Is the wattsupwiththat site a reliable source of info?

I think this shows what scientists think he is about (5 paragraphs in)

http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2008...

He also runs the SurfaceStations.org were members of the general public take pictures and send them to him showing how bad the weather station system is. Except of course the general public have no idea what they are taking pictures of many are 'very James Bond' taken from some distance a number have turned out to be equipment under test sites and not weather stations at all, but Mr Watts seems to have failed to mention that.

I have commented in the past about watts using altered or misleading graphs in relation to Hadcrut data but it seems he also does it on his surfacestations site

http://tamino.wordpress.com/2007/07/30/surface-sta...

(thanks for the link dana)

His wiki page has his profession as TV weatherman who has been promoted? to radio weatherman

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthony_Watts#Surface...

The whole "short term" / "long term" thing seems to be a moving target.

Ten years is a blip - but twenty means everything.

And the 35 years of cooling before the twenty years of warming also means nothing.

And prior, multi-century warm periods that occurred when CO2 levels were lower and long before the advent of the internal combustion engine are meaningless.

In 1999 all we heard about from this crowd was how 1998 was the "warmest year on record" and that it would soon be surpassed. Now that it hasn't been surpassed in a decade, we hear about 5 year moving averages, then 10 year, then 20 and 30 year.

It seems like the only real standard is, warm weather is signal, is climate, while cold weather is noise, is "just weather."

I think the best way to put it is that Anthony Watts is an amateur who would love to find errors in the man-made global warming theory.

Watts often makes the common mistake we see among amateurs of over-emphasizing short-term anomalies. For example, back in January when we had a cold month, he made a really big deal about it (as did virtually all global warming "skeptics").

Some other examples:

http://tamino.wordpress.com/2008/03/02/whats-up-wi...

http://tamino.wordpress.com/2008/03/27/how-not-to-...

http://tamino.wordpress.com/2008/04/01/how-not-to-...

http://tamino.wordpress.com/2008/04/07/how-not-to-...

http://tamino.wordpress.com/2008/08/03/jump/

Tamino at Open Mind spends a lot of time correcting the errors made by Watts, if you couldn't tell.

The site is very accurate and the charts are ones where the data has been corrected from errors found and reported. NASA is in the process of correcting theirs. But it seems the computer system at GISS has some serious software problems in dealing with data feeds and all temperature data that passes through it gets altered.

Dunno, never heard of them.