Bogus Science at CRU and Penn State. Letter to Times.

Didn't get published but in view of the naming of names not very surprising.


Sir,Those who attack Lord Lawson, the Times and others for publicising doubts about the case made for anthropogenic CO2 leading to a catastrophic global warming are doing none of us a favour. In science, criticism and peer review are essential. It is now a matter of public record that some of the results, upon which the IPCC relies so heavily, produced by the East Anglian Climate Research Unit ( CRU ) and at least one other institution fall well short of proper scientific standards.
By way of illustration, here are three of the worrying instances that have been revealed. Using growth rings from Siberian trees, Prof. K.Briffa of CRU produced the famous "hockey-stick" graph that showed world temperatures as being essentially constant over a thousand years and then rising rapidly in recent times. It was only when he was forced by a British Journal to reveal the data from which he produced his graph that it was found that he had used a very small and selected sample of trees. When a colleague went back and took a much larger and random sample, the hockey stick shape vanished. These later results were never published. Again, Prof. P. Jones Director of CRU, who was also asked in vain to produce the raw data upon which some of his important opinion forming publications were based, recently announced that due to " storage problems " they had been lost. Finally, another anthropogenic CO2 disaster champion on whom the IPCC depends is Prof. Michael Mann of Penn State University who simply took a graph derived from Finnish lake sedimentology and turned it upside down. The original Finnish results showed a fifteen hundred year temperature record with a medieval rise and a recent fall in temperature. Turned upside down, the embarrassing medieval rise ( how could temperature rise occur without the CO2 of a modern industrial society ? ) becomes a cooling period and the equally displeasing recent temperature fall becomes a lovely hockey-stick rise. This is not serious science, it does need to be exposed and it gravely undermines the position of the IPCC.