Yes, MA, I refer more to the mass of climate scientists. Some of the principals are infamous and will remain so.
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Kim, Martin A, where did I ever imply that I pardon them? I seek not to excuse them, but to try to understand them better and to reach a more balanced view of what their malfeasance actually was. I think they, and their equivalents in the USA, should have been fired forthwith. I find it extraordinary that they survived. But I don't believe they were evil as some would have them be.

I do not condone their treatment of opponents. How could I, in a very tiny way, was one of their victims.

I said:

"Phil might be wary of a site like Paul Homewood's, because it challenges the basic climate change beliefs,he would presumably accept that Paul presents his information fairly."

Phil responded with: "Not always", the words linking to a website article, which I looked at (I try to follow Phil's links when I have time). On this one I'm not with you, Phil. The site you linked to called Paul H a "climate change denier", thereby betraying its hostility and bias. It came up with a counter-explanation to Paul's article (about temperature adjustments), which is fair enough, but whose version of events you prefer to believe is, I think, like beauty, in the eye of the beholder.

I remain somewhat in awe, though, of Phil's links. Thanks to them, I keep acquiring new knowledge (not difficult,with my limitations!).

Heh, 'awe'. You'd be even more awed if you knew the effort behind them. Yes, they are useful.
=======

When viewing much publicised cases of miscarriages of justice, there are those who went with the flow of interpretations of evidence as presented to them as facts based on presumptions of guilt, by others.

Then there are those who directed the flow, accumulation and interpretation of evidence.

kim is correct, Steve McIntyre has not used the word fraud, despite the evidence he has produced, however Phil Clarke and his linked experts are no strangers to accusations of fraud, because of their lack of evidence.

On this one I'm not with you, Phil. The site you linked to called Paul H a "climate change denier", thereby betraying its hostility and bias. It came up with a counter-explanation to Paul's article (about temperature adjustments), which is fair enough, but whose version of events you prefer to believe is, I think, like beauty, in the eye of the beholder.

Hmmmm. Be careful in whom you place your credulity is my advice. The nearly-always-wrong Christopher Booker picked up on two of Homewood's blog posts on adjustments including one entitled 'Massive Tampering with Temperatures in South America and wrote a piece entitled The fiddling with temperature data is the biggest science scandal ever., which went viral in the conservative media, even being quoted by a US Senator.

Booker/Homewood's claims were debunked here here here here here here here here and here

Note the difference between Booker:

When future generations look back on the global-warming scare of the past 30 years, nothing will shock them more than the extent to which the official temperature records – on which the entire panic ultimately rested – were systematically “adjusted” to show the Earth as having warmed much more than the actual data justified.

And (from the last link) his data source Homewood backpedalling...

"I make no claims about the effect of (temperature) adjustments globally," Homewood said. "I feel that by identifying specific examples, we have moved the debate forward by challenging how adjustments work in practice, and whether we can always rely on them."

Of course, when his source contradicted his bogus claims, Booker ensured that the Telegraph issued a correction.

Ha Ha Ha.

Phil

Thanks, as always, for the links. Some of them use exactly the same words, which suggest some sort of "official" script, but I accept that they go well beyond that. The last link does indeed have Paul Homewood using the words you quote. It also includes this:

"Homewood is right that the Paraguay adjustments raised the temperature reported for that station. But what Homewood leaves out, NOAA says, is that nearly half the time the adjustments made by researchers lower the temperature below what was actually recorded."

That's NEARLY HALF the time (how nearly?). Which means that more than half the time, presumably, the adjustments were up, not down. Which doesn't quite support the conclusion in the same piece that the adjustments have the effect of reducing the increase in temperature. So again, I'm not really with you on this,as the links do seem to involve some heavy spin.

But as temperature adjustments are an area where I have already learned from you, I'm happy to keep looking at the links.

