“New paper blames about half of global warming on weather station data homogenization” (2012-07-17). Anthony Watts eagerly embraces a “peer-reviewed paper” conference abstract that uses some garden-variety data diddling. Sez Anthony:
Authors Steirou and Koutsoyiannis, after taking homogenization errors into account find global warming over the past century was only about one-half [0.42°C] of that claimed by the IPCC [0.7-0.8°C].
Them climate scientists are manipulat’n data for their Commie bosses! Not Steirou and Koutsoyiannis…
Strange how Anthony forgets that even denialist Roy Spencer’s satellite temperature records show a 0.46°C rise in 33 years. One might think a bit of caution is in order when someone claims that only there’s been 0.42°C of warming over the last century.
Anthony Watts just types “told ya so” as fast as he can work his trembling fingers. Where’s the skepticism? Up his ass of course. He, like the paper’s authors, doesn’t seem to understand data homogenization. Here’s Dutch scientist Victor Venema on Anthony’s intentional ignorance:
A student can make an error and conferences are there to talk about preliminary results, much more worrying is that Anthony Watts keeps on getting his facts wrong. An EGU abstract is simply not a peer reviewed paper. Of the three sentences Watts cited from the “peer reviewed paper”, two can only be found in the slides of the talk, which are not reviewed. Every post on Watts up with that?that is on a topic I am knowledgeable about, contains serious factual errors and clear misrepresentations. I am not talking about having another opinion, but facts. If clear facts are already wrong, I start doubting the rest. One wonders why the readers of Watts up with that? keep on reading that stuff. There seems to be little interest in the truth among these self-proclaimed skeptics.
We’ll leave the final insight to one of Anthony’s squad of censors “moderators” who is proud of how enthusiastically and regularly wrong WUWT is:
[REPLY – What it means is that WUWT, unlike nearly all alarmist blogs, does not censor contrary points of view. Science is a very back-and-forth kind of thing. Anyone can be wrong. Anything can be wrong. Consider that. ~ Evan]
Wott's Up With That? 
It’s also a little hard to accept that all of the data changes, such as correcting for time of day are actually “errors.”
[Everything’s a “butcher’s thumb” when it suits the agenda. – Ben]
Hi Ben, me thinks Anthony has a really basic double/double think reading comprehension problem!
Either that or data flows though the eyeballs and straight out the ears.
Unlike Anthony, I actually read the presentation (PDF) by Messrs Steirou and Koutsoyiannis and viewed their slides!
Point 1 “Temperature increase during the last century” (pdf page 2/18)
Point 2
Ah, such intriguing deliberate misdirection moment by Anthony Watts. He too simply forgot to mention the end date was before 2001! I would have thought the graphs from “Sulina station – Romania” and “De Bilt station – The Netherlands” shown. The two graphs alone would have been quite obvious, even to “Blind Freddy”, this was not a discussion paper about the 21st century weather data accuracy. (lol)
Or, one can say, he is a person to whom, how to read a basic science presentation, is a total luxury. (scratches head)
Cheers :)
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What is really amazing about all this is that it has been demonstrated repeatedly, by layman “citizen scientists” and professional scientists alike, that it is not very difficult to confirm the NASA/NOAA/CRU results with *raw* temperature data.
A few Google searches will turn up documentation, source-code, and darned-near “turnkey” programs that people can use to confirm for themselves that the NASA/NOAA/CRU results can be replicated very closely with raw temperature data.
You simply don’t need “homogenized” data to do this. On a global scale, the station “homogenization” steps come pretty close to cancelling each other out, with the end result being that homogenized and raw data produce very similar global-average temperature estimates.
Furthermore, all of Watts’ other major claims about the surface temperature record (UHI, “dropped stations”, etc.) have been soundly debunked by professional and citizen scientists alike — full documentation and source-code that demonstrate how to debunk Watts’ claims are freely available on-line to anyone. Yet Watts persists with his delusions/lying/whatever-you-want-to-call-it. It’s absolutely stunning.
It may depend on how accurate you would like the correspondence to be between your results and the “official” ones and also on the region and the period considered, but for long European climate series you do really need homogenization because the old data is typically too warm due to radiation errors.