More "adjustments" of temperature data from the CRU?

The BBC recently came out with a dramatic article stating that 2010 was the warmest year since 1850 (widely recognized as the last year that temperatures dropped at the end of the Little Ice Age.)

The WMO analysis combines data from three leading research agencies, and is regarded as the most authoritative.

The three records are maintained by the US-based National Aeronautics and Space Administration (Nasa) and National Climatic Data Center (NCDC), and jointly in the UK by the Hadley Centre and the University of East Anglia's Climatic Research Unit (CRU).

Then two scientist looked at the original data from the CRU in East Anglia (of Climategate fame) and found that temperature data had been altered.

Comparing the actual data for each year, from 2001 to 2010, with that given in the press release shows that for four years the original figure has been adjusted downwards. Only for 2010 was the data revised upwards, by the largest adjustment of all, allowing the Met Office to claim that 2010 was the hottest year of the decade.

One wonders why the data from the UK would need to be changed, apparently for publicity purposes, when the data released by "denier" Roy Spencer's university already showed 2010 to be in a statistical tie with 1998 for the warmest year in 40 years. Didn't that quite fit publicity needs?

These kinds of discoveries of altered data just keep happening.  And not just in climate science. There are several reasons for this.

One disturbing thing about alterations in temperature data by climate scientists, starting several years ago with IPPC data, is that the scientists who revise the data typically refuse to say why or how they determined that historical data should be changed.

The discovery of alterations in the data from the CRU comes close on the heels of another scandal in the UK involving the failure of the Met Office to predict the cold winter there:

. . . . the weather service caused a sensation by making the startling claim that it was gagged by government ministers from issuing a cold winter forecast. Instead, a milder than average prediction was made that has been resoundingly ridiculed in one of the worst winters in a century.