A Bowl of Unpleasant Cherries for Mr. Obama in Copenhagen

Here it is mid-December and U.S. President Obama will soon be flying back from an Obama-adulating global warming conference in Copenhagen to land in a monster snowstorm in the northeastern US. Ironic, no?

So it is time to talk about picking cherries.


Just for reference, here are a few of Oregon's choice Hood River cherries - sweet and world famous.

But the topic is not picking cherries, but rather "cherry picking", as in selectively choosing what you want and ignoring anything less than the most desirable.

In my memory, the most delightful use of the term "cherry picking" was the Doonesbury cartoon a number of years ago that inferred that U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney was cherry picking Iraq intelligence data like a man selecting lingerie for his wife.

That one has now been far outdone.

Be there any truth in the matter, the Russians are now accusing the global climate cartel member in Britain (recently and famously hacked) of cherry picking Russian climate data. The accusation?

"Meanwhile, a new climate scandal is gaining momentum. The Moscow-based Institute for Economic Analysis (IEA) has accused the Hadley Centre for Climate Prediction and Research of the British Meteorology Office of only using statistics from weather stations in Russia that fitted its theory on global warming, and ignoring those that did not."
http://rt.com/Top_News/2009-12-18/data-cherry-picked-climatologists.html?fullstory

Just to keep this in perspective, it is good to remember that RT.com is an English language Russian news port. And a country (Russia) that sends an assassin to Britain to poison someone they don't like with a lethal radioactive cocktail should be held somewhat suspect at times.

But I don't see this one going the way the global warming hysterionicals would like it to go. I know personally that Russia has had excellent and extensive climate data collection systems. Their published records may be checked against the claims the above article makes. But Hadley-CRU has been holding back release of the data used to compute their global warming figures. The November 20, 2009, sensational news of the hacking and release of East Anglia University's Climate Research Unit (CRU) files and emails has forced some partial release of the Hadley-CRU data set. And it looks like that partial release is what has made the Russian IEA analysis possible - just in time to greet U.S. President Obama in Copenhagen.

While the Russian claim remains to be verified, it all tastes like a very delicious bowl of cherries to me, while Mr. Obama may find the aftertaste quite bitter. But then his insensibilty to go on to Copenhagen with the "Climategate" scandal growing by the day may indicate that his taster is not functioning very well. In his frenzy to offer up big chunks of U.S. taxpayer change (yes, "Change you can believe in" ) to support a $100 billion (per year) warming fix, the foul bowl of cherries may not even get his attention. Sensibilities be damned.

A bit more from the RT.com article (in case the link dries up):

"In a report this week, the IEA says the HadCRUT’s study of climate change ignored data from three quarters of the weather stations on the territory of Russia. This includes “more than 40% of the area,” which was not included, not due to missing data, but “for some other reasons.”
That means 40% of Russia’s territory is unrepresented in the world’s most important temperature record.

...

Moreover, of the data available for the same location, the British researchers chose incomplete sets of temperature with growth trends over complete ones that did not fit into the global warming model. Also, data from stations located in cities – which are always likely to be warmer due to waste heat generated by local industries and homes – were preferred over those in remote areas, the IEA says.
All in all, the institute evaluates the difference between the growth of average temperatures between 1870s and 1990s, based on all data available for Russia and those delivered by HadCRUT, as at least 0.64 degrees Celsius.
The report goes on to say that if similar practices, which the IEA bluntly calls “overstating the scale of the warming by HadCRUT”, were used in the selection of raw data from other regions of the world, global estimates for climate change should be seriously amended."

This one is going to fun to watch.

Submitted with a whole bunch of conflicted feelings,

D.U.

P.S. I am not a global warming denier, I am a global warming realist. And I have intimate understanding of the pitfalls of taking meteorological-hydrological-climatological models as infallible dispensers of truth. Like twenty-something gaming addicts for whom cyberspace becomes their real world, climate modelers chained to a computer terminal with the heady hope of saving the planet while modeling 100 years into the future can warp one's view of what is real and what is not. I suspect that many of the climate modeling warm-mongers have not been operational forecasters humbled by the occasional busted forecast. At Copenhagen, their arrogance remains unshattered. But tomorrow?

P.P.S. "But would not some warming increase global food production?" I have been wondering? You can look for the IPCC "admission" mentioned by Nigel Lawson, Energy Secretary in Margaret Thatcher's first government in the early eighties, in the UK Daily Mail opinion piece April 5, 2008, that:

"So far as food production is concerned, it is not clear why a warmer climate would be a problem at all. Even the IPCC concedes that for a warming of anything up to 3 per cent, 'globally, the potential for food production is projected to increase'. Yes: increase."

Read this and more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-557374/The-REAL-inconvenient-truth-Zealotry-global-warming-damage-Earth-far-climate-change.html