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Some scientists devote their lives painstakingly assembling fragments of evidence to piece together a picture of the past. They deserve tremendous credit. Unfortunately today we appear to have inept or sleazy scientists who take collected data and destroy it – thus permanently blinding our view of the past. These people deserve to be loathed.

Ed Caryl presents an essay of such an example.

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What Is The Temperature Trend At Barrow Alaska?

By Ed Caryl

If you ask this question of Wolfram-Alpha, the online Guru that Siri depends on for answers, you get this plot.

Figure 1 from Wolfram-Alpha.

If you look at all the available temperature data bases for Barrow, you get multiple answers, none that agree, and none agree with Wolfram-Alpha, or even come close.

Figure 2 is a plot of Barrow temperatures from five different sources. The BEST data nearly coincides with the Barrow Airport NWS Average (the blue line us under the red line) until the last decade. The Russian data ends at 2000.

During the search for this data, I came to the conclusion that RAW data simply does not exist for any stations except for the filled-out sheets from COOP stations or the electronic reports from the automated stations. All the on-line data, whether from BEST, NOAA, USHCN, GHCN, GISS, or wherever, has been manipulated in some way. USHCN, NOAA and GHCN seem to be the prime manipulators, filling in missing records with estimates, inventing data for “zombie”stations that won’t die, and “homogenizing”data to supposedly correct for UHI. GISS then takes the GHCN data and adds their own special sauce where they think it is necessary.

Of the 19 stations examined in my previous article, only Barrow received the “special sauce”. For all the others GISS simply passed along the GHCN data with no changes. All the changes in the last three years and nine months in those GISS files were GHCN changes. But Barrow is special. Here is what GISS did to Barrow

Figure 3 illustrates the GISS “homogenization” change to Barrow temperatures (the green stair-steps), adding more than one degree per century to the warming trend by cooling the past.

Without the change illustrated in figure 3, 1940 would be the warmest year by 0.04°C. This change obviously has nothing to do with Urban Heat Island, it is in the wrong direction. Changes like this give a whole new meaning to the term “hutzpah”.

So from where did Wolfram-Alpha get their data? I have no idea. The source they cite has no connection to climate. It’s appearance suggests it was made up from whole cloth.

So who do we trust with the temperature records? We certainly cannot trust GHCN and GISS, nor any of the other agencies because they get their data from GHCN. GISS simply further corrupts that data. They are also continuously changing the data on a monthly basis, not just the previous month, but months in the distant past. For an excellent review of the “dancing data” see this recent article, and the associated comments.

Who can we trust? No one.