John's Blog

Cooked data redux.

So last January, I wrote about how professional climate change skeptics brazenly cook data and then hope that the public won't catch on given their lack of a basic understanding of statistics. Well I found another great example tonight.

Bob Carter is a Cambridge trained palaeontologist/geologist who is former Director of the Australian Office of the Ocean Drilling Program. The Industrial Relevence section of his COS Expertise page says: "His more general stratigraphic work contributes towards the research base which underpins the exploration for and development of sedimentary mineral deposits, including the important energy resources of coal, oil, gas and uranium." Ok, so Bob Carter is the drill down and get stuff out kind of geologist. Fine, we need people like that.

The problem occurs when guys like this write articles on climate change and publish them in the mass media. In the Telegraph
Bob Carter wrote the following:

"In truth, however, the biggest part of the problem is neither environmental nor scientific, but a self-created political fiasco. Consider the simple fact, drawn from the official temperature records of the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia, that for the years 1998-2005 global average temperature did not increase (there was actually a slight decrease, though not at a rate that differs significantly from zero)."

Sounds pretty straight forward right? Just look at the mean temp and see if it is going up, right. Well, that's the funny part. Here is the actual graph directly from CRU - the very same source Bob Carter cites:



The only reason that average global temperature did not increase from 1998 to 2005 is because 1998 was the warmest year on record.

If he'd done an average from 1997 to 2005, he'd have found an increase.
If he'd done an average from 1999 to 2005, he'd have found an increase.

In fact, if he'd pick *any* other year from the CRU dataset as his baseline, he'd have found an increase. Simply put - he cherry picked the data and hoped the reporter and the public would be too ignorant to catch him at it.

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