It seems that, once you use the broadest set of data available to assess whether the recent warming in the last century is of any consequence, the data shows we are no warmer now than the Earth was in Medieval times.

In fact, in order to raise the alarm of global warming in the 20th and 21st century, you have to be very careful in the data you select, since this is the only way to create a graph which indicates the Earth is in peril. Ross McKtitrick lays out the whole sordid tale behind one of the biggest cons in history:

Only by playing with data can scientists come up with the infamous ‘hockey stick’ graph of global warming.

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Most of the proxy data does not show anything unusual about the 20th century. But two data series have reappeared over and over that do have a hockey stick shape. One was the flawed bristlecone data that the National Academy of Sciences panel said should not be used, so the studies using it can be set aside. The second was a tree ring curve from the Yamal Peninsula in Siberia, compiled by UK scientist Keith Briffa.

Briffa had published a paper in 1995 claiming that the medieval period actually contained the coldest year of the millennium. But this claim depended on just three tree ring records (called cores) from the Polar Urals. Later, a colleague of his named F. H. Schweingruber produced a much larger sample from the Polar Urals, but it told a very different story: The medieval era was actually quite warm and the late 20th century was unexceptional. Briffa and Schweingruber never published those data, instead they dropped the Polar Urals altogether from their climate reconstruction papers.

In its place they used a new series that Briffa had calculated from tree ring data from the nearby Yamal Peninsula that had a pronounced Hockey Stick shape: relatively flat for 900 years then sharply rising in the 20th century.

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But an even more disquieting discovery soon came to light. Steve searched a paleoclimate data archive to see if there were other tree ring cores from at or near the Yamal site that could have been used to increase the sample size. He quickly found a large set of 34 up-to-date core samples, taken from living trees in Yamal by none other than Schweingruber himself! Had these been added to Briffa’s small group the 20th century would simply be flat. It would appear completely unexceptional compared to the rest of the millennium.

Emphasis mine. Please take the time to read the whole article, and pass it along to everyone and anyone. This article should be out front on any climate bill debate on The Hill. The scientific  method was destroyed to produce a desired result. But worse, data in the possession of the researchers which showed no dramatic rise in global warming was in their possession. To reject the data that proved there was no global warming is to lie. To hide it for 9 years is to cover up a con.

We are being asked to fork over trillions of dollars, cripple our economy and lose millions of jobs over the global warming scare. We have been told the Earth is doomed if we do not act. But the data shows that this is not the case. It is long past time the truth is found and real scientists debate using the scientific method as the basis of that debate.

Tags: Briff, CRU, Global Warming, IPCC, McIntyre, McKitrick