From the Copenhagen Climate Summit south across the freezing North Sea to Climategate Centre (that dull, grey government CRU building in the east of England) is exactly 504 miles, or 810.94 kilometres in European terms. Heavy snowfalls in a massive cold front have engulfed both venues. So much cold and snow is most unusual at this time of year in both these locations. The CRU facility like the city of Norwich close by awoke to no electricity and hundreds of schools have been closed due to the bleak conditions. Right across the South-East of England it's the same kind of whiteout. There are very short odds now for a white Christmas in Denmark and Britain and that hasn't happened in both these maritime nations for decades. How strange when 2009 is officially one of the hottest years on record. That's if anyone still believes those CRU and NASA GISS 'fudged' records. After yesterday the biggest skeptics of all are now the Russians.

As I sat snug eating my morning toast I scrolled through the list of news channels before happening on 'Russia Today' to see what their take was on these matters. Across the bottom of the screen a ticker tape scroll left me in no doubt. There was utter condemnation of the UK Met Office and the data fudging of the Climategate scandal. It was very evident that the Russian mood was just as icy as that in Copenhagen or London. With an area of 17,075,400 square kilometres (6,592,800 sq mi) Russia is by far the largest country in the world. It has got lots of climate data and accounts for the most important 'signal' on the warmist's temperature chart. For it is in this vast region that American and British Climategate scientists had identified the largest rise in temperatures in the last fifty years.

But since that epoch-changing moment of November 19th 2009, Russian climate scientists have looked very closely at the 'homogenized' climate numbers and are baffled as to how the now discredited CRU Climategate Centre managed to 'overlook' a vast swath of Russian measurements. To the Copenhagen Summit delegates this is the kind of detail not on their agenda.

The Russian team from Moscow's Institute of Economic Analysis (IEA), looked at the data from 121 monitoring sites that Climategate scientists had used and compared them with the 355 sites that were not used. After plotting the data the Russians found that the 121 sites gave mostly warmer weather reports than the 355 unused sites. A clear case of cherry picking as anyone can see from the graphs in this PDF (in Russian).

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© UnknownIt is easy to see that the meteorological station located on the territory Russia is not entirely uniform, and their concentration significantly and predictably higher in western and southern parts of the country, while in the north and east - notably below.
Do the Russians have some ulterior motive in all this? Unlikely. The Russian delegate's position in the Copenhagen talks has always been rather relaxed as Russia was always in a 'win-win' position whatever happened. Their country was set to benefit either way with tens of billions in carbon credits for unused fossil fuel reserves if they agreed not to sell their fossil fuels on the world's markets.

The reasonable suspicion by the Moscow scientists of some sort of grand ideological conspiracy is supported by examination of the leaked Climategate emails, one of which dated March 2004, is by former CRU boss Phil Jones to Michael Mann, American climatologist at Penn State. Right there we see the evidence:

"Recently rejected two papers (one for JGR and for GRL) from people saying CRU has it wrong over Siberia. Went to town in both (peer) reviews, hopefully successfully. If either appears I will be very surprised, but you never know with GRL. Cheers, Phil."

It seems when voices of concern rose over the dodgy Russian data sets the alarmist trick of pulling the strings of the peer-reviewers again raised its ugly head. Supporters of global warming were swift to counter the Russian claims but the Russians had further proof to support their position. They cited those well-preserved data sets from measuring centres inexplicably dumped by CRU without any explanation.

Weather centres with records going back into the 19th Century were ignored, in some cases, in favour of monitoring stations with less data, but which pointed to warming. The IEA team questioned the motives of the likes of Phil Jones and Michael Mann thus:

"Weather station Uchur has a long and almost continuous series of meteorological observations from 1940; the station Toko - an intermittent series of observations from 1946 and continuous only since 1957; however, the trend towards warming in the 20th Century was more pronounced according to the station Toko. In the calculations of global temperature, HadCRUT predictably uses the data solely from the station Toko."

The Russians revelations quickly silenced pro-warming apologists seeking to smooth over the Climategate irregularities. The world now can see clearly how the green brigade were chopping out temperature data sets that would have disproved their man made global warming scam if it ever had been published. A careful reading of the IEA reports shows a highly biased and savage censoring of data by the likes of Professor Jones and Michael Mann, all to hide cooling and exaggerate warming. "Only one tenth of meteorological sites with complete temperature series are used," says the Moscow team.

In one example, the CRU grossly reduced the temperature data series for the station Sortavala, provided by Roshydromet, the report found. When the Russian experts attempted to reproduce HadCRUT's conclusions they couldn't, but instead found a consistently lower set of temperature values a full 0.6 degree Centigrade - far, far lower that the doomsaying British and American climatologists. If this level of inaccuracy were repeated across the entire spectrum of world temperature sets it would wipe out the entire man made warming effect claimed by the likes of Al Gore and the UN's IPCC quango.

Judging by the view from where I'm sitting we're all going to need a substantial pinch of salt to melt through that sorry winter pile.