Almost everyone accepts "the data" because they assume it is raw data. But, no, it isn't. CRU at East Anglia adjusts the data before anyone else (NOAA, NCDC, GISS, Met Office, etc.) get it. And CRU won't produce their data, their metadata, nor the adjustments they made. They (including their great bud Michael Mann of "Hockey Stick" fame) were supposed to provide such data per the journals' requirements, but the journals generously gave them a pass. Otherwise the data, metadata and adjustments (methodologies) would be available for anyone to vet their work - which is a must in science. Until one's work is replicated, it isn't solid science. All requests for data were stonewalled, which brought on the hacking/leaking known as Climategate. The scandal of Climategate that has brought shame and dishonor to climatology and severely affected their believability, was not the hacking/leaking, but what the scientists themselves said in their emails. They famously discussed "hiding the decline," and blocking access to their data, even to the point of proposing to destroy the data rather than let possible vetters/replicators get their hands on it. In the last few days the data has been forced out of them, though it appears the adjustments and metadata were not included in the order. Since the adjustments are not known, nor their expanations for them, "the data" that you trust is all one big pile of who knows what. The adjustments do not include enough urban heat island factor. This is known, because the study of Chinese cities it was based on had misrepresentations of the urban-vs-rural state of the cities, which led to a UHI factor of only 0.1C. No other study, even ad hoc ones, has ever shown such a low UHI value. Most UHI studies show values that would dwarf the supposed 0.7C "rise" in temperatures globally that are shown in currently accepted post-1900 era studies. In addition, one document in the Climategate files showed that they applied an across-the-board adjustment to temperatures. This across-the-board adjustment was merely a set of values set to different periods in the 1900s, and the values were set to be negative in the early decades, then zero for some decades, and then increasingly positive for the later 1900s. Those later values used actually EXCEEDED the stated temperature increases. This means that they were turning cooling values to warming values. This type of adjustment factors has been seen for individual stations, too, with apparently rising temperatures arising out of what were actual cooling temperatures in the raw data. Thus, the data does not yet show anything, because we don't know what adjustments were made. Not until the work is replicated,or until other full studies are completed - like the one going on right now at Berkeley - will we know if the real data show any warming at all. Does it exist? I have followed this for over a decade, and I can say I do not know, one way or the other. And even if and when such warming is found, it remains to be seen what caused it. The CAGW argument is that all other factors have not changed, therefore the only thing it could be is human CO@ emissions. This is an assumption they repeat all the time, with no real basis in fact - meaning quantified studies. I do believe there has been warming - in urban areas. These areas skew the overall record. Especially when around 1989 over 85% of all stations' records almost instantly were excluded from the overall database used by GISS. Most people don't know that in the age of increasing computerization and ever-growing capacity to deal with data, they threw OUT 6 out of every station from the ones used to compute the global averages. Many of those retained are in micro-locations that are compromised due to buildings, asphalt, traffic, airplane exhausts, etc., meaning UHI is even more important to identify and quantify - but that has never been done. LAND USE is almost certainly the single most important factor, much much larger than CO2 - but the IPCC ignores land use as a possible major factor. They might as well, because there is nothing they can do about it. In an ever-increasing population, cities grow bigger and expand more and more. And there is nothing the IPCC can do about that. Land use is the largest man-made effect on the climate. Not CO2. Cutting down CO2 - even by the numbers that came out of Kyoto - would only affect the global temperature downward by 0.1C. So there is nothing to be gained, even by the draconian steps built into Kyoto. But are we even warming at all? With unvetted processing of data and lack of forthrightness by CRU/UEA, who knows?

As long as they used fudge factors to estimate the effects of water vapor - by far the largest GHG - there is no way the models could be accurate. Also, we were told in early 1990s that the models included every factor. Then in about 1997 the Pacific Decadal Oscillation was discovered - by a BIOLOGIST, not a climatologist or a meteorologist. The PDO is WAY bigger than the El Niño Southern Oscillation, yet it was not - could not have been in the early 1990s models, meaning that those early 1990s models could not have included everything - meaning that those models, that we were told included everything, were wrong. When the PDO was included (based on what? - they hadn't had time to study it enough to pee on), we were told again that the models had everything in them. So, which was right? The ones from 1990, which did not include the PDO, or the post-1997 ones, which did include the PDO? If they were wrong about "including all factors" earlier, they were patently wrong. And what else will come along to make the current models wrong? Especially when the elephant in the room is water vapor, which they don't have ANY capacity to model, and yet has the biggest effect.