Turns this isn't the first time that Willis Eschenbach has been guilty of misrepresention, see Climate Fraudit.

That's your idea of debunking? Really?

See, this gets back to what I mean by obnoxious.  You guys love to throw around the word "lie". He wasn't lying. They don't dispute his findings.

The original article merely took the raw data and then showed what the adjustments were and concluded it looks fishy to him.

This "debunking" fully admits that those adjustments were made but says they're justified.

According to your link, the early 20th century data they had was bad and has to be tossed out. Okay. But that doesn't help us with determining climate trends either.

As one of the commenters in that article pointed out:

None of the nearest "high quality" sites for Darwin airport show a significant warming since the 60s (HALLS CREEK AIRPORT (733 km away), TENNANT CREEK AIRPORT (877 km away)).

Expansion that has taken place at Darwin airport (check it out on google maps 12.42°S 130.89°E and it's discontinuity with its "local" peers, it would seem to be a prime candidate for UHI + jet backwash.

Willis' main point is that the whole trend is due to "corrections" to the raw data - that is a fact. The problem with human correction of data is that it's prone to confirmation bias, and very subjective. You stop looking for corrections when the data "looks" right.

As it stands, not only is the data out of sync with its peers, the whole trend is due to corrections. That is not healthy specially for a "high quality" data point. I would have expected high quality to mean very few corrections necessary.

Ok, I'm convinced.  My Momma has holes.  Certain posters in this thread are just too stupid to even mimic.  Mumbles, you're looking more and more brilliant as the thread continues, I need to try to remember not to think of them as idiots.

Less drugs, more economics.  Compare the cost of electricity via solar panels to the cost of electricity via coal or hydro, what most of the country is running off now.  I don't know about you, but paying five times as much for my electricity just doesn't get me going.  There is no such thing as free, solar panels and windmills are both very expensive.  You can set up a windmill in the right area and maybe turn a profit at some point, if you're a mechanic.  Being able to maintain your own machinery has it's benefits.  Forget it if you aren't, they are very high maintenance.

The greenies can lie till they're blue in the face, but multiplying the power cost by ten will devestate the world economy, period.  There is no such thing as economic stimulus when you decrease productivity, a loss is a loss regardless of how highly paid the employed are.  We'll probably get there eventually, but 30 cents a KWH is still a hell of a lot higher than 5.  Half the country wouldn't be able to afford lightbulbs, forget electric appliances and temperature control.

Now, real ideas, like building a solar farm out in the middle of a desert, those aren't crippling catastrophes.  Unfortunately, guess what the greenies do when you build one after winning the lawsuit they threw up to stop it?  They tell you the power lines can't be put in and you go through another lawsuit.  It's already more expensive before the lawsuits.

Lawyers are also a loss to gdp, they increase the cost of everything in life while producing nothing but red tape.

This is the same technique that was used by the NZ Climate Science Coalition as referenced in the article and explained in more detail in the following link (sorry but this article uses the lie word as well).

http://hot-topic.co.nz/nz-sceptics-lie-about-temp-records-try-to-smear-top-scientist/

Other than that point you’re correct in saying that the difference is that one side claims adjustments are both necessary and justified whereas the other side says that adjustments are “fishy.” Since neither article actually “proves” anything about adjustments this comes down to your particular “belief system” with the skeptic side being no less of a religious assumption than that of the proponent.

I do suspect that records do exist of these adjustments along with their reason (i.e. station move, equipment change, observation time shift) but unfortunately the article doesn’t address that.

Here’s yet another POV, http://broadcast.oreilly.com/2009/12/perplexed-by-smoking-gun.html.

Problem, nothing in there is actually accurate.  It's wrong.  He "debunks" the claims by making false claims. 

All stations are not used, all stations are not considered accurate.  The stations they select for making those adjustments are the supposedly accurate ones.  This is all stated both on the site and in the documentation by the people he was checking up on.  He checked the sites they supposedly used, that they were three completely unrelated sites nowhere near each other is something you should be asking them.  If you'd read more carefully, you'd know this.