By way of idle musing (after half a bottle of wine,it has to be said, so please don't be too hard on me), what are the adjustments made for the urban heat island effect, where relevant? It seems to me, based on common sense (and on no science whatever on my part) that, where it applies, the UHI is significant. Watch a UK weather forecast, and the forecaster will regularly say that the temperatures will be several degrees lower in the countryside than in the towns. Is this the case? I do know that my fancy new car with a thermometer fitted regularly shows the temperature going up by several degrees when we drive into a town from the country, and vice versa. If so, are adjustments of that magnitude made to compensate for it?

Looking at the links again, I also see that there is quite a lot of referring between them, which suggests a co-ordinated campaign or response, and reduces the validity of offering several links, when by and large they are self-reinforcing.

I also see Steven Mosher being quoted at one of the links as a climate sceptic who disagrees with Paul Homewood. I'm not sure how you qualify to be called a climate sceptic, but looking at his comments on ATTP's site (where he was given a guest post spot - and I'm sure you'd agree that such a thing is most unlikely for a sceptic) and his rather dyspeptic ramblings at climate sceptics website right now, one thing I would not think Steven Mosher is, is a sceptic.

As I said earlier, truth, like beauty, seems to be in the eye of the beholder.

Moshe was a scathing critic of the shenanigans of the ClimateGate crew, but he's a lukewarmer who still will quote the IPCC's 1.5-4.5 degrees C/doubling for sensitivity. He's marvelous critic of the flaws of the arguments of skeptics. In my view, his embrace of Obama's use of 'the pen and the phone' mark him as typical of the most dangerous sort of technocrat.

Nonetheless, I read him carefully whenever I see his stuff. I just don't believe it all.
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Mark Hodgson, interesting that you raise queries about UHI.

At school in the mid 70s, it was an accepted fact that London was always a few degrees warmer than elsewhere.

Being from the South Downs, and about 700 feet up, I also grew up knowing it was a degree or two cooler than it was at the bottom of the Downs.

It was natural for me to conclude in cold winters that London was 3-4 degrees warmer, which is why initially, I did believe in Mann's Hockey Stick, and that Dendrotreemometers could be trusted. I still trust trees, but not Mann.

'Coordinated' eh? You ain't seen nothing yet. It's a highly organized campaign to keep the consensus in lockstep. Phil, here, is just another foot soldier, dutifully in step.
===============

Curious about UHI? Check out Phil Jones's corrupted early '90s study of UHI in China, still uncorrected.
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BBC weather forecasts (and I presume other broadcasts also) have this year given predicted temperatures followed by the statement to the effect that rural temperatures would be several degrees cooler. A clear acknowledgement by the BBC and he Met Office that the UHI effect exists and is significant.

kim, I notice from Climate Audit posts on Jones et al 1990, that you are another long term fan of Phil's Chinese cooked data.

The Met Office has not claimed another UHI record for Heathrow Airport this year. A passing jet must have overcooked the thermometer.

ACK, have you googled "Climate Audit" and "Jones et al 1990"

and read a series of posts starting with:

https://climateaudit.org/2010/11/03/phil-jones-and-the-china-network-part-1/

All part of proving UHI did not exist, when (as a non-Climate Scientist) I had grown up knowing it always had.

When anybody spends time and effort trying to prove accepted wisdom and knowledge is incorrect, they need good evidence and proof. Jones never had any of it, and clearly some others at CRU were not best pleased when they realised.

golfCharlie. Yes I am familiar with attempts to disprove the existence of UHI. In my lecture on climate change to undergraduates I used a satellite image showing a false colour image of ground temperatures across the UK, I pointed out the large heat blob that was London. Students got a kick out of finding the heat signature that was little ol' Norwich. I always felt this was more convincing than claiming Chinese data refuting UHI was fabricated.

BTW science often refutes what is common knowledge or intuitive, as was demonstrated by Galileo when he showed that heavy objects do not fall faster than light ones, or more recently that stomach bacteria can cause cancer. Accepted wisdom and knowledge commonly isn't.

golf charlie,thank you for the link, and thanks kim for raising it. I'll have a good read later.

Some time ago, when Phil C and I first had a discussion about temperature adjustments, he provided a lot of links, from which I learned a lot. They went a long way towards reassuring me that most, if not all, of the adjustments that are made, can be justified, and have been made in good faith.

