After years of alleging that corrupt US weather-station records were manipulated to falsely show a warming trend and exclamations of just you wait, Anthony Watts and some denialist colleagues finally had their damning critique of the US temperature record accepted by The Journal of Geophysical Research. Until now Anthony’s accusations have been confined to his blog and to pieces of nonsense he got a partisan think-tank to print up for him; “Surface Temperature Records: Policy Driven Deception” [This is the January 26th 2010 version, Anthony would prefer you to read this redacted August 27th 2010 version without the worst of the unsupported accusations. Our coverage here] and “Is the US Surface Temperature Record Reliable?“).

Watts was especially irate (our coverage here) when a climate scientist took Anthony’s interim surface station quality re-evaluation and ran the numbers. Curiously, Menne et. al. (2010) found that there was no meaningful difference (Skeptical Science link) between the “good” stations and the “bad” stations. In fact, they detected a possible slight cooling bias.

A funny thing happened on the way to the forum though. When Anthony and friends were obliged to make their charges in an accountable way all the inflammatory accusations faded away.

Read Anthony’s paper, Fall, et. al. (2011). Analysis of the impacts of station exposure on the U.S. Historical Climatology Network temperatures and temperature trends, here.

We’ll update as this Shakespearean tragedy unfolds.

Our coverage:

• The long[-]awaited surfacestations paper (co-author Dr. Roger Pielke Sr.’s spin attempt. Un-spun version – no significant difference.)
• The surfacestations paper – statistics primer (co-author Dr. John Nielsen-Gammon’s attempt to talk up the stats.)

Other coverage:

• Anthony Watts contradicted by Watts et al (Deltoid, May 13, 2011). “Last year Anthony Watts said that it was a certainty that siting differences caused a warm bias… Now that Watts et al has been accepted for publication we find that his paper says the opposite and gets the same result as Menne at al.”
• Eli Got a Brand New Combine Harvester and He’s Gonna Pull Some Carrots (Rabett Run, May 21st, 2011). Eli looks at Anthony’s surfacestation qwality data and finds that there is an interesting story to be told, if you don’t have a fore-gone conclusion in mind: “Fall, et al. fell off the carrot truck into the harvester because they did not correct for location bias which is a hoot and a half given how Watts and Pielke have gone on for centuries about the UHI, urban heat island effect, but this appears to be the RRE, the rural refrigerator effect.”