That isn't just an adjustment for a sudden drop in the temperature based on the paint change.  They started hiking the values before reaching it, as is shown by the adjustments made on the overlays.  After they adjusted for the paint, they continued hiking the values up further, turning a rather flat change into a drastic one.  Magically, the temperature station is wrong in the wrong direction.  It's gradually showing less than it's supposed to.  Even if neglected entirely, it would simply show an increase in the temperature as the paint wore off, not a decrease.  I'm pretty sure they're talking about the switch from whitewash to latex there too, which means the paint would have increased the temperature measurements.  That it decreased them means they hadn't been maintained and were too high.  We wont bother with that minor problem though.

No doubt all know this:

Hillary Clinton has plegded 100 billion US dollars per year to assist poor countries because of climate change.  Contigent on China cooperating with external agencies to determine China's ghg emissions. And likely a host of other caveats. 

Is there anyone in the whole world that believes there is any chance of this pledge being met?

Brilliant realpolitic.

Apparently GW has been proved as real dollars are being committed:

Hillaries speech at copenhagen (skip to the 4 minute mark when she starts to talk about actual stuff.)  The information density of the speech is low but she does suggest the US might be spending a lot of money as well as seeking to lower co2 emissions.

No one does this unless they accept that gw is proven sufficiently to warrant spending at this level even factoring in other reasons for the US government to export its currency.

Conflation of GW & AGW again makes this argument a waste of time.

IIRC you agree with GW but not AGW. But there are others here that do not even accept the fact that the planet is warming for any reason whatsoever let alone that human activity is in some arguable range responsible for it.

Also even those like yourself that say they accept that GW is occuring and perhaps even that humans are *some* part of the cause just not the major part will still present arguments with links to articles supporting full denial.

I get that every single skeptic is not a denier. I expect that you also get that every single proponent is not necessarily an alarmist.

As I've said many times once we get away from the two premises of AGW (that the globe *is* warming, and that *we* have had a not insignificant contribution to the problem) then a lot of us probably agree more than we disagree.

I've stated many times that if you want to argue about whether the expected increase is 1C in the next 100 years or 7C in the next 100 years that these are all ranges predicted by different models and no one person can say which is right or wrong.

I've also stated many times that I do not personally agree with provisions of Copenhagen or Cap and Trade. However I still get lumped in as an "alarmist" (just as you get lumped in with "deniers") and people imply that I'm in full agreement with "wrecking the global economy" even though I'm not.

The problem is that areas of potential agreement do not seem to be as interesting a topic for folks to concetrate on as the areas of disagreement. I tried steering the conversation to the apparent breakdown in Copenhagen (reply #327) as a potential point of agreement and neither pro nor anti faction was particularly interested.

The bottom line is that if people would stop presenting arguments that deny the fact that GW (not AGW but just GW) is occuring then I would not continue to respond with rebuttals that "conflate" GW & AGW.

To a denier? I don't know.

To a skeptic, some basic evidence would probably be a good start.

The questions that need to be answered (all must be yes):

1. Is the climate on a definite, continually warming trend?

2. Are such warming trends unprecedented in the past?

3. Are humans the primary cause?

4. Is a warmer climate bad for humans overall?

5. Is there a global plan ready that could conceivably solve it?

6. Is the global plan ready to be adopted by the governments of the world?

7. Is the global plan going to cause less misery than simply adapting to warmer climates?

If any of those 7 question is "no" then there's a problem.

As a "skeptic" I ask that these 7 questions be answered definitively.

But right now, the AGW proponents can't even get past question 1 in any definitive way. 

The arrogance of AGW proponents is one of their biggest problems too.  

I'd love to hear the AGW proponents explain why I'm a skeptic.  I'm familiar with the data. I'm not bought off by "big oil". I can afford any changes better than most. 

AGW proponents are too quick to smear those who don't share in their faith.

No argument there.  

One could argue that accountants are a red tape on our GDP as well, since that is what is happening here, in this paragraph.  The "five times electricity" and "ten times" thing is an accounting trick.   Revamping our infrastructure to use renewable energy takes  billions of dollars, and that cost gets amortized out to the consumers in the form of higher electrical bills.  I've never seen anything higher than 2X, by the way--not 5X.  But who's to say you couldn't make it 10X if you wanted to?  Just pass on the entire up-front  cost to the consumer in one year. There's also the issue that today's windmills and solar panels are highly inefficient; that is easily improved with more research.

