Top scientists start to examine fiddled global warming figures
              The Global Warming Policy Foundation has enlisted an international team of    five distinguished scientists to carry out a full inquiry  
                                                                                                                                      
	
	
	
		
		
		
			
		
		
	
	
                                                                                                                                                                
The Yavari Valley rainforest, Peru Photo: Alamy
 
                                                                          
	
                     
                                              By 
                                             Christopher Booker
                      25 Apr 2015
The Telegraph
                          
	
	
	
		
		
		
		
	
	
2470 Comments             
     
                                                    Last month, we are told, the world enjoyed “
its hottest March since records began in 1880”.  This year, according to “US government scientists”, already bids to  outrank 2014 as “the hottest ever”. The figures from the US National  Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) were based, like all the  other three official surface temperature records on which the world’s  scientists and politicians rely, on data compiled from a network of  weather stations by NOAA’s Global Historical Climate Network (GHCN). 
  But here there is a puzzle. These temperature records are not the only  ones with official status. The other two, Remote Sensing Systems (RSS)  and the University of Alabama (UAH), are based on a quite different  method of measuring temperature data, by satellites. And these, as they  have increasingly done in recent years, give a strikingly different  picture. Neither shows last month as anything like the hottest March on  record, any more than they showed 2014 as “the hottest year ever”. 
 
An adjusted graph from the Goddard Institute for Space Studies 
 
	
	
	
		
		
		
		
	
	
  Back in January and February, two items in this column attracted more  than 42,000 comments to the Telegraph website from all over the world.  The provocative headings given to them were
 “Climategate the sequel: how we are still being tricked by flawed data on global warming” and 
“The fiddling with temperature data is the biggest scientific scandal”.  
  My cue for those pieces was the evidence multiplying from across the  world that something very odd has been going on with those official  surface temperature records, all of which ultimately rely on data  compiled by NOAA’s GHCN. Careful analysts have come up with hundreds of  examples of how the original data recorded by 3,000-odd weather stations  has been “adjusted”, to exaggerate the degree to which the Earth has  actually been warming. Figures from earlier decades have repeatedly been  adjusted downwards and more recent data adjusted upwards, to show the  Earth having warmed much more dramatically than the original data  justified. 
 So strong is the evidence that all this calls for  proper investigation that my articles have now brought a heavyweight  response. 
The Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF) has enlisted an international team of five distinguished scientists  to carry out a full inquiry into just how far these manipulations of  the data may have distorted our picture of what is really happening to  global temperatures. 
 
  The panel is chaired by Terence Kealey, until recently vice-chancellor  of the University of Buckingham. His team, all respected experts in  their field with many peer-reviewed papers to their name, includes Dr  Peter Chylek, a physicist from the National Los Alamos Laboratory;  Richard McNider, an emeritus professor who founded the Atmospheric  Sciences Programme at the University of Alabama; Professor Roman Mureika  from Canada, an expert in identifying errors in statistical  methodology; Professor Roger Pielke Sr, a noted climatologist from the  University of Colorado, and Professor William van Wijngaarden, a  physicist whose many papers on climatology have included studies in the  use of “homogenisation” in data records. 
 Their inquiry’s central  aim will be to establish a comprehensive view of just how far the  original data has been “adjusted” by the three main surface records:  those published by the Goddard Institute for Space Studies (Giss), the  US National Climate Data Center and Hadcrut, that compiled by the East  Anglia Climatic Research Unit (Cru), in conjunction with the UK Met  Office’s Hadley Centre for Climate Prediction. All of them are run by  committed believers in man-made global warming. 
 
Below, the raw data in graph form 
 
	
	
	
		
		
		
		
	
	
  For this the GWPF panel is initially inviting input from all those  analysts across the world who have already shown their expertise in  comparing the originally recorded data with that finally published. In  particular, they will be wanting to establish a full and accurate  picture of just how much of the published record has been adjusted in a  way which gives the impression that temperatures have been rising faster  and further than was indicated by the raw measured data. 
  Already studies based on the US, Australia, New Zealand, the Arctic and  South America have suggested that this is far too often the case. 
  But only when the full picture is in will it be possible to see just  how far the scare over global warming has been driven by manipulation of  figures accepted as reliable by the politicians who shape our energy  policy, and much else besides. If the panel’s findings eventually  confirm what we have seen so far, this really will be the “smoking gun”,  in a scandal the scale and significance of which for all of us can  scarcely be exaggerated. 
 
More details of the Global  Warming Policy Foundation's International Temperature Data Review  Project are available on the inquiry panel's website www.tempdatareview.org
Top scientists start to examine fiddled global warming figures - Telegraph