The CRU scandal should, in my mind, be taken exactly the same way. Unlike what more fire-breathing skeptics have been saying, this is not the final nail in the coffin of catastrophic man-made global warming theory. It is merely a starting point, a chance to finally move government funded data and computer code into the public domain where it has always belonged, and start tearing it down or confirming it.

I completely agree with this, it is only a tiny starting point.

I looked at trends in the NordKlim dataset

http://www.george-barwood.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk/GlobalWarming/NordklimTrends.html

It has annotations for where the stations are. You can easily see the large winter warming in the cities.

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at least approximately….which is to say: not just to what degree, but also why & in what manner – relative to the past…. The MWP & LIA suggest general falls and rises are not unprecedented nor dependent on some recently devised (human) ‘deus ex machina’ …. Which all precedes (as opposed to catastrohopists who leap to ‘C’ before even ‘A’ has been demonstrated, let alone ‘B’) determination of effective causality, analysis of likely impact (if any) of proposed ‘remedies’ and (finally!) some kind of rational analysis of expected costs accounting (and here’s where the alarmists are most wildly off-base) for the adaptive capacity of normal human activity…you know, the kind that doesn’t require committees, NGOs, UNGOs, central governments or any of that dreck… The alarmists appear to believe that unless there’s some central authority tasked with the authority to undertake the task (and funded appropriately) ordinary folks don’t have the sense or ability to even come in out of the rain on their own, much less manage to deal with normal historic climate change! What I want to know is how on Earth did humanity, to say nothing of “the Earth” (you know, those Polar Bears and all) manage to survive the MWP and the LIA without central governments, let alone without some global governance authority and the UN? Pray tell!

I think the available data only proves that, on average, most of the globe has warmed (at least since 1920). The question is to what degree. The people at GISS, Hadley, and NOAA are comparing apples and oranges.

Since 1960, over 2/3rds of the reporting stations worldwide have closed. Most of the remaining reporting stations are located at major airfields. The remainder are NOAA CO-OP stations, which Anthony Watts has demonstrated utterly fail to meet the minimum standards established by NOAA. Quite a few of these stations have been moved in the last 30 years, and thier moves were undocumented by NOAA. One could also easily argue that since 1960, suburban and urban sprawl greatly accounted for much of the increase.

To illustrate my point, just subtract one adjustment (ie the TOBS) from the station data, and you reduce almost 30% of the alleged AGW component of the recent temp increases. The UAH/RSS sat data provides a much better account of lower tropespheric warming than does raw station data. Of course, the results are not quite so melodramatic. Of course, the sat data only goes back to 1979. And unfortunately, NOAA no longers uses satellite coverage to get thier SST ocean data. They purged this data last June. They said the sat data introduced a cold bias into thier reconstructions. Imagine that!. So instead of getting 100% ocean coverage of the mid-latitudes, they will use a few dozen ocean buoys, which of course they can adjust upwards.

I also find it ironic that GISS, a NASA agency, forgoes using data from unmanned satellites and instead uses unreliable thermometer data.

Much of what is done at this 2 institutions is gridcell extrapolation. The “averaging” is spurious at best. And, at GISS it occurs at different time intervals. One GISS verion might adjust a gridcell down compared to an earlier version. The method of extrapolation is unpublished, and changes from year to year. When NOAA or GISS publish a news bulletin saying that such and such a location had the warmest Feb-June in 150 years they are refrencing an average temp derived from multiple gridcells that have constantly been adjusted, tweaked, and massaged.

The public is ignorant of these methods. Perhaps it is time to educate them.

All-in-all, it’s pretty clear that “Something is rotten in the state of Denmark”….so to speak.

It appears to be applied on the basis that the current measurement is closest to the true value – basically “We can see the thermometer today, and it isn’t lying.”

But the primary goal is to determine the average gridcell temperature – not the average city temperature. Since the gridcells are far larger than cities, you should be subtracting out any effect a city might be having from the -current- value, not adjusting the pre-city (or smaller-city) data.

The same Phil Jones that is so central to the Climategate emails is the one that performed the seminal UHI adjustments.