Oh, the irony. I don't know if there's a sadder clan of internet trolls than the ones who inhabit "Watts Up With That?" The guy hasn't had a shred of credibility for years and has done nothing but strengthen the case for AGW while desperately flailing against anything to stay relevant. Even other skeptics laugh when his name comes up.

The sad part is that he started out with legitimate questions and a genuine curiosity/desire to find the truth... now it's just another political propaganda site where they throw rationality out the window and do nothing but make jokes about Al Gore and Obama all day. At least the guys over at denialdepot are actually funny.. WUWT is just sad.

You should really lay off the kool-aid.

Surfacestations.org(run by Watts) butchered your idiotic cause years ago, it's not my fault you live in an environmentalist bubble.  The surface stations are reading hot, the reporting agencies are rating them even higher than they read.  It's not hard to figure out, you just find your local station, see what it looks like, and get the raw data set and the history of the location.

Oh look, the temperature station at the nearby airport is reading low and they have to correct it's recent values up, and it was reading too hot a hundred years ago when it wasn't surrounded by pavement...

Unlike you, I checked the actual records years ago, and what do you know, government agencies are lying to us!  Our doom and gloom scenario is pure bullshit.  There is no major increase in temperatures, just a major increase in government funded fraud.  Reality is out there, start looking somewhere besides the nearest swine gathering.

Yes, let's ignore the data from hundreds of CO2 monitoring stations in over 60 countries around the world telling us the same thing in favour of ad hominems and conspiracy theories! Yay! Why bother with all that pesky sciencey stuff? They're all just lying to us! Whee! No doubt the tens of thousands of scientists representing hundreds of scientific bodies worldwide are all on the payroll of the World Federation of Treehuggers and have pulled off the biggest hoax ever! Thank you psychoak for opening my eyes with your intrepid investigative work into checking the records!

As the great philosopher Ron White once said, "I eat the cow!"

I grill the cow with Charcoal or propane. 

Dammit zombie, that defeats the entire purpose...

or CAGW (For Catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Warming). It changes daily.

 "Don't confuse me with the facts. I've got a closed mind." - Earl Frederick Landgrebe.

You should really stop embarrassing yourself. There's been tons of independent research into the statistical data and quality of the USHCN monitoring stations used for NOAA and others, and they have all found the same thing: there is no meaningful statistical difference between those cited by Watts as poor and those cited as good. Hell, even one of Watts' former skeptic cohorts, Richard Muller, used Watts' own methodology and "discovered" that the global warming trend was not a hoax. It turns out that those "poor" stations actually have a slight cooling bias. The only thing surfacestations.org has done is collect some nice photos and reinforce the climate data we already have. Watts has been debunked time and time again... he even admitted he didn't even contribute to some of the papers he claimed to author, presumably to save face when those said papers turned out to be hokum.

If having skeptic-led team partially funded by the Koch brothers conclude that AGW is real and that the temperature readings are 95% accurate doesn't convince you, I don't think there's anything else to say.

Global Warming is more correctly referred to as "climate change" because some people can't deal with any moderately nuanced argument when they have massive biases.

Climate change has a number of effects that have been predicted for decades.  For example, it predicts that BOTH the mean and the variance of temperatures will increase.  Due to the increase in the variance of temperatures, there will actually be more extreme cold spells.  There will also be more extreme hot spells.

Now, most honest people can grasp this.  However, people with obvious bias on this issue like to do the "derp derp, Global Warming predicts more cold spells, WUT" thing.  Obviously this is a ridiculous statement, but ridiculous people can often be loud and vote.  So scientists usually use the more accurate term "climate change" now.

There have also been other cooling effects that have been predicted for decades.  For example, if you melt enough Arctic ice, you can disrupt some of the heat distribution from specific ocean currents.  This could very easily result in cooling in some areas.

For example, England is much further north than Minnesota, but also much warmer.  This is partly due to ocean currents which are distributing energy from warmer equatorial regions.  Such currents could get disrupted by climate change, greatly cooling the UK.

