We don’t usually waste your time with denier’s dabblings in climate science. There are too many examples, they rarely get any traction in the real world, and these posts would all be the same- “Are climate scientists adjusting data to make climate change look worse than it is? No. No they’re not.”
But in what may be a new record for how quickly a conspiracy can crumble, a Watts Up With That (WUWT) post was published in the early morning hours on Thursday and was already corrected by the start of the work day.
The headline asks “Is NOAA adjusting data to make droughts look worse than they are?”
No. No they’re not.
But this is more than an example of Betteridge’s Law of Headlines. It’s a great example of the skeptic/denier distinction. Because instead of working through normal channels and doing due diligence to examine their own skeptical claims, the deniers assume wrongdoing and explain it with a conspiracy theory.
The post is a guest essay from someone who was updating a 2013 presentation on the drought in North Dakota. In going back to find new data, he noticed that the 2013 graphs he had in his presentation didn’t match the new ones NOAA now has online. The new numbers make it look like droughts are getting worse, which according to the poster and most of the WUWT commenters, means NOAA must be secretly adjusting the data to perpetrate the hoax of climate change.
WUWT moderator and sea level rise denier Willis Eschenbach went through the arduous and surely time-consuming process of emailing NOAA to ask about the scandal. At 8:27 AM EST, only a few hours after the post went live, the nefarious activities of NOAA had been blown wide open.
Turns out that in 2014, NOAA switched to an updated dataset, so they recalculated the drought (and other) info and published the results in a peer-reviewed paper. Far from being a clandestine and secret conspiracy, they first announced this pending update in 2011 (pdf.) But instead of just removing the post whose headline and content allege scientific malpractice, WUWT simply added the clarification to the end of the post so those who click and scroll through a ton of graphs can see that the whole thing is nothing more than an expression of how ignorant deniers are about real science and how it works.
This kind of rigorous, intelligent content is apparently what makes WUWT a better science blog than RealClimate, the NY Times, The Smithsonian and The Guardian, according to RSS-replacement and contact-list spamming Feedspot, whose gold medal icon WUWT now proudly displays in its sidebar.
But is Feedspot a legitimate and trustworthy judge of high quality science blogging?
No. No they’re not.
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