Can we trust climate data?

In the first case to which Meacher refers "concerning the location of 42 rural Chinese weather stations" revolves around whether all the temperature data collected globally is finding its way into the final statistics or whether the CRU is selective in preferring to base its final reports on those taken from warmer areas rather than the cooler ones such as rural China. The implications for the temperature records, if this is the case, are obvious.

The second case referred to concerns "the width of annual growth rings in frozen Siberian bogs."

In this case, the issue here is the "hockey stick," which Morning Star readers may recall played a prominent role in Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth. It showed Earth's temperature remaining stable for the past 1,000 years until the industrial revolution brought increased carbon dioxide emissions and rising temperatures.

The temperature graph produced from this data resembled a hockey stick.

But the historical record shows that there were periods when temperatures departed considerably from the straight line suggested by the hockey stick - including the Medieval Warm Period (1000AD to 1400AD), the Little Ice Age (1650AD to 1800AD) and the 20th century cold period (1940 to 1975).

These temperature variations would have shown up in the tree ring growths in the trees preserved in the Siberian frozen bogs, information which would have been known to the members of the CRU. Meacher himself describes the suppression of this information as "serious."

People can draw their own conclusions from the refusal of the CRU to make these data sets available to other researchers.

Jean Johnson Fleetwood