It’s getting tiresome.
There’s a new post on WUWT about how
“Authors Steirou and Koutsoyiannis, after taking homogenization errors into account find global warming over the past century was only about one-half [0.42°C] of that claimed by the IPCC [0.7-0.8°C].”
Anthony Watts was so excited he felt the need to alert Richard Muller to this result. The blog post leads to the usual frenzy of accusations that the global temperature estimates are a fraud. There’s much talk of how the entire global warming during the last 100 years is only 0.4C, and half of that must be natural, leaving a mere 0.2C (at most) attributable to humankind, so they’ve been right all along that we’re not changing the climate in any dangerous way. There are even some bizarre statements like one reader concluding “that is fully consistent with what we’ve said all along, that incresed water vapor is a negative, not positive feedback…” How water vapor got into the discussion, I don’t know.
What’s lacking is the faintest glimmer of actual skepticism about this claim.
Here’s the data for global average tropospheric temperature from UAH:
This is satellite data — nothing to do with surface station records. It’s from Roy Spencer and John Christy at UAH — can’t be accused of trying to exaggerate global warming. That red line is the estimated trend from least-squares regression.
The question on everyone’s mind must be this: how much does that trend line increase during the 33.5-year time span of the UAH data record? Answer: 0.46 deg.C.
That’s more than is stated in the WUWT article for the last century. Yes, folks, we’ve seen more global warming in just 33.5 years than Watts’ post claims happened in 100 years. According to satellite data. From two of the most prominent scientists who deny dangerous man-made global warming.
The WUWT crowd laps it up. Uncritically. No skepticism at all.
It reminds me of when Roy Spencer (one of those UAH scientists) claimed that the U.S. was warming at a mere 0.013 C/decade, when his own UAH data set indicated a warming rate 17 times as high.
Where’s the skepticism? It sure isn’t at the WUWT blog.
Open Mind 
Tiresome is the first word that pops into my mind also. All the usual blogs are abuzz with their latest silver bullet to shoot down the entire global warming scam. The comments at WUWT are, as usual, leaving one with a choice of laughing hysterically, facepalming constantly or weeping for the stupidity of some aspects of humanity. I tend to chose all three. My beef is them all referring to it as a “paper”. http://uknowispeaksense.wordpress.com/2012/07/18/a-conference-abstract-is-not-a-paper-anthony/#comment-536
“All the usual blogs are abuzz with their latest silver bullet …”
Hang on; I thought it was thenother final coffin nail?
How many denskepticons does it take to secure a coffin lid, anyway?
Q. How many deniers does it take to nail down a coffin lid?
A. 30,000, and they’re all scientists!
A. Just one, but then he has to remove the nails from his fingers and start over.
A. 45,000,001–one to drive in the nails, and 45 million to tell him what a genius he is.
Horatio wrote this a while ago after the (other) “final nail” had just been driven into the coffin of Global E. Warming (survived by his wife, Medieval). Extra points if you can guess who “Bob” refers to (Hint: rhymes with Mizfail”)
“Put Another nail in the Coffin”
— Horatio Algeranon’s reversification of
Glaser Tompall’s “Put another log on the fire”
Put another nail in the coffin
Cook me up some data and a graph
Post up on my blog and keep on bluffin’
Until you’ve written Warming’s epitaph.
Come on, Bobby, you can boost my hit-count,
And then go fetch my hackers.
And boil me up another pot of tripe.
Then put another nail in the coffin, Bob,
And bury Global Warming — time is ripe.
Now don’t I let you lie with stats on Sunday?
Don’t I warn you when her tails are gettin fat?
Ain’t I a-gonna take you trollin’ with me someday?
James Inhofe couldn’t love you more than that.
Ain’t I always nice to Judith Curry?
Don’t I hype her blogging every day?
So, dissemble on my blog ‘cos God knows it spreads the fog,
And you know that in the short run it will pay.