However, something just doesn't feel right. The UHI is being airbrushed out far too readily for my liking. Your comments, and those of ACK, reinforce my gut feeling that the UHI is much more significant than allowed for. As we have said, how can the Met Office/BBC weather forecasters regularly make the point that rural temperatures will be several degrees lower than those in cities, if UHI is as insignificant as some would have us believe?

I am not sure why you see UHI as a problem. It is just one variable among many which might cause a station to read higher or lower than its neighbours.

If an urban station shows a 2C higher average than its nearest rural neighbour, then this will becomes a regular part of the data, just as a station 1000ft amsl will read 2C cooler than its sea level neighbour.

Given the current warming trend in temperatures UHI should still not be a problem. If the same 2C differential between urban and rural stations is maintained, eg they both increased by 0.1C over a decade, then both stations should warm by the same amount and the UHI effect is irrelevant to the larger trend.

UHI would only become a problem if urban areas warmed faster than rural areas. If the rural average increased by 0.1C/decade while the urban average increased by 0.2C/decade then UHI would exaggerate the warming trend.

Curious about UHI? Check out Phil Jones's corrupted early '90s study of UHI in China, still uncorrected.

Half truth. Uncorrected perhaps, superceded with better data yes. In 2008 Jones updated the study verifying the original conclusions for the Chinese data for the period 1954–1983, showing that the precise location of weather stations was unimportant to the outcome.

Global surface temperature trends, based on land and marine data, show warming of about 0.8°C over the last 100 years. This rate of warming is sometimes questioned because of the existence of well-known Urban Heat Islands (UHIs). We show examples of the UHIs at London and Vienna, where city center sites are warmer than surrounding rural locations. Both of these UHIs however do not contribute to warming trends over the 20th century because the influences of the cities on surface temperatures have not changed over this time. In the main part of the paper, for China, we compare a new homogenized station data set with gridded temperature products and attempt to assess possible urban influences using sea surface temperature (SST) data sets for the area east of the Chinese mainland. We show that all the land-based data sets for China agree exceptionally well and that their residual warming compared to the SST series since 1951 is relatively small compared to the large-scale warming. Urban-related warming over China is shown to be about 0.1°C decade−1 over the period 1951–2004, with true climatic warming accounting for 0.81°C over this period.

http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/2008JD009916/abstract

I note that McIntyre's tl;dr piece on the affair dates from 2010, but mentions the 2008 study only in passing. Am is surprised?

Nope.

More here.

EM. The UHI becomes larger as the town/city expands. So urban temperatures do indeed tend to increase a faster rates than surrounding rural areas.

As EM points out, UHI is well-understood, and if an urban station consistently reads say 2C higher than a rural neighbour then their contribution to the trend calculation will be identical. It becomes an issue when urbanisation increases (or decreases) over time and different agencies handle delta-UHI in different ways, including homogenisation, or in the case of NASA:

The urban and peri-urban (i.e., other than rural) stations are adjusted so that their long-term trend matches that of the mean of neighboring rural stations. Urban stations without nearby rural stations are dropped. This preserves local short-term variability without affecting long term trends.

So GISTEMP is effectively a rural-only dataset for trend-calculation purposes. Its agreement with other surface datasets would tend to indicate that the different methods used to handle UHI are working effectively.

UHI was one of the possible non-climatic influences on the record investigated by the Berkeley Earth project, there report is here:http://www.scitechnol.com/2327-4581/2327-4581-1-104.pdf

Phil Clarke, thank you for demonstrating how Climate Science continues to try to bury the Inconvenient Truth of UHI contaminating the temperature record, and record temperatures recorded at Heathrow (amongst others)

Jones et al 1990 was used, and IS still used by the IPCC and 97% Consensus Climate Science.

Country Bumpkins around the world, including farmers who feed the world, would welcome the Global Warmjng that UHI has recorded.

PC: "So GISTEMP is effectively a rural-only dataset for trend-calculation purposes." so why not remove any station that could be affected by UHI, then you would be left with a truly rural dataset.

Of course, there could be reasons why someone would like to keep in stations that require a constant adjustment.