Imagine if there were no reliable records of global surface temperature. Raucous policy debates such as cap-and-trade would have no scientific basis, Al Gore would at this point be little more than a historical footnote, and President Obama would not be spending this U.N. session talking up a (likely unattainable) international climate deal in Copenhagen in December.

Steel yourself for the new reality, because the data needed to verify the gloom-and-doom warming forecasts have disappeared.

Or so it seems. Apparently, they were either lost or purged from some discarded computer. Only a very few people know what really happened, and they aren’t talking much. And what little they are saying makes no sense.

In the early 1980s, with funding from the U.S. Department of Energy, scientists at the United Kingdom’s University of East Anglia established the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) to produce the world’s first comprehensive history of surface temperature. It’s known in the trade as the “Jones and Wigley” record for its authors, Phil Jones and Tom Wigley, and it served as the primary reference standard for the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) until 2007. It was this record that prompted the IPCC to claim a “discernible human influence on global climate.”

Putting together such a record isn’t at all easy. Weather stations weren’t really designed to monitor global climate. Long-standing ones were usually established at points of commerce, which tend to grow into cities that induce spurious warming trends in their records. Trees grow up around thermometers and lower the afternoon temperature. Further, as documented by the University of Colorado’s Roger Pielke Sr., many of the stations themselves are placed in locations, such as in parking lots or near heat vents, where artificially high temperatures are bound to be recorded.

So the weather data that go into the historical climate records that are required to verify models of global warming aren’t the original records at all. Jones and Wigley, however, weren’t specific about what was done to which station in order to produce their record, which, according to the IPCC, showed a warming of 0.6° +/– 0.2°C in the 20th century.

Now begins the fun. Warwick Hughes, an Australian scientist, wondered where that “+/–” came from, so he politely wrote Phil Jones in early 2005, asking for the original data. Jones’s response to a fellow scientist attempting to replicate his work was, “We have 25 years or so invested in the work. Why should I make the data available to you, when your aim is to try and find something wrong with it?”

Reread that statement, for it is breathtaking in its anti-scientific thrust. In fact, the entire purpose of replication is to “try and find something wrong.” The ultimate objective of science is to do things so well that, indeed, nothing is wrong.

Then the story changed. In June 2009, Georgia Tech’s Peter Webster told Canadian researcher Stephen McIntyre that he had requested raw data, and Jones freely gave it to him. So McIntyre promptly filed a Freedom of Information Act request for the same data. Despite having been invited by the National Academy of Sciences to present his analyses of millennial temperatures, McIntyre was told that he couldn’t have the data because he wasn’t an “academic.” So his colleague Ross McKitrick, an economist at the University of Guelph, asked for the data. He was turned down, too.

Faced with a growing number of such requests, Jones refused them all, saying that there were “confidentiality” agreements regarding the data between CRU and nations that supplied the data. McIntyre’s blog readers then requested those agreements, country by country, but only a handful turned out to exist, mainly from Third World countries and written in very vague language.

It’s worth noting that McKitrick and I had published papers demonstrating that the quality of land-based records is so poor that the warming trend estimated since 1979 (the first year for which we could compare those records to independent data from satellites) may have been overestimated by 50 percent. Webster, who received the CRU data, published studies linking changes in hurricane patterns to warming (while others have found otherwise).

Back when I was in college and grad school obtaining degrees in chemistry, we of course all learned some basics about what qualifies something as “science.”  Science is supposed to be observable, reproducible, transparent and all that other good stuff.  This global warming nonsense has never really met any of those standards, and this latest set of hijinx really takes the cake.

Essentially, Jones is hiding the data.  Or he lost them.  Or he lost them while hiding them.  Or he’s hiding them by losing them.  Or maybe he just made the whole durn thing up out of whole cloth.  Who knows? 

Let’s see if we can piece this together.  The data Jones and Wigley used to construct the theory that is presently being used by the UN IPCC to push for the destruction of the industrialised world is based on shoddy data to begin with.  Temperature sensors places on asphalt parking lots and near exhaust vents will not produce reliable data.  Even a child should be able to recognise that.  Yet, Ph.Ds all over the world seem blissfully unaware of this fact.  Nevertheless, the data is tainted – which calls into question whether it truly meets the criterion of observability.

Then, the shoddy data for 25 years is kept under lock and key and the gatekeepers refuse to release it to fellow scientists whom they fear might use it to “try and find something wrong with it.”  There goes reproducibility out the window.

THEN, the data IS released to one scientist who subsequently used it to “prove” that global warming will cause more hurricanes (which, by the way, has proven to be false, per my post from a few days ago).  At the same time, the data is NOT released to other scientists – who presumably were not felt to be sufficiently pro-AGW enough to merit seeing the data – using the lie that there were all these vitally important confidentiality agreements blocking release of the data.  I can understand confidentiality if we’re talking about secret projects by the Defence Department, but civilian meteorological research that supposedly will have an impact on us all?  Wow.  That, along with the lying, means that transparency just left the building. 

Then the data disappears.  Obvious question of the day: What was in the data that Jones didn’t want people finding out at last, knowing that eventually the stonewalling was going to have to end?

Folks, it’s time that we cut to the chase.  Anthropogenic global warming is complete, utter, bilious nonsense.  It’s nothing more than a cover story for the radical left and its radical, anti-human environmentalist agenda.  There’s nothing to it.  What’s more, people, when you see somebody seriously stumping for the global warming religion, you can be almost assuredly guaranteed that there is a money trail.  Somebody is getting some coin for trying to scaremonger us into believing this rubbish.   And most likely, that coin is courtesy of the American taxpayer.