Hopefully, this coup does not muck up their plans to maintain their nation.

From some of the expert researchers I talked to, there are some issues with distributed sources on a micro-grid concept like this, but they mostly revolve around effective communication with the individual sources and the utility SCADA system. I’m not sure how the research has progressed in the past few years, but it seems promising that Sandia has some ideas and UC San Diego has a working model.

But apparently, that’s still too much for Watts and Co to handle…. They haven’t been able to figure out how to do that in … (how many years have they been making that “dropped stations” claim, now???)

Unfortunately, the attitude from some is that they think they are doing good for the world by helping to stop a UN/gov’t power grab or regulation that they find repulsive. Some seem to think that environmentalists are going to starve the third world of energy, while others indicate that the third world is just trying to bilk the developed countries out of cash.

If only this effort directed at attacking scientists were put towards coming up with palatable ideas for mitigation, we might be getting somewhere.

As for your mind-bending statement “there’s no evidence any of that would have elicited a different response here”

There’s no evidence for a negative? No shit Sherlock. I. Am. Surprised.

Watts and Co. have spent *years* making all kinds of unfounded claims about the surface temperature record. They’ve claimed that UHI is responsible for the global-warming signature. They’ve claimed that the warming trend was a product of “station deletion”. They’ve claimed that station siting problems are responsible for the warming trend. They’ve claimed that the warming trend was created by data “homogenization” and “adjustments”. They’ve spent *years* making these claims.

But the bottom line is, *all* of these claims can be completely disproved with just a few days of work, as I found out when I “rolled up my sleeves” and dug into the temperature data myself. The only technical skills needed are a mastery of high-school math and college-undergraduate programming ability.

Run the raw GHCN data through a straightforward gridding/averaging program that an on-the-ball college compsci/engineering college-undergrad could code up and you will get results amazingly similar to the NASA global-land-temperature index.

Process raw and adjusted GHCN data separately, and you will get very similar results (minor differences, but similar warming trends).

Process GHCN urban stations and rural stations separately, and you get nearly identical results.

To counter objections that stations may have been mislabeled as rural, then pick 50-60 rural-designated stations randomly around the globe, copy/paste their lat/long coordinates into GoogleEarth to verify their status via hi-res satellite imagery, and use just those stations to compute global-average temperatures. Do that, and you will *still* get results very similar to the official NASA results. That’s right — throw out ~99 percent of the stations and process just a few dozen verified rural stations (distributed around the world so as to get full global coverage), and you will get the same global-warming trend that you get when you process *all* of the GHCN stations.

All of the above can be done in just a few days by someone who has decent (or even mediocre) programming/analytical skills. I know this for a fact because I’ve done it all myself. And I am not the most talented programmer around, not by a long-shot.

The fact that Watts and his followers (some of whom claim to smarter than many climate scientists) have been unwilling and/or unable to do in *years* what I was able to do in a matter of *days* in my spare time should tell you all you need to know about them. Watts and his fans are nothing more than a bunch of lazy, incompetent, loud-mouthed bullies.

The only way this can be constructed as evidence of sinister “info-fascistic” misdeed by WUWT is if one believes in their existence in the first place.

As for Tom Nelson, I have no idea who he is. If he’s part of the “info-fascistic” Climate Specter, it’s a lonely group I suspect.

“Watts and Nelson…as I said could they have ignored Mann’s book? If they could’ve not, what should have they done? Please explain.”

A question so dense light that bends around it. You also know the answer.

Here’s a third option. They could also have acknowledged the books existence and encouraged their readers to read it. A fourth option would be they read it themselves and provide their own critique.

Instead they encouraged the faithful to spam the page with half baked guff without bothering to read the text.