Sunday, August 05, 2012

Watts down with that - Part the Second

I really think Anthony Watts might be starting to crack up.  This post from a couple of days ago, begins with:
I’ve been sitting on this little gem for a year now, and it is finally time to point it out since nobody seems to have caught it.
It's about the BEST temperature analysis.  Watts complains that, following a 1 to 5 scale of how well weather stations are sited, the enemy Muller's BEST analysis has put the mid range class 3 in with the high quality classes 1 to 2.  And this is just wrong, so wrong, according to Watts.  He's been waiting to see if they would correct this for a year.

But the nutty thing is - he then goes on to point out that the BEST papers acknowledgement they have done it, and explain that they think it is the right thing to do.  In fact, as the temperature trend was lowest in class 3 (for whatever reason), adding it to the worst two categories (4 and 5) would make them seem not as bad as they would otherwise be.  (Remembering that the Wattsonian theory is that poor siting of stations leads to a warming bias in the temperature record.)  

So what the hell is Watts complaining about?  

And yet, being the Watts worshipping automatons that they are, quite a few comments to the thread are along the line: "ho, ho, ho, you really caught them out this time, Tony."  (Thankfully, there are some comments saying - are you really sure this is significant, Tony?)

Really, I don't know what he's going to come out next.   I wouldn't be surprised if it was something to do with how the density of his moustache is significantly better than Richard Muller's.

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