So, put another nail in the coffin
Cook me up some data and a graph
Post up on my blog and keep on bluffin’
Until you’ve written Warming’s epitaph
Come on, Bobby, you can boost my hit-count,
And then go fetch my hackers.
And boil me up another pot of tripe.
Then put another nail in the coffin, Bob,
And bury Global Warming — time is ripe.
“How many denskepticons does it take to secure a coffin lid, anyway?”
Aha! “Skepticons”. Thanks DB.
“Hang on; I thought it was thenother final coffin nail?”
Some can’t decide if AGW is dead or undead.
An extra fillip of amusement because “coffin nail” was popular decades ago, long before the Surgeon General weighed in, as slang for the small, cylindrical drug delivery system so beloved of Lindzen, Fred Singer, and many others who cannot join us today because they are in sadly unironic and unmetaphorical coffins.
I chose “silver bullet” because some idiot I was talking to a few weeks ago referred to “the giant bloodsucking vampire that is the global warming movement” or some such thing. He was nuts, but I hadn’t made the coffin nail/cancer stick connection. Duh to me. I’ll use that from now on.
Horatio, with your permission, I’d like to set that to music and post it to Youtube. Please drop me a line with permission and I’ll get right on it!
Harry, what’s the name of your YouTube channel? I’d like to check it out.
pdf version of the Steirou and Koutsoyiannis presentation is here: http://itia.ntua.gr/getfile/1212/1/documents/2012EGU_homogenization_1.pdf
It should be noted that the work does not claim that temperatures increase for the past 100 years should be 0.4 deg C instead of 0.8. It says that homogenization corrections at a sub-set of 163 stations (ones that had long records, few missing data, etc.) resulted in an trend increase from 0.42 C (raw data) to 0.76 C (corrected). They also report that the corrections resulted in a trend increase at 2/3 of the stations and call into question the reliability of some homogenization techniques.
It should also be noted that the distribution of the 163 stations is heavily biased to the USA and Europe (98 out of the 163 stations). The most they say is:
“The above results cast some doubts in the use of homogenization procedures and tend to indicate that the global temperature increase during the last century is smaller than 0.7-0.8°C.”
And the only reason for the doubt is that there is a difference in the trend between raw and homogenized, because the authors, new to homogenization, wrongly assume that homogenization should not change the trend. At least at that point Watts should have started thinking, doesn’t he want climatologists to remove the effect of the urban heat island effect? That is homogenization and changes the trend.
On my blog, kindly linked by bluegrue below, I mention some of the reasons why you would expect the trend to change by homogenization, for example better protection against radiation errors in modern instruments.
That’s from JeffID the self-proclaimed über objective slayer of climate science and, now, apparently, the Nobel-heavy denialists (partially reformed, to their chagrin) comprising the “BEST team”.
It’s funny reading Mosher in that thread, in which he’s posing as a die-hard “warmista”, because he recognizes how utterly stupid the argument being posed is.
Mosher! Radical warmista! Who woulda thunk it a year ago?
More than once over the last 12 months or so I’ve found myself thinking the same thing. It’s to Mosher’s credit that he demonstrates at least a modicum of reason, and the more so because he hasn’t been painted into a corner in quite the public way that, say, Muller, was.
Perhaps the world isn’t flat, after all…
To be fair he’s also been debunking a lot of fake-skeptic nonsence over at Curry’s. When he can resist playing silly games he actually has some intelligent stuff to say.
“The Climate Skeptic (IV)”
— by Horatio Algeranon (based on a line from “Black dog”)
I don’t know
But I been tricked
A peg leg Mann
Ain’t got no stick
The comments by Victor Venema are worth reading. He’s a scientist at the Meteorological institute of the University of Bonn, Germany and is first author of a paper benchmarking homogenization techniques.
http://www.clim-past.net/8/89/2012/cp-8-89-2012.html
His blog may be of interest, too. Here are two post he is herding WUWT readers to
http://variable-variability.blogspot.de/2012/07/investigation-of-methods-for.html
http://variable-variability.blogspot.de/2012/01/homogenization-of-monthly-and-annual.html
From the third link in Bluegrue’s post:
In these two sentences one can see on the one hand the scientific professionalism and extremely generous collegialism of Venema (not to mention his dry humour), and on the other hand the very antithesis of the practice of science in Watts.
