The house of cards has collapsed...

...and a easy way to rate the clanging of the alarm bells is to check out the level of debate at the green left site Hot Topic. A stab to their sensitive green collective hearts has been the admission from their UK Guardian spokesman and ally George Monbiot, that the head of the CRU, Phil Jones should resign. Further revelations from the leaked material will strengthen future actions and investigations. From CBS news ...the U.S. Congress may probe whether prominent scientists who are advocates of global warming theories misrepresented the truth about climate change...

This issue will not go away, and has the potential to rival Watergate as a political scandal. It may become the defining issue of the Obama presidency. And talking of scandals, closer to home the NZ Climate Science Coalition has been doing some simple spadework, and what they've found appears to link NIWA, CRU and their ex-employee Dr Jim Salinger, to some more dodgy statistics...

There have been strident claims that New Zealand is warming. The Inter-governmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), among other organisations and scientists, allege that, along with the rest of the world, we have been heating up for over 100 years. But now, a simple check of publicly-available information proves these claims wrong. In fact, New Zealand’s temperature has been remarkably stable for a century and a half. So what’s going on? New Zealand's National Institute of Water & Atmospheric Research (NIWA) is responsible for New Zealand's National Climate Database. This database, available online, holds all New Zealand's climate data, including temperature readings, since the 1850s. Anybody can go and get the data for free. That’s what we did, and we made our own graph...

...and what the Coalition have found is that the official graph used by NIWA, and largely collated by Dr Jim Salinger, and started by him in the 1980's when he was at the CRU, differs markedly from the data. They therefore conclude...

The shocking truth is that the oldest readings have been cranked way down and later readings artificially lifted to give a false impression of warming as documented below. There is nothing in the station histories to warrant these adjustments and to date Dr Salinger and NIWA have not revealed why they did this...We have discovered that the warming in New Zealand over the past 156 years was indeed man-made, but it had nothing to do with emissions of CO2—it was created by man-made adjustments of the temperature. It’s a disgrace...more here... and here... and now featuring on WuWT here...

It remains to be seen what Dr Salinger will say about all this, but the suspicion is now raised that NIWA understood Salinger's apparent distortion of the data, and may have sacked him as a result...Now Rodney Hide has asked Minister for the Environment, Nick Smith, to "please explain." However, the ball remains firmly in Dr Salinger's court...watch this space.

Some more light relief. What do you think Homer Simpson thinks about climate change ? Check it out...with thanks to PKH here...

...and... We the undersigned petition the Prime Minister to suspend the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia from preparation of any Government Climate Statistics until the various allegations have been fully investigated by an independent body...here...

...and for a great overview, with links to blogs, media sources around the world, see The Week, here...