This article should raise (yet again) some questions for those concerned with the truth. For Craig it will just be more conspiracy-theory and holocaust denial.
http://climaterealists.com/index.php?id=5806
The only questions raised are why anybody should take any notice of cranks such as the author Tim Ball.
The scientific "debate" on the reality of AGW is over, there is not longer grounds for reasonable doubt. In this context, the Tim Ball's of this world resort to the worst sort of personal slanderous attacks on leading scientists devoid of factual basis. But chock full of lies and nonsense.
The lie:
"RealClimate the attack group organized to defend the Climatic Research Unit (CRU)"
The truth:
The RealClimate blog/website has existed for years - long before "climategate" and the politically motivated attacks on the CRU. It's purpose was, and is, to further public understanding and discussion of climate science. The vast majority of articles on the site relate (unsurprisingly) to issues of climate science. Anybody can very easily verify this for themselves by actually looking at the site:
http://www.realclimate.org/
The nonsense:
"NASA needs to understand weather and climate because it affects the launch orbit and landing of space vehicles."
The reality:
NASA studies planetary climate and atmosphere for the furtherance of scientific knowledge not only as a necessary adjunct to the launch and landing of space vehicles. Only a (politically motivated) idiot would exclude Earth's atmosphere and climate from this. Indeed only an idiot would suggest that earth's climate and atmosphere is not the most important of all.
The grossly misleading
..... discovery of the so-called the Y2K error, which resulted in a significant change in the US temperature record. The claim 1998 was the warmest year on record and 9 of 10 of the warmest years were in that decade was amended to 1934 being the warmest and 4 of the top 10 were in the 1930s.
The reality:
The fix for the Y2K error made negligible difference to the
global temperature record. Cherry picking US data to give false impressions about the global temperature trends is downright dishonest. According to HADCrut, 1998 is the warmest and according to GISSTemp, 2005 is the warmest. When dealing with large data sets, corrections to errors are sometimes made. That is reality. Would Tim Ball prefer that they not be made?
The slanderous:
Each year global annual temperatures are produced by different agencies and every time the NASA GISS data shows a more pronounced warming. “Each time Hansen announces that the GISS has discovered a better way to statistically modify actual US ground temperatures, warming becomes even more pronounced and any cooling less pronounced.”
The facts:
The main reason the GISS record shows slightly more warming is that it includes that arctic and the others (other than the satellite record) don't. The arctic has shown dramatic warming in the last few years (as predicted by models). However, this year the satellite record is showing dramatic warming likely to easily exceed all of the surface temperature records. The UAH satellite record is maintained by Dr Roy Spencer (an AGW skeptic). Will Tim Ball accuse him too of cooking the books? The GISS data processing methods are documented and available for free download. The source code for their software is also available.
A more apt moniker for Tim Ball would be slimeball judging by this horrible article.