I really don't care whether solar panels were mounted on every house or out in the desert.  I use the house as a comparison point.  If you put a solar panel on your roof, around average you cut your electric bill in half and your break-even point is around 8 years.
The maintenance on it is about the same as maintaining your roof.  How often do you even think about your roof?  If there's a hurricane or a hail storm, obviously--that depends on where you live (solar panels withstand hail about on the same level as masonite, by the way).  Certainly you get a big economy of scale by putting a solar farm out in the desert (not to mention more sun), but you also arguably have a more complicated grid and power lines (like you said), and you have to worry about voltage drop.

But the big thing in this context is the accounting trick.  You implied that a) a wind farm is not even a legitimate idea, and I sure appreciate that.  That is obviously not true, seeing as how it's already being done.  Ever been to Palm Springs?   How about West Texas?  They're putting out a solid 8 gigawatts out there.  That sure is an awful lot of power for "an idea that doesn't even warrant consideration".  And B ) you implied you would be paying $.30/kWH on top of the billions up-front investment.  That is simply not true.  After the up-front investment, electricity is virtually FREE.   Just take the billions we handed to the bankers and insurance lobbyists, and instead hire some 25,000 people (pure guess) to build wind & solar farms, and cut everybody's bill in half.  That does no more to our national deficit than we have already done to ourselves.  Oh, the horror!  Our economy is dead!  The environmentalists did it!

1.  First take care of business.   Pull our troops out of Iraq and tell the oil companies to go f--- themselves.   One of the benefits of being an emperor and not a democracy.

2.  Build a wind farm on the north Alaskan tundra.  Lots of wind there.  Destroy the environment?  What environment?   Those who've been there should know, there isn't exactly much environment there to destroy.   And we all know how many eco-tourists just love to visit north Alaska.  So...tell anti-drilling ANWR environmentalists to go f--- themselves.  I refer you back to point #1.

3. Convert HAARP to peaceful uses.  It's an awesome project, and an awesome weapon against climate change.  It's just not benefitting anybody being used militarily.

4.  Power HAARP with said wind farm.  They're located in Fairbanks.  They're burning an obscene amount of coal every day--what is it, like 12 train loads of coal every day?  It's a lot.

5.  Research good ways to transmit the energy from north Alaska to the lower-48, because putting a big 100,000V power line alongside the Alaska pipeline isn't going to cut it.  Probably direct the wind power into the Arctic, to take the saltwater and convert it into H2 and O2.  That's fuel cell.  It takes a lot of energy to pull apart H2O.  Then you could transmit that down the pipeline the same way you do natural gas.  And it gets distributed to "gas" stations the same way you do petroleum.

6.  Fund DoE-sponsored research in general.  It's just like Galciv or Sins:  when you build a whole lot of one kind of ship on a massive scale, a little bit of research goes a long way.  Wind turbines need to function just as well in 45mph gusts as in 25mph winds.  Actually, better:  when wind velocity goes up, you square the energy.

7.  Run a lot more fiber to the same places in Alaska and put a gigantic cloud computing farm up there.  Not just to be close to the wind power, but so you don't have to worry about cooling it.  In fact, the server farm serves as the heaters for the IT people maintaining it.  And silicon happens to run reeeeally well at -25 degrees. 

8.  Sponsor a big international gaming tournament where everybody gets to play on totally awesome overclocked, cryogenically-cooled machines and projection screens.  See?  Alaska ain't so bad.  Who cares what the weather's doing outside when all I need is my little cabin and my 6 GHz overclocked quad-core running Supreme Commander II in 3D?

9.  Fund it the same way FDR did the New Deal.  The New Deal was to get us out of recession, and what did they do?  Tennessee Valley Authority, hydroelectric power.  It's no different.

10.  Get Sarah Palin to replace Vannah White when she retires.   Need to get her out of Alaska.