Improving the temperature record vs conspiracy theories at WUWT

Over the years, scientists in different parts of the world have worked hard to get a more accurate picture of the change in global surface temperature over time. This is slow painstaking work. Initially it would have meant working with written records, with people trying to decipher handwriting of the tens of thousands of people who wrote down readings of temperature and rainfall, and other weather indicators, from all the weather stations around the world. Over time the data was digitised - another extremely laborious task.

I'm not going to write about all that's been done. It's a mammoth ongoing effort involving people from all around the world. What I'm writing about are the ignorant scoffers. You know the people I mean. The ones who sit at their keyboards all day to snipe at the work done by scientists.

Anthony Watts has put up three articles from one chap who's been looking to see the extent of this careful work, as measured by adjustments to the original data. He's only looked at two data sets. One which is used by NASA and NOAA for global land surface temperatures. The Global Historical Climatology Network Data or GHCN. This was first developed in the early 1990s, with the current version 3 released in 2011. The other is the United States Historical Climatology Network (USHCN), which is the high quality dataset used by NOAA for USA temperatures since 1987.

WUWT proposes harassment and lawsuits to stop climate research

Matt Manos is going great guns with his conspiratorial thinking over at WUWT (archived here). He comes across as a real nutter, albeit one who can manage to write an entire sentence with proper use of nouns and verbs. Flush with his success at flushing out all his fellow WUWT conspiracy theorists, today he's urging WUWT-ers to spam governments with FOIA requests. Matt wants to get to the bottom of what he thinks is a giant climate conspiracy. He wrote, using the same "sheeple" concept from his last article:

In my previous post, Why It’s So Hard to Convince Warmists, I introduced the concept of bellwethers and rational ignorance to explain why it’s so hard to convince warmists using empirical evidence.