ClimateGate Fallout: Russian Think Tank Says Temperature Data was 'Cherry-Picked'

Call it another strike against global warming alarmism. Investor's Business Daily reported on Dec. 17 that one think tank is alleging that Russian climate data was manipulated to exaggerate the extent of climate change in Russia.

According to IBD, the Institute of Economic Analysis (IEA) alleged in a new report "that England's Hadley Centre for Climate Change and the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia, the U.K.'s two top climate research outfits, had improperly selected climate data from Russia."

IEA's Andrei Illarionov said the think tank's analysis found that temperature data in Russia used by Hadley-CRU was limited to 25 percent of Russia's stations and left out almost half of the country's land mass.

"(The report) is an analysis of what stations have been used, what stations have not been used and, based on this analysis, it looks like the real actual temperature dynamics ... in Russia, that is the increase in warming, have been artificially increased by 0.64 degrees Celsius," Illarionov told IBD.

Hadley Centre responded to IBD via e-mail saying: "The World Meteorological Organisation (sic) chooses the set of stations designated as essential climate stations that have been released by the Met Office."

Met Office spokesman Dave Britton told IBD that if all data had been used "we would probably suggest that the (Russian) warming would actually be greater."

But Illarionov said that the station data chosen by Hadley/CRU tended to be closer to places with higher populations, which are often warmer.

Just a few weeks ago, around Nov. 20 CRU e-mails and documents about climate change were leaked and posted to the internet anonymously. Some of those e-mails disturbed many with scientists suggesting how to "hide the decline" of global warming and willing to destroy information rather than release it under freedom of information laws.

This scandal became known as ClimateGate, despite the unwillingness of some news outlets to cover the story.