Breaking: Climate Database quality is appallingly bad

The Climate bloggers strike back:

The new improved assessment, for the years 1979 to 2008, yields a trend of +0.155C per decade from the high quality sites, a +0.248 C per decade trend for poorly sited locations, and a trend of +0.309 C per decade after NOAA adjusts the data. This issue of station siting quality is expected to be an issue with respect to the monitoring of land surface temperature throughout the Global Historical Climate Network and in the BEST network.

This is huge, from a scientific perspective - I've been complaining about the quality of the climate data for years.  It's even more important from the perspective of the political debate: this is a direct challenge to the climate establishment - the one that the Climategate emails showed worked so hard to control the peer review process.  The authors include Anthony Watts, Stephen McIntyre, and John Cristie - big names in the debate.  The argument is that the challenge to climate science has to come from outside the climate science establishment, because climate science is so politicized.  That's a further rebuke.

It seems that they have math and everything - their indictment is that once data from poorly cited weather stations (those located in the middle of hot asphalt parking lots or sitting next to the exhaust from air conditioners - or at airports breathing hot jet exhaust all day) are included in the data sets and then when the data is fudged "adjusted" by NOAA, the warming trend is doubled.

The timing is not a coincidence.  Dr. Muller had an Op-Ed in the New York Times this weekend about how the Berkeley BEST network conclusively demonstrates a massive warming.  Well, maybe not conclusively, unless you trust all the fudging "adjusting" that's being done to the data.  How's the adjusting done?  Well, nobody really will say, but hey - trust them, they're scientists!

And pony up a Trillion Dollars a year, h8ter.

Oh, and the fact that this hasn't been published yet?  They tweak Dr. Muller using his own words:

The pre-release of this paper follows the practice embraced by Dr. Richard Muller, of the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature project in a June 2011 interview with Scientific American’s Michael Lemonick in “Science Talk”, said:

I know that is prior to acceptance, but in the tradition that I grew up in (under Nobel Laureate Luis Alvarez) we always widely distributed “preprints” of papers prior to their publication or even submission. That guaranteed a much wider peer review than we obtained from mere referees.

Gauntlet, thrown.  This is getting interesting.