Another Way To Hide The Decline

I have been sitting on this story for a couple of days - waiting for verification. I now have some. Watts Up With That says that the CRU (of ClimateGate fame) cherry picked Russian data. And you probably couldn't guess this in a million years, but they left out the data from the coldest stations.

They actually have a computer program that can pick out the special stations depending on their match to the desired result. At least they have a program that can do that with tree rings. Why not weather stations?

Here is a bit from the pdf of the announcement.

Climategate has already affected Russia. On Tuesday, the Moscow-based Institute of Economic Analysis (IEA) issued a report claiming that the Hadley Center for Climate Change based at the headquarters of the British Meteorological Office in Exeter (Devon, England) had probably tampered with Russian-climate data.

The IEA believes that Russian meteorological-station data did not substantiate the anthropogenic global-warming theory. Analysts say Russian meteorological stations cover most of the country's territory, and that the Hadley Center had used data submitted by only 25% of such stations in its reports. Over 40% of Russian territory was not included in global-temperature calculations for some other reasons, rather than the lack of meteorological stations and observations.

I believe they did something similar with Russian trees. First you "goose" the "official" temperature record and then you go looking for data that backs up the desired results. Gotta keep the press releases coming.

My question is: when did the Russians learn about the misuse of their data? How long have the Russians been sitting on the knowledge that their record was corrupted?

H/T Clarice Feldman at American Thinker

Cross Posted at Classical Values