How much "climate change" science is dodgy?

We've happened across a couple of scientifically interesting reports in the last day or so that place great big question marks over the whole "climate change" and "global warming" religion.

Now, as an individual, this blogger does think that it is important that we look after our planet. However, the endlessly ratcheted-up bandwagon on green-this and green-that does appear to have reached fanatical levels.

Cards on table, this blogger is not into "science" - so we have to take everything we read as accurate. Yet it seems that there is a lot more to read on the "it's all a load of nonsense" minority perspective than is made widely available.

Our curiosity was aroused by a fascinating article in The Spectator by Melanie Phillips. She outlines how a study of trees from the Yamal Peninsula in Siberia which uses tree rings to look for global warming appears to be dodgy - because, it is claimed, they have only used those trees that back up the global warming argument and have ignored the rest.

She cites other analysis of this study which says that there is a "scientific scandal" at play here as it has been made impossible to even verify the data which leads to the "global warming" conclusion: "Scientists have ensured much of the measurement data used in the reconstructions remains a secret -- failing to fulfill procedures to archive the raw data. Without the raw data, other scientists could not reproduce the results".

By chance, we then happened across another article which alleges the same thing about a totally separate study - that a key plank of the global warming agenda is backed by "science" in which it is alleged that the raw data on which the scientific conclusions are based is absent and unavailable.

The study with apparent question marks over it looks at surface temperatures and was conducted by the University of East Anglia's Climatic Research Unit - a study with backing from the U.S. Department of Energy.

So, without going into it too deeply and being open to reading two sides of a story, it seems that there are still plenty of question marks from the green lobby to have to answer - even about the science on which their conclusions are said to be backed up.

Complex story, ladies and gentlemen. And these question marks do not seem to receive much in the way of publicity.

That is until one reads a report from the BBC which appeared online over the last couple of days and which asks the question: "What happened to global warming?".

In this last story, it appears that scientists failed to predict the latest set of data - that there has been no global warming over the last eleven years and that the warmest year measured was 1998. It appears, from this report, that the planet goes in thirty year cycles and that there was a period of global cooling - rather than warming - between 1945 and 1977.

Anyway, this blogger is not scientifically minded. But this blogger can read. If two sides of an argument are made available for us to read.

Interesting how, on global warming, we seldom see the other side of the argument and so are all too often not even encouraged to think there might be another side to the argument.

And then you notice proposals to make "climate change denial" a crime. Have a Google search of that one.

What strange times we live in.

And our conclusion? If your science is solid, you shouldn't need to lose your raw data. If your argument is solid, then you should be able to counter the other side of the debate - not repress it through criminalising thought.