For attention: Andrew Bolt

Well, the failure of the Anthony Watts surfacestation.org project to prove what Anthony Watts promised for years (that is, that poor siting of some US weather stations would be shown to give a misleadingly higher-than-it-should-be temperature trend) is getting some attention in the climate science blogosphere.

Notably, a site which I will soon book mark "Wotts up With That" has a couple of posts about it, as well as Deltoid (from whose hat tip I've been getting quite a few hits this weekend.)

I would hope that more climate science bloggers will specifically post on it - particularly Skeptical Science - and perhaps someone in the mainstream media (Andrew Revkin, George Monbiot: this is important!) Joe Romm should be able to have a (well deserved) field day too.

But for this post, I want to note what some Australian skeptic sites have said about this project over the years:

Jo Nova: I have never taken this blog seriously, in the sense of believing both the arguments used or that it is particularly influential (the latter because I suspect its slick appearance -which makes it look like a funded PR exercise, even if it isn't - actually works against it.)

Anyhow, her short "Skeptics Handbook", which is chock full of wrong arguments, devotes an entire page to claiming the location of weather stations is a major issue.

I await the amended version of the Handbook, containing appropriate acknowledgement of the reassuring findings of the surfacestation.org project that the adjustments and work of the climate scientists did result in an accurate mean temperature trend. (Ha.)

Andrew Bolt: Australia's most influential climate skeptic blogger by far, I reckon, has made repeated references to Anthony Watts' work:

May 2009: A post headed "No way these stations could measure warming" ends on this note:

But read Anthony’s full report here - an awesome testimony to the commitment to evidence and truth from volunteers that should shame the professional alarmists which relied on these stations for their warming scare.

July 2009: Post headed "How not to measure warming" contains many photos from Watts, repeats a Pielke Snr post which pooh-poohed the NCDC's claim that siting bias were likely to cancel each other out (a fact Pielke Snr now confirms - with nary a sign of embarrassment for being wrong before,) and ends with this:

Moral: If the US data on warming is so dodgy, how much can we rely on weather stations in vast countries such as China, Russia, Brazil and India? Or even in Italy (above)?

Answer to Andrew: Well, there you go. The US data wasn't so dodgy after all. (Or, to be more precise, the degree to which any US data was "dodgy," it did not, as expected by climate scientists looking at how to best assess it, have any significant consequences for judging temperature trend.)

June 2010: in a brief note of a radio interview, Andrew notes:

Anthony Watts of Watt’s Up With That tells us when dodgy siting of weather stations may explain two thirds of the warming measured last century. (Examples in the clip above.)

I have listened to the interview, and can confirm that Watts was claiming, only a year ago, that he was estimating, at that time, that it could account for .5 degree of bias. Bolt then said (to paraphrase): well, if the globe has warmed by .7 degree over the last century, it could be that 2/3 of that is not "real warming". To which Watts concurred.

June 2010: another reminder of Watts' tour of Australia, and extracts parts of the Counterpoint interview in which Watts says:

Michael Duffy: In which direction does the bias lie? Are you suggesting that the temperature has not got as hot as the American official historical record suggests?

Anthony Watts: That’s correct. It’s an interesting situation. The early arguments against this project said that all of these different biases are going to cancel themselves out and there would be cool biases as well as warm biases, but we discovered that that wasn’t the case.

My comment to Andrew Bolt: have you read the Pielke Snr post on Watts' blog yet? The one which notes that the warming and cooling bias did cancel each other out? The one which is consistent with earlier studies that said the siting is not the confounding issue for working out temperature trends that it seemed to be?

Andrew, I strongly disagree with your take on climate change, and your willingness over the years to seemingly accept anything a contrarian has said without (apparently) seeking the climate science response to the claim. (Have you ever had a detailed read of Skeptical Science?)

But, despite this, I find it hard to believe that you could not review what Watts has been saying about this pet project for years, and not now feel that you've been taken for a ride.

Care for another interview with Mr Watts where you put to him the very same things he was saying only a year ago in your studio?

I look forward to hearing it...