It staggers me that Watts is able to post what he does day in, day out, for year upon year, and to do so with no hint of shame.
Bluegrue – Thank you for all of the links.
Bernard J – Yes!
I recognize the authors, they are the ones who have been pushing Long Term Persistence as the reason for current warming (indeed, for all climate change ever, no physics required) for a while, based on a few records of rainfall in the Pacific North West.
Anyway.. have to note that the very first graph they show (the standard FAR temperature graph goes from ~-0.2 in 1900 to ~0.8 at the end, which gives a rise in the region of 1K in my book. As opposed to 0.7K..
Then we have a couple of graphs that look like they were picked as extreme cases of adjustment. Would certainly be interesting to see if there was a physical basis for this adjustment.
Then we see the distribution of station records; this is very heavily biased towards the continental US and Europe – relatively small geographical areas with significant urbanisation, and hence in many ways the most problematic records. It would certainly be interesting to see what their results would be if they excluded these regions, or at least sampled the globe evenly.
There is no discussion of any possible physical reasons why this adjustment might be systematically upwards.
Finally, there is a sleight of hand. The global warming from the first graph is about 1K, but they have already called it 0.7K. Which is then conflated with the adjusted figure of 0.76K from their chosen sites, which is then compared with 0.42K raw data from the set of sites..
“no physics required”
Indeed. That’s the reason the deniers nix the greenhouse effect. If the greenhouse effect is genuine, the deniers have to come up with some mechanism to vamoose the heat it produces. It’s easier to simply deny.
On WUWT there is no skepticism. Only pseudo-skepticism and denial.
I think what Lawrence Torcello (distinguished ethicist at University of Rochester) points out applies.
He notes that actual skepticism is about positive inquiry and critical thinking, as well as proportioning one’s beliefs to the available evidence (not to mention being willing to alter those beliefs if and when the evidence changes significantly). Pseudoskepticism, on the contrary, makes a virtue of doubt per se, regardless of other considerations, and is therefore irrational.
he also says
(1) Ethical obligations of inquiry extend to every voting citizen insofar as citizens are bound together as a political body;
(2) It is morally condemnable to put forward unwarranted public assertions contrary to scientific consensus when such consensus is decisive for public policy and legislation;
(3) It is imperative upon educators, journalists, politicians and all those with greater access to the public forum to condemn, factually and ethically, pseudoskeptical assertions without equivocation.
I see no evidence of positive inquiry or critical thinking from Mr Watts or many of his followers who post there – or indeed any adherence to an ethical framework – just the constant regurgitation of a predisposed view reinforced by confirmation bias and (apparently) deliberate ignorance about the science.
This issue is no exception
I see that Watts has quietly removed the “Dr. Richard Muller and BEST, please take note prior to publishing your upcoming paper (I’ve sent them a notice)”
Is that because this time he is actually sticking to his word that “I’m prepared to accept whatever result [Muller] produces, even if it proves my premise wrong”?
Or is it because he has suddenly remembered he qualified the above claim with the proclamation that “[Muller’s] method isn’t the madness that we’ve seen from NOAA, NCDC, GISS, and CRU”?
Or has he just realised how stupid he must look because homogenisation is not responsible for half of the warming trend and BEST doest homogenise anyway!
The funniest part is that you will recall that after BEST came out, Watts backtracked instantly on his hip-hooraying over Muller’s work, *because*, he said, it hadn’t yet been peer-reviewed.
So now he’s posting a non-peer-reviewed conference abstract, and wants Muller to take note of that?
Oh, now I get it. Not passing peer review is just fine, as long as you agree with the result, right Anthony?
