Well, the Kerry Lieberman cap and trade fiasco has brought Tom Karl to give a Senate briefing last week. Predictably, they couldn’t wait to spring more adjustments du jour on the hapless Senators, claiming once again, everything analysis-wise the government does is ‘robust’ (used several times). But ‘robustness’ just isn’t convincing enough anymore. The new catch phrase is shown below:

What’s the most interesting thing about this PowerPoint? It reads like a skeptics refutation handbook. NCDC reacted. I’ve highlighted a few slides of interest, including one refuting me and the surfacestations project. Because, well, as readers of DeSmog blog and Romm’s fairy tales know, I’d never want anyone to see that.

The key word above (enlarged here) is “adjusted”. Comparing adjusted data to adjusted data will almost guarantee an agreement.

I’m sure Karl (or Peterson) was thinking “Better not make those graphs too big”. Surely he didn’t mention that he and Menne et al ‘borrowed’ my incomplete surfacestations rating data against my protests. Dr. Pielke Sr. and I, plus others on the surfacestations data analysis teams (two independent analyses have been done) see an entirely different picture, now that we have nearly 90% of USHCN surveyed. NCDC used data at 43%, and even though I told them they’d see little or nothing in the way of a signal then, they forged ahead anyway. Assuming we aren’t blocked by journal politics, we’ll have the surfacestations analysis results in public view soon. If we are blocked by journal politics, we’ll have other ways.

What’s humorous about this PowerPoint (besides the claims) is that after Peterson previously authored a rushed and ghost written “Talking Points Memo” critical of the surfacestations project, attributable to nobody, but who got caught in the PDF document properties.

…they now show this for the author, heh.

Once I took the test to be a “Govenment” employee, now I are one.

After NCDC’s unethical borrowing of my data and denying my right of first publication, don’t ask to see the surfacestations analysis results here. I learned my lesson not to trust Karl et al the first time. Full disclosure comes in an SI with journal publication, not before.

Here’s some other slides of interest.

The urbanization signal, easily dispensed with thanks to homogenization (enlarged here).

This slide above is part of the “nothing matters and we can adjust for everything” meme. Now they are using Hansen’s night lights method. Heh. The rural trend they present is different than what I’ve seen.

Above (enlarged here): New and improved! Gotta show progress for the senators! Thanks to GHCN3, it’s now even hotter, faster.

Look for new pronouncements of “unprecedented” and ‘it’s worse than we thought” when they publish GHCN3. Robust times two. Gosh.

Of course, airports don’t matter. Naw. Never, even when they don’t bother to remove the base measurement errors at airports (below enlarged here), even when pointed out. Like movie directors, I’m sure they are thinking: “we can fix that in post production”.

Yes, I’m being sarcastic here. Yes, I think most of this shown to the Senate is based on self fulfilling adjustments and a need to keep bureaucracy alive.

You can download the entire powerpoint here. Do it fast before it gets “disappeared”.

In related news. I’ve been made privy to a new surface data set, one that doesn’t have the problem of NCDC’s need to show additional warming to keep the cap and trade dream alive. This surface data set uses an entirely different methodology to fix the errors, deal with dropouts, and separate good records from bad. I’ve seen the methodology. I won’t insult everyone’s intelligence by calling it “robust”. Instead, I’ll call it properly engineered.

The best part is, it was never designed with global warming in mind. So there’s no built in confirmation bias.

And to Mr. Karl, Dr. Menne, Dr. Petersen, and Dr. Easterling (who I know will read this): stay tuned.

Oh, and another team sends word today and that’s not the only surprise to come. But, that’s another story for another day.

h/t to Steve Mosher, who is the new inspector Columbo. See full story and comments here.