Happy Thanksgiving
Take a hint from the polar bears. Relax and have a great Turkey Day.

Monbiot Makes An Astounding Admission
George Monbiot made the following statement: It’s no use pretending that this isn’t a major blow. The emails extracted by a hacker from the climatic research unit at the University of East Anglia could scarcely be more damaging. I am now convinced that they are genuine, and I’m dismayed and deeply shaken by them. Yes, the messages were obtained illegally. Yes, all of us say things in emails that would be excruciating if made public. Yes, some of the comments have been taken out of context. But there are some messages that require no spin to make them look bad.

CRU E-mail Critical of Mann's "Hockey Stick" Graph
From an alleged CRU e-mail:Take this from first principles.A tree only grows on land. That excludes 70% of the earth covered bywater. A tree does no grow on ice. A tree does not grow in a desert. Atree does not grow on grassland-savannahs. A tree does not grow inalpine areas. A tree does not grow in the tundra We are left with perhaps 15% of the planet upon which forestsgrow/grew. That does not make any studies from tree rings global, oreven hemispheric.The width and density of tree rings is dependent upon the followingvariables which cannot be reliably separa

Not A Smoking Gun, But A Mushroom Cloud
It may be "fruit of the poison tree," but if true, the contents of the hacked CRU e-mails are astounding. Imagine that scientists have manipulated or destroyed data to advance their agenda. I find it amusing that the press is instead talking about the illegality of hacking the e-mail accounts. It was a different story when it was Sarah Palin's account.“This is not a smoking gun; this is a mushroom cloud,” said Patrick J. Michaels, a climatologist who has long faulted evidence pointing to human-driven warming and is criticized in the documents. Several scientists and others contacted by The New York Times confirmed

Temperature Bias
There has been a bit of press regarding the October 2009 NCAR publication regarding increasing ratio of new daily maximum temperatures to new daily minimum temperatures. There are problems with that report. First, the report conveniently omits records prior to the 1950s, especially those from the 1930s. More extreme records were set in the 1930s than any other decade of the last 100 years.http://tinyurl.com/yjurhzsThe other problem is the dubious quality of temperature readings recorded in the United States. A survey of surface stations is continuing. About 78% of those stations have been surveyed. Of those, 69% have an