Here’s more Wattsian Skepticism:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/07/13/friday-funny-dr-michael-mann-keeps-interesting-company/
Anthony claims that a Brazilian Goth rocker is the poster “caerbannog666” who frequents many a climate blog on the “warmista” side, while taking a dig at Mann for “keeping” such company. Except he’s completely wrong – wrong guy, wrong age, wrong continent. No connection whatsoever beyond the “caerbannog” in their handles. Does he admit his obvious error? Not in the least! It’s up to “caerbannog666” to prove he isn’t the Brazilian Goth, says Watts. A couple of minutes of Googling is enough for him. That’s Wattsian Skepticism in a nutshell. It doesn’t matter if it’s a cheap attempt at an ad hominem or a cheap attack on science; Wattsian Skepticism is applied in the same way. So simple even a simpleton can use it!
RM: That’s Wattsian Skepticism in a nutshell. It doesn’t matter if it’s a cheap attempt at an ad hominem or a cheap attack on science; Wattsian Skepticism is applied in the same way. So simple even a simpleton can use it!
BPL: So simple ONLY a simpleton can use it…
Why would it matter if Caerbannog666 was a Brazilian goth rocker anyway?
By the way, a quick Google shows that the name Caerbannog comes from Monty Python, so they must be the same person – I mean hardly anyone watches Monty Python, right?
Thread closed.
It’s interesting how Watts can’t back down on even the most blatant of errors.
(On the plus side, a few regulars called him on the ad hom.)
Imagine the bruhaha from the peanut gallery if, instead, someone had tried to out Watts.
This from Anthony in reply to Rattus:
“REPLY: No its about costumes, a choice, much like views on climate.”
Got that? Views on climate are a “choice”.
The only thing this proves is that Monty Python has fans in Brazil, too. Anyone who reads what caerbannog writes will recognize that this guy has a lot of scientific expertise.
But all they had to do was calculate global land temperature averages using both the raw and adjusted data! Then they would be able to tell us how big the difference is! How can they not have done that, for pity’s sake!
(Yes, I did it. So have lots of other people.)
[Response: We should start a club.]
I find such WTFUWT posts worrying. I read them and think, “Wow, maybe they have a point”. Then somewhere down in the comments is a voice of reason, and I realise I’ve been sucked in again by the blog equivalent of a sensationalist TV current affairs show.
Still, it must be very frustrating to the “skeptics”, who can’t understand why none of their “final nails” are keeping that coffin lid on.
John, you need to adopt the attitude that if WUWT or any denier blog for that matter says they have a peer reviewed paper supporting their lunacy, it means they have something that either isn’t peer reviewed, is peer reviewed but being misinterpreted, or is peer reviewed and being misrepresented.
I suppose if you are hydrologists, you may be happy making a splash like Steirou & Koutsoyiannis. It would have certainly created an interesting 15 minutes (unless your sole concern was Chinese humidity). I’d almost ask “Can they swim?” but surely their presentation was intended to provoke – the graphs of the De Bilt & the Sulina data presented without comment, the unsupported assertion “The difference between the trends of the raw and the homogenised data is often very large,” the description of Kuglitsch et al’s standard error (cooling) from a test of a proposed method as a correction (warming) intimating it is routinely used.
The two main findings they presented (which are more than a bit narrower than their stated conclusions) are quite distinct from each other. Both are surely ill-judged and extremely naive bits of climatology.
(1) They found 2/3 of the stations they examined adjusted temperature up rather than down, while they expected it to be 1/2. On average, the 169 stations examined were adjusted +0.34 deg C.
And that is where they leave it.
So why would they expect 1/2? Why attach the +0.34 to the entire global temperature record? And why consider such an adjustment to be in error?
(2) Their examination of the SNHT normalisation method “for single shifts” identified multiple false shifts within synthetic test data.
And that’s were they leave it.
They do not relate this finding to actual use of this SNHT method on real data used by actual global temperature records. There is no discussion of they examination of the “two cases of stations with a big difference between the trends of raw and adjusted data.”
