“GHCN V3 temperature data errors spotted within a day of release“. Anthony Watts leaps on a claim that newly released data from Global Historical Climatological Network has quality control problems. Someone has plotted the difference between the old analysis software version and the new version, and they aren’t identical!
Perhaps it’s because there’s a problem with the beta release of their website’s charting software? Geez, it’s a beta. Let them finish it before you start howling.
Anthony, why can’t you just savor one conspiracy theory at a time? Well, at least we get to enjoy the bizarre spectacle in the comments of Steven Mosher defending climate data.
Wott's Up With That? 
I’m getting real fed up with the WUWT tactic of blowing up small issues for propaganda.
Do you remember the whole Peter Tans incident where the CO2 trend site (http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/ccgg/trends/) was posting preliminary data and WUWT tried to blow it out of proportion? That one still sticks in my mind for the sheer stupidity of playing a website update error as if it was news affecting climate science.
Or when WUWT blew the GISTEMP October 2008 error out of proportion?
These are just website update errors, but WUWT exploits them to discredit the science in general. What does the NOAA website interface providing difference table have to do with quality control of the actual dataset? Nothing, nada. But WUWT can hardly help adding twatish comments like “well this is climate science”
There are other examples of this behavior (I remember a few about GISTEMP’s online temperature mapper and default colors). There’s another one yesterday about some photo of Bradley with a CO2 graph in the background.
The ones “in the know” play these irrelevant errors in the presentation layer of things which don’t affect anything as if they DO affect the underlying science, or call it into question somehow, or just generally reduce the credibility of the science. Only in their silly heads.
The most frustrating thing is the sheer amount of crap on their own side which they totally ignore while making these silly exagerations of the smallest presentation layer errors. E.g. with regard to the “GHCN V3 temperature data errors spotted within a day of release” WUWT post that you talk about above, the guy behind it put up a very misleading and stupid subsequent post up which I commented on:
http://theinconvenientskeptic.com/2010/11/ghcn-v3-update-and-comparison/comment-page-1/#comment-1191
Take a read and tell me if that just doesn’t make sense. That last graph he accumulates the differences. WTF.
And the first graph it looks like he’s added up all the monthly differences between V2 and V3 for a particular year, but forgotten to average them (or more likely, hasn’t realized he has to average the 12 monthly differences to get the annual difference)
And all the way through I keep thinking, HOW… HOW can you produce those two graphs showing gigantic differences between v2 and v3 and not notice that V2 and V3 are not anywhere near that different.
He even plotted annual V2 and V3 in the previous post and it’s visible that they aren’t very different.
In case my comment gets deleted:
The last part is just rewording his own accusation aimed at climate scientists back on him. He deserves it. They don’t.