As it happens, the day that I posted on NOAA’s inherently ethically dubious “adjustments” to historical climate data, a blog post by The Manhattan Contrarian turned up in my email following up on the same ABC News story that sparked my post. It is well worth reading. His conclusion:
“If the NOAA data adjustments cannot be tied to specific metadata like station moves or instrumentation changes, then they are not really scientific “data,” but rather just opinions of people who are interested in promoting the global warming narrative. They are completely unusable for purposes of making public policy.”
Yes, but the manipulated data does make charts like the “hockey stick” graph above seem convincing, even though all those data points come from after-the-fact guesses about what the real data should be.
Ethics Alarms 
For basic scientific rigor, they should be recording and making available the raw data of any and all sensors (in addition to the context and conditions those sensors were operating in), so that people can work out for themselves how to interpret it.
Ideally, they’d continue using the old obsolete sensors, in addition to the new ones, so that people could attempt to model the differences between them and make guesses as to how to interpret how all the old sensor data might translate into the new paradigms, including highlighting places where we just don’t know how the data would map (within error bounds).
I don’t know if people are doing that, but that’s what I would expect proper scientists to be doing.
in general, they aren’t. Science got way less sciencey decades ago. I spent a summer in the late 80s chasing turtles around cranberry bogs. There was more scientific rigor and mud! In that summer than the last 50years of the climate cult
This makes so much sense, I don’t understand why it isn’t the practice, and it is suspicious that it isn’t.
The real issue, in my mind, is that they’re trying to calculate some sort of worldwide average at all. That’s a mistake. An easier way is compare each station to the same time in the previous year, and only work with the differences. When there’s a change of some kind between one year and the next, leave that station out of the new year’s data. Don’t weight it to try and smooth it over space, because there IS no way to accurately do that with the data they have.
The raw data is available. I went and pulled it back when the response to skeptics pointing out one station with unknown reasons for adjustiment (darwin australia IIRC) was to claim cherry picking, and then to provide a different set with the opposite trend. There was no reason not to look at all stations instead, so I did, and there’s a definite warming trend in the adjustments.
All the money spent on “decarbonizing the economy” and “achieving net zero” will go down as the largest waste of money, material, and time in the history of mankind.
Even very simple things – like UHI (Urban Heat Island) build-up should be rigorously accounted for and explained in the modeling. For example, a sensor is placed in a rural suburb of Phoenix thirty years ago and it read temperature from a largely desert environment. Thirty years later, that sensor may still exist…but is now surrounded by all the by-products of urban expansion – concrete, steel, and other materials that radiate and absorb heat at very different rates than what existed three decades before. That sensor will likely read VERY different values now.
The proper thing to do is either 1) move that sensor to the equivalent environment from the past, or 2) note that the sensor is now in an “UHI” and flag it. What should not be done is to continue reading that sensor as though nothing has changed in thirty years and then report it as “rising temperatures due to man-made climate change.”
Yes, in a sense, man changed the climate…around THAT sensor. But that gives no indicator to warming trends on any kind of scale. In fact, that sensor now gives misleading information.
For some additional information (including charts and such) on our host’s post, here’s Tony…
https://realclimatescience.com/2025/02/climate-tampering-crisis/#gsc.tab=0
And by the way, Tony has been documenting the letter agencies’ manipulation of temperature data for years…and years…and years.