Russians accuse Hadley Centre of falsifying Russian temperatures

December 16, 2:15 PMEssex County Conservative ExaminerTerry Hurlbut

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The mystery of the accusations of Russian involvement in the Climategate scandal suddenly deepened yesterday, when a key Russian ministry accused the UK Met Office Hadley Centre, closely partnered with the East Anglia Climatic Research Unit (CRU), of misreporting Russian weather-station data in order to allege warming trends that, the Russians now say, their data do not support.

According to an article in Kommersant, reproduced here at RIA Novosti (and quoted here at The Air Vent), the Institute for Economic Analysis (IEA), in Moscow, issued a report Tuesday alleging that the Hadley Centre, when compiling its contribution to the Hadley-CRU Temperature (HadCRUT) surveys, used data from a select 25% of Russian weather stations.

The problem: the remaining stations, covering 40% of Russian territory, have shown no substantial warming in recent decades. Furthermore, the stations selected mostly include those with incomplete datasets.

IEA also specifically alleged that the stations selected by the Hadley Centre were in large population centers and thus subject to urban heat island (UHI) effects.

The IEA is particularly concerned as to whether faulty temperature-trend projections have figured in the calculations made for the Fifteenth Conference of Parties (COP-15) at Copenhagen, a conference that Kommersant calls "abortive."

Jeff Id at The Air Vent produced a graphic that illustrates the problem. Shown on his blog entry is a map, bearing the logo of the UK Met Office, purporting to show vast tracts of land in Russia that are one to three Kelvins warmer today than they were, on average, from 1961-1990.

They specifically state that lack of measurement is not the cause. If they claim the full set of Russian data does NOT support global warming, imagine how different the bright red dot over Russia would look.  Again the accusation is completely believable, yet is completely unverifiable because CRU has refused to release the data.  This data and code release is the subject of illegal blocking of FOIA’s is one of the keys in the Climategate emials.  We need to know the list of stations used and we must have copies of the raw data.

HadCRUT is one of three major climate datasets. Recent reports have highlighted problems of selection bias and systematic error affecting the Global Historical Climate Network (GHCN) dataset from the US National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Association. Now, it would appear, the HadCRUT dataset is definitely compromised--and the continued refusal of CRU to provide its data, and the continued apparent downtime of all of CRU's servers, only add credence to the suspicion that the compromise is deliberate.

Numerous defenders of the CRU have accused the Russians, and specifically their counterintelligence service, of engineering what they call the "theft" of the CRU Archive. However, experienced systems administrators have definitely concluded that the CRU Archive was leaked, not stolen, and possibly by accident. The temporary residence of the archive on an anonymous File Transfer Protocol (FTP) server based in Russia is inconclusive, given that anyone who knows where an anonymous FTP server is located, can easily leave something on it without a password.

Update (3:26 p.m. EST): The report from the IEA may be read here, in the original Russian. More to the point, Climate Audit has developed clear and convincing evidence of complicity by Phil Jones in the suppression of papers calling HadCRUT into question over these data. From File No. 1080742144.txt, Jones to Michael E. Mann, dated 31 March 2004:

Recently rejected two papers (one for JGR and for GRL) from people saying CRU has it wrong over Siberia. Went to town in both reviews, hopefully successfully. If either appears I will be very surprised, but you never know with GRL.

GRL stands for Geophysical Research Letters; JGR for Journal of Geophysical Research.