“A helpful note to Dr. Eric Steig“. Anthony Watts casts about for something critical to say about “perfesser” Eric Steig, whose 2009 paper on Antarctic warming trends was supposedly refuted by Anthony’s team-mates, O’Donnell, Lewis, and McIntyre. In this case “refuted” means that they packaged the data slightly differently and got slightly different warming trends. Thus revealing once and for all (the denialists shouted) that Global Warming isn’t happening.

Here’s the response to a comment by “MapleLeaf” at Real Climate that has Anthony foolishly yelling “gotcha!”

And why did WUWT show an image that appears to have less warming than the one shown here by Eric? Sorry but I have to fault you both there..the figures should show for what season they are valid, or if they are for annual temperatures.

[The figure here shows O’Donnell’s et al.s reconstruction for the same time period as our Nature cover image. These are annual mean estimates. I cannot speak to WTF WUWT has done.–eric]

So what is Anthony’s “gotcha” advice to Dr. Steig? It wasn’t Anthony who used temperature color bands that visually minimized warming in the Antarctic temperature anomaly map shown on Watts Up With That, it was someone else! Ooh, snap! Anthony just blindly copied and pasted it, like the alert “skeptic” he is, so you can’t blame him for any graphics shenanigans. Take that “perfesser”, you were impugning the wrong website!

There was much denialist lip-licking when this paper was in preparation. Finally the virtuous scientist-citizens were going to show the corrupt climatologists how to do science… Too bad that in the end the authors had to conform to reality and found themselves the proud owners of a dud. From O’Donnell’s closing comments:

In my opinion, the Steig reconstruction was quite clever, and the general concept was sound.

Poor  Anthony’s looking for a way to pretend the denialist firecracker didn’t fizzle.