“A new must read paper: McKitrick on GHCN and the quality of climate data“. Economics professor Dr. Ross McKitrick of the University of Guelph has performed a comprehensive review of the GHCN surface and sea temperature data set! It’s published in… Oh, it’s a vanity publication by his denialist friends at The Global Warming Policy Foundation.

Anthony Watts’ associates keep trying to repackage the accusation that the temperature data sets are untrustworthy and hence there is no Global Warming, but they can never make it stick. This time McKitrick even tries to slide in a few “Climategate” e-mails for support. Let’s look at the two excerpts that Anthony posts:

1.2.3. Growing bias toward lower latitudes – This actually biases against warming. McKitrick tries to float the idea that “this implies less and less data are drawn from remote, cold regions and more from inhabited, warmer regions.” In fact it’s well established that the warming anomaly is more pronounced at higher latitudes. Either McKitrick is uninformed or he’s trying to mislead readers.

2.4. Conclusion re. dependence on GHCN – Another canard from Ross, claiming that “All three major gridded global temperature anomaly products rely exclusively or nearly exclusively on the GHCN archive”. Guess what? There aren’t large overlapping collections of weather stations around the world. What climatologists interested in historical temperature trends do is select stations from the larger group that meet their analytical requirements. Good morning Rip Van Winkle.