Hi xye,

Thanks for your note. To be clear, skeptics do not “assert,” they explore. So, you are, perhaps inadvertently, referring to climate deniers, not skeptics. Deniers do not revisit their positions based on exploration of facts. Skeptics do revisit and change their positions. Skepticism is the foundation of science. Denialism is a political game for, sorry to say, fools. See, “What to call doubters of climate change?”.

I don’t understand how you ‘analyzed about 40 stations’ in the U.S. First, because say “about” - I find it hard to believe that one would not remember the source of their data sets used for an analysis. Regardless, there are thousands of weather stations across the world commissioned to measure a variety of types of temperature data (soil, water, air, for example). And, until quite recently, NOAA used data from 6,000 stations around the world, and currently analyzes data each month from 1,500 stations. 

I’d like to see why NOAA, or any serious researcher, could cut their data collection points to ‘about 40 stations.’ Perhaps you’ve developed a methodology that the world’s best scientists aren’t aware of, and I’m sure they’d welcome new insights. 

I skimmed your site and I don’t find your methodology. Hopefully it’s more than just a graph plotted from a simple spreadsheet. If you’ve published it, please add it to your site and tag it appropriately. 

There is absolutely no basis for the claim that temperature data have been altered to date. This has been put to rest by several studies and meta-studies over the years, and one of the best papers covering this topic is: Benchmarking the performance of pairwise homogenization of surface temperatures in the United States. It’s free. It was conducted double-blind. And benchmarks methods for future analysis, such as your amateur* approach (*unless you published your findings in peer-review?).

The researchers of the Benchmarking article show that the data gathered from temperature-collection points under-estimate the symptoms of climate change, and that warming is much higher than is actually measured.

I also point you to the summary form of answering the data manipulation question by FactCheck.org: “Nothing False About Temperature Data." I wrote about it in a previous post. Basically, they say the same thing: temp data is accurate and the world is pretty much boned.

I’m happy to discuss climate data, but this topic on data manipulation has been discussed at great lengths in the literature, both popular and scientific. Hopefully you’ll take it seriously…

Cheers,

Michael

http://xye.tumblr.com/post/111278470060