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LancePodstrong [soylentnews.org] writes:

Over the weekend, another editor pointed me to this piece in The Telegraph in which columnist Christopher Booker calls scientists' handling of the temperature data "the biggest science scandal ever." The same piece also appeared in a discussion today and was sent in via the reader-feedback form. So, it seemed worth looking into.

Doing so caused a bit of a flashback—to January 2013, specifically. That was the last time that the previous year had been declared the warmest on record, an event that apparently prompts some people to question whether we can trust the temperature records at all.

The culprit that time was Fox News, but the issue was the same: the raw data from temperature measurements around the world aren't just dumped into global temperature reconstructions as-is. Instead, they're processed first. To the more conspiracy minded, you can replace "processed" with "fraudulently manipulated to make it look warmer."
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Why would Booker latch on to this without first talking to someone with actual expertise in temperature records? A quick look at his Wikipedia entry [wikipedia.org] shows that he has a lot of issues with science in general, claiming that things like asbestos and second-hand smoke are harmless, and arguing against evolution. So, this sort of immunity to well-established evidence seems to be a recurring theme in his writing.

From Christopher Booker's Wikipedia page:

On a range of health issues, Booker has put forward a view that the public is being unnecessarily "scared", as detailed in his book Scared to Death. Thus he argues that asbestos, passive smoking and Bovine spongiform encephalopathy have not been shown to be dangerous.
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Booker has also argued in support of intelligent design, claiming that supporters of the theory of evolution "rest their case on nothing more than blind faith and unexamined a priori assumptions".

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