Those apparently tasked with carrying the standard for anthopogenic global warming are increasingly resembling the Gang That Couldn't Shoot Straight. This has huge implications for the political struggle for resources to reduce emissions and convert our energy base to greener technologies. So what follows will look like piling on--but it isn't. We really need to get better measurements, better analysis and better communications or our efforts to control global warming will go the same way as Australia's, where they recently voted down their version of Cap and Trade.

First up is Phil Jones from East Anglia University in the UK, where he is charged with collating, smoothing and computing average temperatures from thousands of measurement stations around the world. When served with Freedom of Information requests by climate skeptics, the response from Dr. Jones and East Anglia was more or less that they lost it. Steve Macintyre from Climate Audit, who made one of the FOI requests, reports on it here. Roger Pielke Jr., who also filed one request, talks about the implications of their inability to archive data here. Key quote:"Can this be serious? So not only is it now impossible to replicate or reevaluate homogeneity adjustments made in the past -- which might be important to do as new information is learned about the spatial representativeness of siting, land use effects, and so on -- but it is now also impossible to create a new temperature index from scratch. CRU is basically saying, "trust us." So much for settling questions and resolving debates with empirical information (i.e., science)."

Next we find the climate scientists taking refuge at Real Climate with yet another controversy. This is about a paper they published last year saying, predictably enough, that Antarctica was warming, and, predictably enough, having huge problems with their analysis. Here is a discussion of the topic from Penn State, where Michael Mann of Steig et al has an appointment.

"In an entirely unrelated development, Steig et al have issued a corrigendum in which they reproduce (without attribution) results previously reported at Climate Audit by Hu McCulloch (and drawn to Steig's attention by email) - see comments below and Hu McCulloch's post here.

They also make an incomplete report of problems with the Harry station - reporting the incorrect location in their Supplementary Information, but failing to report that the "Harry" data used in Steig et al was a bizarre splice of totally unrelated stations (see When Harry Met Gill). The identification of this problem was of course previously credited by the British Antarctic Survey to Gavin the Mystery Man."

This week's episode of Weird Science concludes with yet another guest appearance by Real Climate contributor Micheal Mann, who has published a study on how hurricanes have developed with greater frequency than at any time in the past 1,000 years, according to this story in the Houston Chronicle.

But, as noted in the article, "This is not Mann's first attempt to use "proxies" for actual observations of conditions to tease out historical climate details.

He was among the scientists whose global temperature reconstruction of the last 1,000 years - dubbed the "hockey stick graph" because it showed a distinct upward trend since the mid-19th century attributed to greenhouse gases - received both praise and criticism.

Now he appears to be doing the same with hurricane activity, and the new work is not without its detractors.

"The paper comes to very erroneous conclusions because of using improper data and illogical techniques," said Chris Landsea, science and operations officer at the National Hurricane Center. In his criticism, Landsea notes that the paper begins by saying that Atlantic tropical activity has "reached anomalous levels over the past decade."

This ignores recent work by Landsea and a number of other hurricane scientists who found that storm counts in the early 1900s - in an era without satellites and fewer seaborne observers - likely missed three or four storms a year. The addition of these storms to the historical record, he said, causes the long-term trend over the last century to disappear.""This isn't a small quibble," he said. "It's the difference between a massive trend with doubling in the last 100 years, versus no trend."

It is occurrences such as these that will condemn good energy policy to failure. It is the work of those most convinced that global warming is an oncoming freight train that will make it impossible to resolve the real climate change issues we face. While they are busy blaming the skeptics, it is their errors that will haunt them when it comes to making decisions.