> Tom Karl, director of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's National Climatic Data Center in Asheville, N.C., noted that the conclusions of the IPCC reports are based on several data sets in addition to the CRU, including data from NOAA, NASA and the United Kingdom Met Office. Each of those data sets basically show identical multi-decadal trends, Karl said.
Yes. Reading these hyperventilating blog posts, you'd be excused for thinking that the climate research is based on one set of temperature measurements from twenty years ago.
I'm continually amazed by how many "skeptics" clearly haven't read (or even glanced at) the IPCC reports. It's hard to be skeptical of arguments that you don't understand.
Hmm I think Pete and Ken (comments on the page) answered this one pretty well.
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>How could anyone who calls himself a scientist allow the primary data and metadata to be destroyed?
Copies of the primary data.
>Somebody will have to do the work of collating raw historical data from weather stations all over again before we will know anything
If only someone like NASA had also been keeping an instrumental record, we could check to see if they agreed with the HadCRUT record.
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Skip – most of the climate data the CRU disposed of was hard copy, and one of the reasons it WAS disposed of is because they felt that the digitization efforts of other climate research teams covered it adequately.
For example, the open source data sets put out by UCAR include the raw and adjusted data, and is gathered from the same sources that the CRU massaged data comes from.
The existence of reliable datasets does not contradict the argument that unreliable data should not be used.
The fact that there does not seem to be an overwhelming call among the climate-science community to purge themselves of unreliable research and researchers makes the whole field look like cargo-cult science.
I'm ok with GW articles being on Hacker News, because it is a very important issue. But let's at least keep it to articles that have something new or interesting to say.
While there are certainly a lot to look in to with this whole thing, could we get posts from a slightly more objective source? ESR is pretty obviously an extremely biased wingnut chomping at the bit to blow this up as much as possible.
I'd expect posts from a bit more level-headed source to make HN front page...
I was actually surprised by this post. I had seen the claims of missing data some time ago, before this latest media wrangle. I had not mentioned it in any of the comments on the most recent bunch of posts, either at esr's site, HN, OB, or any of the other sites weighing in on the matter, because I had, apparently wrongly, assumed everyone else already knew about the missing base data.
> Tom Karl, director of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's National Climatic Data Center in Asheville, N.C., noted that the conclusions of the IPCC reports are based on several data sets in addition to the CRU, including data from NOAA, NASA and the United Kingdom Met Office. Each of those data sets basically show identical multi-decadal trends, Karl said.