And in #26, you say
Re #20: One “small correction”? *snork* A couple of errors with pretty large consequences, as I recall. S+C’s stuff got a lot of attention mainly because they sought to portray their findings as an anti-AGW argument, underlined that stance by aligning themselves with the ExxonMobil-funded FUDtanks, and wound things up with the aforementioned bait-and-switch. Consider by way of contrast the treatment by all sides of the ocean cooling findings of Lyman et al.
Setting aside your various ad-homs, I’d like to make a couple of points about Spencer and Christy:
1) They have always been totally open about their procedures, their data, and their errors.
2) All but one of the errors they identified themselves, and duly reported them.
3) When the RSS folks found one error, they acknowledged it, and adjusted their dataset accordingly.
“An artifact of the diurnal correction applied to LT
has been discovered by Carl Mears and Frank Wentz
(Remote Sensing Systems). This artifact contributed an
error term in certain types of diurnal cycles, most
noteably in the tropics. We have applied a new diurnal
correction based on 3 AMSU instruments and call the dataset
v5.2. This artifact does not appear in MT or LS. The new
global trend from Dec 1978 to July 2005 is +0.123 C/decade,
or +0.035 C/decade warmer than v5.1. This particular
error is within the published margin of error for LT of
+/- 0.05 C/decade (Christy et al. 2003). We thank Carl and
Frank for digging into our procedure and discovering this
error. All radiosonde comparisons have been rerun and the
agreement is still exceptionally good. There was virtually
no impact of this error outside of the tropics.”
Note that, far from “pretty large consequences”, this is 0.035°C/decade. Also, note that they thanked RSS for finding the error. That’s how real science works, Steve, not the Piltdown Mann style …
Here’s another:
Update 8 April 2002 **********************
Roy Spencer and I are in the process of upgrading
the MSU/AMSU data processing to include a new
non-linear approximation of the diurnal cycle
correction (currently the approximation is linear).
In preliminary results, the effect is very small,
well within the estimated 95% C.I. of +/- 0.06
C/decade. In the products released today, some
minor changes have been included (though not the
new non-linear diurnal adjustment). The 2LT trend
is +0.053 C/decade through Mar 2002. The difference
in today’s release vs. last month’s is a slight
warming of monthly data after 1998. Essentially,
this release corrects an error in the linear diurnal
adjustment and produces better
agreement between the MSU on NOAA-14 and the AMSU
on NOAA-15. The single largest global anomaly
impact is a relative increase of +0.041 (April 2001)
while most are within 0.02 of the previous values.
The net change in the overall trend was toward a more
positive value by +0.012 C/decade. Again, this is
still an interim change, and we anticipate a final
version (“E” or “5.0″

next month.
Now, you know what, Steve? The discovery and correction of these errors do not make me trust the S+C data less, they make me trust it more. Why? Because it’s been under the microscope, both by the creators and the detractors, and every error found so far has been fixed. That process leads me to more confidence in their results than, say, the Phil Jones dataset that he won’t release because he’s terrified that someone will find an error …