“Not Whether, but How to Do The Math“. A Willis Eschenbach “citizen-scientist” post on Anthony Watts’ blog is always entertaining.In this one he’s taking on the denialist’s former BFF, the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature (BEST) project. Apparently any kind of quality control or “homogenization” is bad science, but since BEST may still swing back into the denialist camp Willis couches his attack as constructive advice.
Willis invokes the “Zipf Distribution” as the best test for outliers but, predictably, he may be the only person who has ever suggested using an empirical linguistics law for temperature data. Cutting-edge thinking from the make-the-data-look-as-bad-as-possible school of thought.
Willis’ preferred approach is plotting the raw data and let the public figure it out themselves. Let a thousand uninformed opinions bloom!
If only BEST, and those other secretive climate scientists would stop hiding their raw temperature data we might be able to believe them. Oh that’s right, it’s been publicly available for years. Funny how you don’t hear that much in the denialist blogosphere.
Wott's Up With That? 
’tis the old proverb once again that dates to middle ages that ‘applying corrections to faulty practises is a matter of the court’ (do it wrong and get you beheaded)
[The denialists have a pig-headed interpretation of “faulty”. They try to pretend that laboratory standards should be applied to uncontrolled historical data. It’s just more misdirection. – Ben]
Could THAT be why Willis is a citizen scientist and not a real one employed by a university? I’ve never heard that phrase before at all. I flunked out of grad school in philosophy (wasn’t passed on to the Phd program, but I’ve had a 40 year interest in the subject.May I call myself a citizen-philosopher?