On the plus side, the methods used to homogenise temperature records will become more widely understood because of Steirou & Koutsoyiannis. Beyond that, have they done anybody any favours? Even the infamous Cap’n Watts, that intrepid explorer last heard of voyaging to seek out the mythical Urban Heat Islands, he may find changing course to seek out the lost sub-continent of Homogeniz Asia becomes a more stormy passage than he is used to.
I can’t wait for the follow-up post, “New paper blames about half of Arctic ice loss and ocean acidification on weather station data homogenization.”
tomfid, I don’t know whether to laugh or cry at that comment. For sure its funny but after reading many of the comments from google galileos and excel experts over at WUWT, it won’t surprise me if they try and rewrite the Laws of Physics to suggest that all the ice loss is due to global cooling.
“…it won’t surprise me if they try and rewrite the Laws of Physics to suggest that all the ice loss is due to global cooling.”
Do the words “negative feedback” mean anything to you…?
;-)
negative feedback. now that is funny! Yep, the colder it gets, the more the ice melts. I’ve seen crazier comments than that though.
“The Global Warming Skeptic (just ain’t what he used to be)”
— by Horatio Algeranon (to the tune of “The Old Gray Mare”)
Oh, the Global Warming Skeptic, he ain’t what he used to be,
Ain’t what he used to be, ain’t what he used to be.
The Global Warming Skeptic, he ain’t what he used to be,
Many long years ago.
Many long years ago, many long years ago.
The Global Warming Skeptic, he ain’t what he used to be,
Many long years ago.
The Global Warming Skeptic, he picked from the cherry-tree,
Picked from the cherry-tree, picked from the cherry-tree
The Global Warming Skeptic, he picked from the cherry-tree,
Many long years ago.
Many long years ago, many long years ago,
The Global Warming Skeptic, he picked from the cherry-tree,
Many long years ago.
Feel free to add your own verses.
In the post, as the near-certain-proof breaks down more and more: “[REPLY – What it means is that WUWT, unlike nearly all alarmist blogs, does not censor contrary points of view. Science is a very back-and-forth kind of thing. Anyone can be wrong. Anything can be wrong. Consider that. ~ Evan]”
Hah! ha! ha-ha-ha… whimper.
Let me fix that for Evan: “What is means is that WUWT, unlike nearly all blogs run by scientists who actually know what they are talking about, does not censor totally stupid material. Blog-science is a very myopic sort of thing – no learning from past mistakes, no critical evaluation, no assessments taking into account what is actually known about the way the world works. Anyone can be wrong, especially at WUWT. Some things can be wrong, especially at WUWT. Consider that.”
“Here at WUWT, we take pride in being *not even wrong*… most of the time.”
Come now, these are words that every graduate student should hold in reserve for that difficult moment during a thesis defense.
Committee: “Your derivation falls apart at equation number 5.1”.
Candidate: “Unlike you, I don’t censor contrary points of view”.
Committee: “It has nothing to do with censorship. Rather, it has to do with the fact that you’ve invoked a boundary condition that is entirely inappropriate to the class of problem under investigation”.
Candidate: “Anyone can be wrong. Anything can be wrong. Consider that.”
Guaranteed free pass to Doctorate!
This is why I like to call Anthony a manufacturer of doubt. I’m sure you’ve probably heard of the manufactured doubt industry, with respect to tobacco control and other issues. I don’t even think he’s a skeptic — or a denier. Heck, when you call one of his Watts-bots out, they revert to the old “nobody’s denying it’s warming, it’s just we’re not sure the extent it’s caused by man.” But the reality is there’s a wealth of nonsense published there and elsewhere by these doubt manufacturers, some of it contradictory. Clearly, Anthony’s efforts are designed to show it hasn’t been warming and there are other high-profile “doubt manufacturers” who specifically deny it’s been warming, e.g. Joe Bastardi.
