1709: The year that Europe froze - environment - 07 February 2009 - New Scientist

There may be no easy explanation for the Great Frost of 1709, but unexpected weather patterns revealed by Wheeler's data underline why climate reconstructions are so important. "We need to explain the natural variation in climate over past centuries so that we can tease apart all those factors that contribute to climate change. But before we can do that we need to nail down those changes in detail," says Wheeler. "Climate doesn't behave consistently and warmer and colder, drier and wetter periods can't always be explained by the same mechanisms." In the two decades after that terrible winter, the climate warmed very rapidly. "Some people point to that and say today's warming is nothing new. But they are not comparable. The factors causing warming then were quite different from those operating now."

Will Alexander: CLIMATE MODELS FOR MONKEYS « An Honest Climate Debate

In my field I challenge the absence of the well-documented and well-established solar linkage in the models. As I reported in a previous memo this influence is more than 17 times that of the claimed human influence. I also challenge the absence of the well-established multiyear periodicity in the models. Other scientists have challenged the claimed linkage between carbon dioxide emissions and global temperatures.

Climatologists who ignore the considerable doubts about the model inputs cannot complain when they are criticised for making alarmist predictions based on a suspect input data.

Christopher Booker: Gill and Harry entangled in a southern scandal

There has been a hilarious twist to the bid by the shock troops of the global warming scare to pretend that, contrary to all the evidence, Antarctica has lately been warming up, Behind this claim were scientists belonging to America’s leading pro-warmist blog RealClimate, including Michael Mann, creator of the notorious â hockey stick’ graph, and Dr James Hansen’s colleague Gavin Schmidt of the Goddard Institute for Space Studies.

When their allies at Nature made a cover story of their claims, this hit headlines across the world, trumpeted by all the usual suspects, from the BBC to the Guardian’s George Monbiot (aka the Great Moonbat). But they hadn’t reckoned with the forensic expertise of the two leading US science blogs, Anthony Watts’s Watts Up With That and Climate Audit, run by Steve McIntyre, the chief demolisher of the 'hockey stick’.

Combing through the data they discovered that the chief evidence for a warming Antarctica came from a single weather station, 'Harry’. But the data for 'Harry’ was not all it seemed. Secretly spliced in with it were lower temperature readings from a quite different weather station, 'Gill’, so that the higher and later temperatures from 'Harry’ (cocooned for several years in snow) made it look as though there had been a warming which didn’t exist.

So embarrassed was Schmidt when this sleight of hand was exposed that he pretended it had come to light through an 'independent’ observer, who was then revealed to be himself (after reading the blogs run by his more assiduous critics). But perhaps Nature, Moonbat and Co. should apologise to their readers for having been fooled by such chicanery.