Every time I think maybe there really is something to the concerns about global warming, I find out that the people claiming that global warming is or will be serious cooked/fudged/lied about their data. Thank goodness for people like Ross McKitrick (a colleague when I visited Guelph a few years ago). His recent piece in the Financial Post highlights more highjinks:
In recent years there have been a number of cases in which high-profile papers from climate scientists turned out, on close inspection, to rely on unseemly tricks, fudges and/or misleading analyses. After they get uncovered in the blogosphere, the academic community rushes to circle the wagons and denounce any criticism as “denialism.” There’s denialism going on all right — on the part of scientists who don’t see that their continuing defence of these kinds of practices exacts a toll on the public credibility of their field.
Cooking the data is simply not legitimate, and it looks as if that's what too many people in the global-warming non-skeptic camp have been doing.
Update: Harold Brooks writes "McKitrick knows a great deal about cooking data. He was involved in cherry picking the 1% most sensitive artificial time series from an experiment and treating them as random selections. See http://deepclimate.org/2010/11/16/replication-and-due-diligence-wegman-style/ and Mashey's other analyses of Wegman, McIntyre, and McKitrick."
I wish I understood the nature of the debate better.