This argument that it hasn’t been warming & that it’s all a product of data manipulation is asinine. The warming signal is robust. Anybody is capable of seeing it. It’s visible in the melting ice caps, melting glaciers, rising sea levels, increasing frequency of hot temperature extremes relative to cold extremes, decreased seasonal ice & snow coverage, changes in plant hardiness, lengthened growing seasons, etc. If this is a hoax, Mother Nature must be in on it.
But what really ticks me off is when these guys go out of their way to impugn the reputation of the scientists who have been working to research climate change and document its effects. “Steven Goddard” is even worse than Anthony in this regard. He blatantly makes stuff up and publishes it. I called him out on his nonsense, and he refused to publish my comment, saying it was BS. Apparently, Steven thinks the national temperature should simply be an average of all climate stations. This is beyond stupid, because it fails to recognize that the location and geographic distribution of the sites has changed with time. Using Steven’s logic, NOAA/NCDC could create a warming trend by gradually shifting the distribution of sites to warmer locations without correcting for this change. After all, then the “raw data” would show a warming trend.
The reality is there have been minimal adjustments to the U.S. climate record. The adjustments that have been made are designed to correct for known biases (such as “time of observation” and the switch from cotton region shelters to MMTS) and based on published methods, such as regression analyses, to make the corrections. Anthony & Steven aren’t motivated by accuracy — in fact, their insistence that any adjustments are bad will decrease the reliability of the temperature record. Instead, they’re motivated to do whatever it takes to sow doubt about the reality of climate change.
“Here at WUWT, we take pride in being *not even wrong*, every time.”
KAP | July 18, 2012 at 6:24 pm | Reply
The only thing this proves is that Monty Python has fans in Brazil, too. Anyone who reads what caerbannog writes will recognize that this guy has a lot of scientific expertise.
I am the evil caerbannog666 that Anthony Watts warned you about…
I am one of the folks who has been able to replicate the NASA/GHCN results with raw data. [Response: Welcome to the club!] What distinguishes my approach from the others is that my processing procedure is *much* less sophisticated than theirs — in fact, it’s “dumbed down” to the point that it could be taught to on-the-ball high-school students.
Now, regarding my scientific expertise, it pales badly in comparison with that of tamino, the Nicks (Stokes/Barnes), etc. I’m just a very run-of-the mill programmer/analyst type. If you were to put Anthony Watts and Tamino on a talent scale, I’d fall somewhere near the midpoint.
Like the others who took a crack at the temperature data, I was motivated by all the denier naysaying…. “Nasa is manipulating their data, hiding their methods, they won’t give anybody enough information to check their work, blah blah blah….”.
Well, it didn’t take me very long to discover that it is almost embarrassingly easy to replicate the NASA/GHCN results — I was able to do it with nothing more than raw GHCN data and a very crude description of the basic gridding/averaging procedure.
That’s when I *really* began to appreciate the magnitude of the incompetence/dishonesty of the denier crowd. They’ve been going on and on for *years*, making bogus claims that can be debunked with just a few *days* (maximum) of very run-of-the mill programming work. It’s really pathetic and disgusting.
Anyway, I put together 3 images and a (hopefully) plain-English README file that I hope can really drive home to non-technical folks just
incredibly robust the global-warming results produced by NASA/NOAA/CRU are. I zipped them up and uploaded them to Google Docs.
The first image shows the official NASA/GISS “meteorological stations” results (copy/pasted directly from the NASA/GISS web-site) along with results I computed from *fewer than 70 rural stations* scattered around the globe. The other two images show Google Earth visualizations of the locations of the stations used by NASA vs. the stations that I used to generate my own results. The accompanying README file explains what I did, hopefully in a way as to strip the mystery from all of this.
You can download the package from http://tinyurl.com/globaltemperatureresultsV2 — please pass them around to friends/family in you think that they will do some good. The pix definitely have made an impression on the folks that I’ve shared them with.
Like I said — there’s no magic to this. When it comes to computing global-average temperature estimates, you really can get 99 percent of the answer with 1 percent of the work!
Frankly, I’m bordering on disappointed that you’re not a B&D Goth.
