Always interesting to see people get is backwards. What they actually did was this: Trend adjustments

The importance of feeling stupid: http://jcs.biologists.org/cont...

Cartoon to educate you: http://static.skepticalscience...

What about the concentration of the platinum group metals ... 80% or so are found in South Africa and are central to every cars catalytic converter, not to say anything of the necessity of their properties in many other key industries.

The decisive evidence is well displayed in the voluminous volumes (!) of the IPCC reports which reviews 1000s of published literature that is in the public domain. Even if you don't go with the assessment conclusions of the IPCC authors (I do), the evidence is all there -- if nothing else, just go read the summary for policy makers (SPM) for working group 1 (from www.ipcc.ch), all the summary material is traceable back through the main volume to individual published peer reviewed literature. It merely requires one to read for oneself, and not take the word of a blogger. By contrast, the type of data being discussed here is just a minutia of the full body of evidence.

What's missing here are some additional context facts; recognizing that the data are not UK data per se. Data from many countries has been collected and collated at the CRU (Univ. of East Anglia) and which feeds into some of the UK Met Office work. Some of this data were collected under the arrangement that the source data were not to be made public because of commercial or other interests. Outside of the USA this is quite common -- that national meteorological services (tasked with maintaining a national observing system and archive) treat their data as a commercial product -- and so they will not release it to just anyone. The fact that I and others think this is wrong and inhibits science is not the issue, the reality is that many countries are not willing to freely release their data. So the CRU and Met Office are between the rock and a hard place; publicize the data and risk ruining their relationships with the data sources, or hold onto the data so that they can keep the data stream flowing and be able to produce the valuable derivative products.

Suggest you get a temporary email address when (if) you initiate communication. Your normal email is just too useful a lead for them to google and see how much you're worth stinging for. Better yet, ignore them and find another name.

That's really cheap. It's about what I end up paying per month on my capped 3mbs connection in South Africa, and I only use about 10gig/month! Sigh.

A successful example is this one, to "re-create" a quagga -- part zebra/part horse that went extinct in 1883. http://www.quaggaproject.org/