Caught fiddling the data?
That’s the accusation arising from the CRU email hacking. But wait!
In an opinion piece in The Times last week Lord Lawson appeared to take particular glee in expressing his outrage. “Astonishingly, what appears, at least at first blush, to have emerged is that the scientists have been manipulating the raw temperature figures to show a relentlessly rising global warming trend,” he wrote. That is why, he said, the public needs his new thinktank, the Global Warming Policy Foundation, to peer a little more closely at the predictions being made by scientists.
If you feel reassured that GWPF is taking the matter in hand, think again. Peering a little more closely at the GWPF’s website reveals cause for real concern.
Every page of the GWPF’s website features a graph which appears to show that there has been no warming this century. Unfortunately, it doesn’t represent any accepted data set. When challenged, an admission was made that a graphic designer had made a mistake in showing that 2003 was warmer than 2005, the opposite of the truth. But there’s more too it than that. The graph showed 2001 to 2008. Why not more? Because adding in 2000 and 2009 produces this very different looking curve
Manipulating the data?
Of course, it is true that such a short period does not establish a statistical trend. And it’s also true that the graphic on the site is more of a logo than a serious presentation of scientific data. even so, you have to ask why an organization that claims to be about producing clarity on global warming should produce something so obviously propagandist.
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