It would be a salient lesson in the perils of argumentum ad hominem.
Actually, it still is a salient lesson in the perils of argumentum ad hominem.
And Watts’ “Friday Funny” defence is not one at all.
Every day is funny at WUWT–though often I find the humor a little too dark for my taste.
That should be, “please pass them around to friends/family *if* you think that they will do some good”… If there are any other stupid typos that I missed, oh well….
I think you have very few typos considering your first language is Portuguese. :)
Caerbannog666 I like your page that Watts linked to. All the info they need to replicate the global temperature record. Pity it will be lost on them, but we can hope.
The Rocky Horror Gothy Bunny said here:
The trouble is, Caerbannog, that you didn’t also release the research assistant, the guide dog, the GPS, and the donor brain that every ‘auditor’ requires in order to veryfy that highfalootin’ scy-ency stuff.
Wotcha hidin’, hey?
H/T to Daneel Olivaw over at Stoat:
I see Norfolk Police have concluded the CRU hack was a sophisticated external hack, not an internal whistleblower, by the way. Montford and McIntyre refuse to let it sink in.
You have it wrong. The lack of evidence pointing to a whistleblower is the absolute and irrefutable proof that it indeed was an insider. Only an insider and whistleblower would cover his/her tracks this perfectly. At least that’s the reasoning, if you are in denial.
Bernard J. | July 19, 2012 at 8:52 am | Reply
Frankly, I’m bordering on disappointed that you’re not a B&D Goth.
Don’t be disappointed — I’ve never denied that I was a B&D Goth.
In fact, I’ve never denied that I was a B&D Goth with lots of tattoos, body-piercings, and dark fantasies of B&D vampire sex. Not once have I denied any of that.
Shweeet!
;-)
Been taking explanation lessons from Watts?
So–you’re denying that you’ve denied that?
You need to post this up on Reddit.
You need to post this up on Reddit.
done
I’m so disapointed that it’s not in Portuguese …
Hmmm.
I seem to have a niggle in the back of my mind that Watts had a refereence to BEST in his original post, but I can find nothing to indicate such, although some of the subsequent comments alude to it.
Has Watts been editting his posts, and if so, does anyone have an archived copy?
TW | July 18, 2012 at 9:32 am | Reply
I see that Watts has quietly removed the “Dr. Richard Muller and BEST, please take note prior to publishing your upcoming paper (I’ve sent them a notice)”
https://tamino.wordpress.com/2012/07/18/wheres-the-skepticism/#comment-64178
Beaten by a better man!
It pays to reread these threads from the top…
;-)
But you were right!
You are indeed correct – Watts had originally said “I’m sending this over to Muller for his attention”, or words to that effect. Which he later removed with no update notice. Sadly, I do not have an archived copy.
Given that he’s frequently criticized other sites for “undated post-publication revisions of article contents after significant user commenting.”, it’s quite a show of hypocrisy.
Bernard J.
TW’s comment up-thread has a quote that looks like it is direct from WUWT prior to the refence to Best being expunged.
Thanks for the pointer to TW’s post above, Arch and Al.
I’ve actually asked about this over at WWWT:
and I’ll be interested to see whether it is allowed through, let along answered.
Last year (I think it was) I idly spoke of a resource that backed-up each WWWT thread as it was posted, for just this eventuality.
It’s probably a forlorn hope, but I don’t suppose that anyone ever took the idea seriously? I reckon that TW’s recollection is on the mark, but I’d be most curious to see exactly what Watts thought was superfluous to his needs, and from where in his original post he excised it…
Deniers do not engage in anything even remotely resembling ‘skepticism;’ rather, they just fulminate, obfuscate, and bury the data by..well, fulminating and obfuscating! Nuthin’ new here…;)
There seems to be a significant difference between the troposphere temp trend in this article and that of Christy et al., 2010.
I quote from the abstract, “We conclude that the lower tropospheric temperature (TLT) trend over these 31 years is +0.09 ± 0.03 °C decade−1.”