Over at ICECAP.us Meteorologist Joe D’Aleo has posted an item on a “Russian Bombshell” highly relevant to the ClimateGate scandal. The Russian media first posted the story and now some Brits are loving it.

The long and the short of it is best summarized by the Telegraph’s James Dellingpole: “What the Russians are suggesting here, in other words, is that the entire global temperature record used by the IPCC to inform world government policy is a crock.”

That is, we have yet further evidence that the data is being cooked to make the long-running claim of an increase in global temperatures, and now to diminish the apparent cooling of said temps. As the gang at EU referendum tout, “it is in Soviet Union that the CRU, NOAA, NASA show the greatest warming.”

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Canada’s Macleans has a profile of the skeptic at the center of the ClimateGate e-mails (what, you expected an American newspaper to cover this story?):

The private emails and logs leaked last month from the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia can’t tell us whether industrial activity is really heating the earth’s atmosphere and endangering civilization. But they have settled the identity of the Great Satan of climate science. Torontonian Stephen McIntyre, a gentle, persistent amateur who had no credentials in applied science before stepping into the global warming debate in 2003, is mentioned more than 100 times.

In the emails, leading climate researchers dismiss him as a capitalist hireling or a hapless “bozo,” and argue about the relative merits of ignoring him versus counterattacking him, even as others acknowledge that his criticisms have merit and imitate his use of the Web as a venue for hyper-detailed scientific discussion. At one point in 2005, CRU director Phil Jones, now under suspension, ponders the possibility that McIntyre might use U.K. freedom-of-information laws to obtain raw weather-station data compiled by the CRU. He grumbles: “I think I’ll delete the file rather than send to anyone.” The overall impression is that of 100 elephants stampeding in confusion and panic around a mouse.

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One thing about “ClimateGate” nagging at the back of my mind is the absence of any discussion by ringleader Phil Jones (or others) of the remarkable, shocking discovery that Jones now claims he had that his precedessor destroyed the raw data in the 1980s.

That is the data that scientists have for years been seeking from Jones under the UK’s freedom of information law. Against numerous such requests he offered equally numerous excuses for refusing access culminating with the September 2009 claim – when it looked like he’d been cornered and had no excuses not to provide it to Prof. Ross McKitrick who met all of his long-stated qualifications – that in fact he’d lost it.

First, it does seem odd that Jones would so firmly and crisply articulate his many, very specific excuses for so many years about why he could not provide something that in fact they had, as he now tells it, lost. His refusals all clearly imply that a belief that he had it.

But where are the emails putting out the word, oh, snap, you guys aren’t gonna believe this?

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