It is ALREADY obvious to all. All who can read a satallite-map of the polar ice-caps, that is. How much more obvious do you want? You wanna wait until there are no more polar ice caps at all???

Sure they stand to gain if their ideas turn out right, but that’s true of everyone.

He’s free to conduct his own experiments to try to duplicate or refute your findings.

In this case, the raw data can and should be gathered over again. I have no doubt it will validate the original adjustments. Because there is plenty of confirming evidence for AGW that has nothing to do with the original raw data.

Most likely the data were entered electronically–but many years ago, in some legacy format like EBCDIC on magnetic tape (or even worse, paper tape), on some ancient mainframe computer that has long since been scrapped or gone to some museum. Such data would have just disappeared unless there was a specific project to save it. They used this raw data just once–to adjust it for differences among reporting stations–and entered the adjusted data on a more modern computer. Then they just forgot about the raw data.

But I can see that climate skeptics won’t be convinced by anything less than a rise in global temperature that is so obvious that no one will be able to deny global warming any longer.

That’s why I have been saying for a long time that the only politically acceptable way to deal with global warming is mitigation of its effects, only after it becomes obvious to all. Trying to prevent it, when all we can show the public is a bunch of mathematical models, is hopeless. The public won’t be convinced by theories to make major changes.

Remember the novel (and movie) “When Worlds Collide”? Despite warnings from the world’s top astronomers, the public refused to believe that a planetoid was on a collision course with Earth until they could see it in the sky with the naked eye. And that’s when the panic really started.

I’m willing to explain this stuff to you, but please, no more putting words in my mouth, or, if yer gonna put them there, at least don’t be so obvious about it. OF COURSE I never said “labs don’t give out their data” (you left out the critical word “RAW”), and OF COURSE I know that scientists report data and methods, the former in the Results section and the latter in the Materials and Methods section. There is no need for you to pretend to be more obtuse than you are–really, there is no need to do that.

Re: Phil Jones and deleted data–if he were seriously planning do that, he would not have shared his intentions with anyone. No way anyone would write down the intention to do that, except as a joke. Your colleague would not thank you for making him into an accessory.

And you are telling me that the original data were never entered electronically? You think they just read them off the page and adjusted them on the fly?

Are you crazy?

What raw data did they use to produce CRU TS3 and HADCRUT? Stuff they read off a tape and never saved anywhere in a data file?