Once again, this possibility has been predicted for years and years.

We have two debates here...

On one hand, is global warming or climate change even occurring?

On the other hand, if it is occurring, is it because of us?

As far as I'm concerned, the first debate is the bloody pulp of a poor beaten horse....I wouldn't bother with it anymore...

"What do I listen to?  Oh, whatever's popular." - a Justin Bieber Fan Climate Change Alarmist

Page 17.

Wonderful graphs, really.  BEST proves out exactly what Watts said.  CRN1 sites read half the gain over the last century that the others have.  Meanwhile, the morons at Berkley toss 2 and 3 in with CRN1, knowing damn well they're just as inaccurate as 4 and 5 thanks to deviations in the other direction, and then accurately say there's no bias between "okay" and "poor" stations.

We're talking about less than a degree over a century, "okay" doesn't cut the mustard when it's showing twice as much of a gain as "accurate" does.  If you only use the best available source, we have a very typical warming trend of less significance in this century than it was in the last.

Meanwhile, they somehow come to a conclusion that the poor stations are trending low over the last thirty years in spite of this, because the okay stations have been gaining faster.  They then uprate all the bad stations further, completely missing the fact that those CRN2 and 3 stations used to be CRN1 stations, and are reading a higher trend because they've degraded in accuracy since their installation.  They've now managed to achieve identical results to the equally flawed USHCN records, the ones that still show we've stopped gaining even with their twice inflated readings.

After they've done such monumentally stupid things, yes, they came to the conclusion that Watts is wrong and station accuracy has no bearing on the warming trends.

10 years ago, I thought the AGW crowd was populated by morons, and the morons thought it would be significantly warmer now than it was then.  In another 10 years, I'll have an even bigger ego than I do now, and the morons will have moved onto something else to scream about.  The effects of cosmetics advertising on animal mating habits or something.

I'm not the one that decided the gold standard for CO2 monitoring stations was the Mauna Loa observatory, right next to two active volcanoes.  AGW is junk science, as such I lack the inclination to do detailed research into the root cause of a fictitious temperature anomaly.  The primary sites by which they baseline the others are all equally stupid in location, and from what I remember, the majority of the monitoring is done above ocean water anyway.  As you hopefully know, the oceans release CO2 in increasing amounts as they warm, so any warming trend will lead to artificially higher readings in a marine environment.

Maybe we're really at 395 ppm, maybe we've got half that gain and we're sitting around 360 instead.  It's irrelevant to me, just something I find amusing, that they'd intentionally pick CO2 producing sites to measure from.  Mauna Loa is in an increasingly active volcanic region, another was next door to a major petrochemical refinery complex in China, the one in Antarctica is right next to the most active undersea volcano they could find.  If there's a logical explanation, I'm still curious to know even if I'm too lazy to find out myself.  The several hundred hours I spent studying AGW has exhausted my interest in climate related research.

Edit: Figured I should link the pdf for those that aren't psychic and didn't bother looking at swifty's self defeating link in the first place.

@Victor5,

You seem confused so let me try to clear this up for you. No one is advocating an appeal to "popularity". Personally I would prefer it if AGW were not happening. What people are listening to is massive and widespread expert opinion after assessing what is known on the subject and what data actually shows is happening. I'm not a climate scientist. But I know enough about how science works to know that a consensus like this can be trusted. If I go to the doctor and he tells me I have brain cancer and I get a second opinion and a second battery of tests done and it still shows brain cancer, I'm going to listen to the doctors. I'm not going to listen to some crank telling me doctors are liars and the tests are a scam. But that's the problem - people have this notion that they somehow magically know better than a huge consensus of experts. It's called the Dunning Kruger Effect.

Consensus.  You keep using that word.  I do not think it means what you think it means.

You're certainly welcome to your logical fallacy.  Consensus is not a scientific argument.  Nothing but a poll result.  The consensus of 'smart people' is frequently wrong, has often been throughout the history of science.

