Not Everything That Looks Bad Is Bad

Not Everything That Looks Bad Is Bad

A number of people have made much of this code fragment from the CRU software:

;
; Apply a VERY ARTIFICAL correction for decline!!
;
yrloc=[1400,findgen(19)*5.+1904]
valadj=[0.,0.,0.,0.,0.,-0.1,-0.25,-0.3,0.,- 0.1,0.3,0.8,1.2,1.7,2.5,2.6,2.6,$
2.6,2.6,2.6]*0.75 ; fudge factor
if n_elements(yrloc) ne n_elements(valadj) then message,’Oooops!’
;
yearlyadj=interpol(valadj,yrloc,timey)

Eric S. Raymond over at Armed and Dangerous sees this as prima facie evidence of intentional fraud. Some of the responses to his argument make the claim that this is actually an adjustment to bring Maximum Latewood Density measures into conformity with known thermometer readings for recent decades. This is a proxy for temperature derived from measuring tree growth characteristics--and it might be a legitimate method for correcting this data to more correctly match the temperature data. It is rather curious that the adjustments down match the last peak global temperatures, in the 1930s, but then suddenly start up at the time when the global warmists claim that--surprise, surprise--it was getting hotter because of mankind's actions.

If this was a legitimate correction, you would hope for a better comment than "Apply a VERY ARTIFICAL correction for decline!!" Especially since some of the other emails from the true believers acknowledge that they are having a problem with recent temperature declines not matching their elegant models. Once you demonstrate that you can't be trusted to tell the truth, everything--even the most innocent statements--suddenly get a lot more scrutiny than they did before.