A missing scale on the global warming Sauron?

Apparently not only are scientists disagreeing with a recent NOAA study that has been found to "adjust" climate monitoring numbers by those who watch these things closely, but a Georgia Tech researcher has said the unthinkable. 

While I'm sure this latest analysis from NOAA will be regarded as politically useful for the Obama administration.....

Chew on that one for a while.  Judith Curry is all but accusing the Obama administration of tightening the thumbscrews on NOAA to get the results they want, and in the process is admitting that all too often, the data is fudged.

Now speaking as a guy who works with numbers for a living, this is troubling.  I can see creating a proxy to overall climate analogous to the "q" factor in human intelligence and correlating various other factors to it, but as a rule you don't mess with the original measurements or present "adjusted" measurements as original.  Apparently this is the rule in climatology, however, and that tends to mean that the data mean exactly what the researcher intends them to mean.

Just like Professor Curry noted.  Ouch.