John: You're going to get hell for this. But nothing like the Times; they can expect protests for publishing this.

I suspect that we are witnessing the unveiling of today's equivalent of the Piltdown man. The good side of this disgraceful mess is that principled scientists have begun to clean up the Augean stables of climate science.

From Hayward's post: "Bishop, 42, had just months left teaching at the University of Alabama in Huntsville when she opened fire Friday in a room filled with a dozen of her colleagues from the school's biology department. Bishop, a rare woman among workplace shooters, was to leave after this semester because she had been denied tenure."

Here: "The temperature records cannot be relied on as indicators of global change,” said John Christy, professor of atmospheric science at the University of Alabama in Huntsville [!!!], a former lead author on the IPCC. "

The connection at least SEEMS to be there; it will be interesting to see if anything comes of this.

Yeah John, it's extremely risky for you to post something like this here at NLT. I predict you'll lose your job at Ashland and eco-terrorists (Bishop???!!! (great theory, Owl!)) will be after you for the rest of your life. Only Captain America can save you now - that is, unless he's under the spell of the Evil-doers!!!

When you go into hiding, at least try to post something about those protests when they happen at The Times.

I'll note this:

"The crucial question though is how much extra warming do poorly sited weather stations contribute to the temperature record? Unfortunately, no amount of photos will answer this question. The only solution is data analysis, calculating the temperature trends from poor sites compared with good sites. Curiously, Watt's report contained no such data analysis. While page after page of photos may be effective in sowing doubt about the temperature record, they offer no actual answers on the impact of poor siting.

Finally this month, a peer-reviewed analysis of the temperature data was published in the Journal of Geophysical Research. The paper used Watt's station ratings to split all US weather stations into two categories: good (rating one or two) and bad (ratings three, four or five). The analysis then compared the raw, unadjusted data from the good and bad sites. In typical peer-reviewed understatement, the results were described as "counterintuitive". They were in fact, a great surprise to many. Poorly sited weather stations actually show a cooler trend compared to the good sites.

The cause of this cooling bias appears to have been a change in instruments. In the late 1980s, many sites converted from Cotton Region Shelters (CRS, otherwise known as Stevenson Screens) to electronic Maximum/Minimum Temperature Systems (MMTS). This had two effects. Firstly, MMTS sensors record lower daily maximums compared to their CRS counterparts. So the switch from CRS to MMTS sensors caused a cooling bias in certain stations.

Secondly, the MMTS sensors were attached by cable to an indoor readout device. Limited by cable length, the MMTS weather stations were often located closer to buildings and other artificial sources of heat. This meant most of the stations with the newer MMTS sensors also happened to fall under poorly sited categories. The net result is that poor stations show an overall cooler trend compared with good stations. However, when the change from CRS to MMTS is taken into account in data adjustments, the trend from good sites show close agreement with poor sites.

One might reasonably question whether the goal of surfacestations.org was to lead us into greater scientific truth or merely to sow doubt about the temperature record. Nevertheless, their efforts to rate each individual weather station enabled scientists to identify a cool bias in poor sites and isolate the cause. A net cooling bias was perhaps not the result the surfacestations.org volunteers were hoping for, but improving the quality of the surface temperature record is surely a result we should all appreciate."

from here:
https://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/blog/2010/jan/27/climate-sceptics-global-warming

Regarding the peer-reviewed research done here:
https://www1.ncdc.noaa.gov/pub/data/ushcn/v2/monthly/menne-etal2010.pdf

the summary of which ends with this:

"In summary, we find no evidence that the CONUS temperature trends are inflated due to poor station siting"

(and they even thank Anthony Watts in their acknowledgements!)

Oh come on, Scanlon. It's not serious.

Scanlon, if you support 'anthropogenic causes' of global warming it's easy to find supporting evidence -- 90% of climate scientists hopped on the massive funding wagon long ago. No crisis = no money. The long and short of it is that we can't and don't trust the "research." Federal and private money has utterly corrupted the scientific process in this instance.

I for one think that global warming is happening. I think it's happened in the past, and I think it will happen in the future. The real arguments are 1) are humans mostly responsible for this, and 2) if so, what should be done about it. Massive transfers of cash to the 3rd World, or massive regulations aren't the way to proceed. If we try to deindustrialize then 90% of the world's 7 billion people will DIE.

The day that the Left stops using 'global warming' as a Trojan Horse to bring about backdoor socialism is the day I'll get serious about solutions. Until then, I'm with the skeptics.