Skepticism's wheels get wobbly

It's a peculiar thing, but just at the time when a significant part of the public seems to be thinking that "climategate" meant that global warming science has become somewhat tarnished and deserves to be taken less seriously, there has evidence gathering at skeptic blogs themselves that AGW skepticism is looking distinctly wobbly. For example:

1. Raw temperature / adjusted temperature not so different after all? Lucia's Blackboard is a well know "soft" skeptic site, but she has been running posts lately about individual bloggers attempts (if I read this right) to chart "raw" land temperature records to see how the results looks compared to the adjusted "official" temperature records. (Remembering that many a post at Watts Up With That and elsewhere loves to find examples of adjustments to individual station records that they think shows something untoward going on with the "official" adjustments.)

Well, guess what? These amateur attempts at charting raw data are not giving any reason to doubt that the official temperature charts are far off the mark. Have a look at Lucia's latest post about this.

She doesn't seem to be exactly making a clear point about this, but unless I am misunderstanding something here, this is a pretty damning indictment of the irrelevance of much of AGW skepticism when it comes to questioning the temperature record.

2. Widget fails. I have been wondering whether skeptics are starting to be a little embarrassed about the Watts Up With That's widget. It was meant to help encourage the view that there was not much of a relationship between CO2 increase and temperatures. But look at it now:

I wouldn't be surprised if some people think the purple CO2 line is just the mean of the temperature anomaly graph - which is far from the impression Anthony Watts intended.

3. Stepping out of his knowledge zone. Speaking of Watts Up With That, regular contributor Steven Goddard recently got inspired to start his own reappraisal of planetary physics, by posting that he had worked out all on his own that NASA and many, many scientists were completely wrong about CO2's role in creating a greenhouse effect on Venus.

He convinced no one, apart perhaps from some the old Velikovsky faithful (Australia's very own Louis Hissink amongst them.)

I reckon this foray into a topic he is ill prepared to fully understand has substantially harmed Goddard's (and Watt's) credibility.

4. Ice issues. While skeptics were heartened by the extent of North Pole ice cover over winter appearing to be back to being very close to average in April, barely a month later and it's virtually back to the 2007 low. (And this does not take into account the question of how much ice is "old" ice, a topic skeptics don't seem to discuss much.)

If Arctic ice this (northern) summer drops well below 2007, skeptics are going to have to start making excuses again. In fact, there's a touch of pre-emption in Goddard's recent post about it here.

Skeptical Science also had a post recently criticising WUWT's claims that sea ice is nearly "back to normal", and in particular Goddard's understanding of Antarctic ice. Goddard did not take the criticism well.