I doubt that's even possible....;p

50 years from now could get 'interesting'.

Define 'interesting'

Oh God, oh God...we're all going to die?  [borrowed from Serenity] ...;)

I should add....50 years from now I'll be pushing 109 ....so will be long past caring....;)

The consensus is on whether AGW is occurring or not. It is not an argument in itself obviously. It's based on evaluation of the evidence though. Thought that was fairly obvious. "Smart people" are frequently wrong? They don't sound very smart then. And claiming that as an objection just makes for ridiculous hand-waving where you can ignore anything you choose to. This is not an appeal to authority either. It's an appeal to a mountain of evidence that there is a consensus of experts over.

*Sigh* Well, that much is clear. You would think that if the CRN1 station data showed vastly different trend lines that they would run with that? From your response it seems like your excuse is that the people who did the study are morons. Maybe it's because umm, the trendlines from CRN1 stations actually do follow along with the rest? You should read those graphs you pointed at... the mean trend of the CRN1 stations is right in line with all the others, excepting CRN5. The standard deviation is lower, sure, but that's because there's only 13 stations ranked as CRN1, while there's over 1000 of the other types. If you're basing the root of your entire "AGW is a hoax" stance on the raw data of 13 surface-air temperature (not even bothering with ocean temp measurements) reading CRN1 stations only in the US (nevermind global temperatures, because the US is obviously the only country where temperature readings matter)... wow. That's not even getting to the biases that come from a failiure to account for Time of Observation bias, selection bias and UHI. Raw data can lead you astray in more ways than one. In this case, it seems like it has led you very very far astray.

We, who 'waste' don't even make up 3% of the worlds population. It's a totally absurd concept to think you make a difference and pretty damn arrogant as well. Saying 'we' use X % of the worlds resources is just saying the rest doesn't use enough because they are to slow, dimwitted, backwards or otherwise incompetent to make something better of their existence, not that 'we' use too much. Though excrement for them, just get to work instead of murdering/slaughtering or otherwise being bone idle holding out your hand for handoffs.

Your holier than thou 'responsible choices' only means you are so enormously well off you can permit yourself to choose one way or the other. It's beyond belief people can be that stuck in their tiny world.

So you deny me the right to dispense of the things i bought and paid for in any way i see fit? You feel that someone else should have the right to tell me: Ok you can pay an absurd extra amount for real cost of energy due to political machinations, but you can't do what you want with it?

That is your view of how things should work? Freedom within a cage. Well that's not mine, and never will be.

My energy,water and whatever which i bought is mine and mine to decide what to do with. It's neither foolish nor intelligent to do with as i please. It's just what it is. Freedom.

Seems to me you are the one with the 'holier than thou attitude'.  In my correspondence with you in this thread I have suggested one thing and one thing only.  That I considered your choice to intentional waste...

...pointless/foolish.

I also indicated in my posts what works for me personally and that I have no desire to force anything on anyone (reread your own quotation of me).  You however have subsequently suggested that my viewpoint is "malarkey"', that I must have been "spoonfed ecolooneytunes" etc.  etc.

I haven't 'denied you the right' to anything.  Quite the contrary.  If anything I had hoped to point out to you that there is another choice that can be made, there is a more responsible (in my opinion) way we can live.  We can choose to waste less instead of choosing to waste more but for your argument of "it's mine I paid for it so I'll use it if I feel like it".  Yes how we choose to use our resources is either foolish (intentionally wasteful) or intelligent (responsible use).

Also, I am by no means "enormously well off".  I have worked very hard in my life for the things currently in my life.  I also have great respect for the things currently in my life which is why I choose to live the way I do (or didn't you read where I say I walk before I drive, I repair (sometimes many times) before ever considering replacement etc. etc. etc.).

The internet is full of experts who know f-all...

Don't bother, Monk. Not worth it. I respect your approach, and wish billions shared it.

True, Fuzzy. 

Logical.