By now, everyone will have learned through our betters in the mainstream media that the revelations contained in the Climategate document drop are of little importance to the overall climate change debate – that the temperature reconstructions at East Anglia CRU have been duplicated by “hundreds” of other researchers. Why, thousands even!
Well, no.
Willis Eschenbach explains: there are three main global temperature datasets.

One is at the CRU, Climate Research Unit of the University of East Anglia, where we’ve been trying to get access to the raw numbers. One is at NOAA/GHCN, the Global Historical Climate Network. The final one is at NASA/GISS, the Goddard Institute for Space Studies. The three groups take raw data, and they “homogenize” it to remove things like when a station was moved to a warmer location and there’s a 2C jump in the temperature. The three global temperature records are usually called CRU, GISS, and GHCN. Both GISS and CRU, however, get almost all of their raw data from GHCN. All three produce very similar global historical temperature records from the raw data….

Presto homogeno!

Intrigued by the curious shape of the average of the homogenized Darwin [northern Australia] records, I then went to see how they had homogenized each of the individual station records. What made up that strange average shown in Fig. 7? I started at zero with the earliest record. Here is Station Zero at Darwin, showing the raw and the homogenized versions.

Figure 8 Darwin Zero Homogeneity Adjustments. Black line shows amount and timing of adjustments.
Yikes again, double yikes! What on earth justifies that adjustment? How can they do that? We have five different records covering Darwin from 1941 on. They all agree almost exactly. Why adjust them at all? They’ve just added a huge artificial totally imaginary trend to the last half of the raw data!

Go read “The Smoking Gun At Darwin Zero”.
And now for a Canadian connection!
Guest blogger Mark Jaeger mentioned this to me privately just after the scandal broke;

I notice in e-mail 1255477545.txt Phil Jones mentions what a good job Lucie Vincent did on homogeneity adjustments at Environment Canada.
According to GEDS Lucie Vincent is indeed still at work in Environment Canada:
The comment by Phil:
> > In the papers, I’ve always said that homogeneity adjustments are
> > best produced by NMSs. A good example of this is the work by Lucie
> > Vincent in Canada. Here we just replaced what data we had for the
> > 200+ sites she sorted out.
So – this would be something to challenge the media or interested commenters to find out. Which are these 200 stations are what were the adjustments? If Phil calls them a good job I’m interested to see how the adjustments differ from the original raw data – and if the original data still exists.

Related – Lucie Vincent explains how to adjust…

Several years ago, a database of long-term and homogenized temperatures was created for the analysis of climate change in Canada. Using a technique based on regression models, the annual means of the daily maximum and minimum temperatures were tested for “relative homogeneity” with respect to surrounding stations. Monthly and daily adjustments were derived from the regression models and were applied to create homogenized temperature datasets at 210 locations across the country. The causes of inhomogeneities were mainly due to station relocation and change in observing time.
A Second Generation of Homogenized Temperature is currently under development. The new homogenized datasets are prepared for a greater number of stations (336 stations). Series are extended to cover the period 1900-2008 as much as possible by joining the observations of two or three nearby locations. New procedures are applied for adjusting the cold bias in the daily minimum temperatures introduced by the redefinition of the climatological in 1961 at synoptic stations. Newly developed techniques based on regression models and surrounding stations are also considered for homogeneity assessment and adjustment of the discontinuities due to station relocation. The methodologies used to generate the new homogenized temperatures will be presented along with the impact of the adjustments on climate trends.

Cold bias?

The Sun’s Great Conveyor Belt has slowed to a record-low crawl, according to research by NASA solar physicist David Hathaway. “It’s off the bottom of the charts,” he says. “This has important repercussions for future solar activity.”
The Great Conveyor Belt is a massive circulating current of fire (hot plasma) within the Sun. It has two branches, north and south, each taking about 40 years to perform one complete circuit. Researchers believe the turning of the belt controls the sunspot cycle, and that’s why the slowdown is important.
“Normally, the conveyor belt moves about 1 meter per second—walking pace,” says Hathaway. “That’s how it has been since the late 19th century.” In recent years, however, the belt has decelerated to 0.75 m/s in the north and 0.35 m/s in the south. “We’ve never seen speeds so low.”

He adds, “This is interesting news for astronauts.”
As in, “Honey, where did we put that window scraper? I’m going to be late for the launch.”
h/t Sylvan
SolarCycle24.com

… very:

The data from the Climatic Research Unit at East Anglia University — headquarters for Climategate — is now discredited. This discredits any findings by other research bodies that relied on the Climategate data.
How much falls from Climategate, whose participants read like a Who’s Who at the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change? Not much, says CRU’s disgraced director, Phil Jones, pointing out that CRU’s data for global temperatures is but one of several datasets, all in general agreement. Besides, many argue, CRU was no linchpin to the science. The IPCC relied on numerous other sources. Throw CRU out, they say, and the IPCC’s conclusions remain unshakable.
In truth, if you throw CRU out, you’ve eviscerated the findings of the IPCC’s Fourth Assessment Report, the most recent and most definite opus from the UN. This is the report, received with universal acclaim in 2007, which scarily stated: “The warming of the climate system is unequivocal.”
The argument over global warming requires evidence that the globe is warming in dangerous ways. This evidence the IPCC presents forcefully in its third chapter on surface and atmospheric warming, which rests overwhelmingly on the official global temperature record of the United Nations World Meteorological Organization, called the HADCRUT3 temperature dataset.
And who produced the HADCRUT3 dataset for the World Meteorological Organization? The Hadley Centre of the UK government’s meteorological office (the HAD of HADCRUT3) and the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit (the CRU).

… keep reading.