Or in other words, the “raw” numbers could be preprocessed through a computer to provide the desired result...
They threw out the raw data, per the Sunday Times:
SCIENTISTS at the University of East Anglia (UEA) have admitted throwing away much of the raw temperature data on which their predictions of global warming are based.
It means that other academics are not able to check basic calculations said to show a long-term rise in temperature over the past 150 years.
The UEA’s Climatic Research Unit (CRU) was forced to reveal the loss following requests for the data under Freedom of Information legislation.
The data were gathered from weather stations around the world and then adjusted to take account of variables in the way they were collected. The revised figures were kept, but the originals — stored on paper and magnetic tape — were dumped to save space when the CRU moved to a new building.
The admission follows the leaking of a thousand private emails sent and received by Professor Phil Jones, the CRU’s director. In them he discusses thwarting climate sceptics seeking access to such data.
So in other words,
The only way to have any confidence in the results is to start over completely. To use absolutely nothing from these Universities because it could all well be tainted.
What ought to happen is a public server setup with unaltered world temperature records from everywhere available and let everyone that wants to have a shot at reconstructing past global temperatures.