The US is cooling!

This claim is the latest hot denier meme. It's rubbish of course, from a global warming bozo called Steve Goddard, but it seems it's not stupid enough, so a pair of even bigger bozos called James Delingpole and Christopher Booker have turned it into

Global Warming 'Fabricated' by NASA and NOAA

and

 The scandal of fiddled global warming data

The claim is based on the difference between the USHCN Version 1 USHCN Version 2 data sets of US temperatures illustrated in these graphs, combined into an animation:

The animation is a bit dishonest, because it doesn't include the recent data, so here is my own version:

Looking at the first animation, you might get the impression that higher temperatures at the end of the graph are the result of "NOAA/NASA Dramatically Alter[ing] US Temperatures After The Year 2000". Well, no, they are not: they are the result of warming temperatures in the US.

There is a difference between the two data sets up to 2000: a drop mid century and a rise at the end of the century in the second data set. The rise at the century is because (among other factors) "there has been a widespread conversion from afternoon to morning observation times in the USHCN", which is documented in the scientific literature. NOAA National Climate Data Center.

The warming bias is about 0.2 of a degree, visible around 1990/1995, but notice that average temperatures rise by 0.5 of a degree after that, with the maximum rising by a whole degree: in fact, the latest graph has a new line to fit this new datum, with it's scale rising to 2.0 degrees.

This was of course 2012, the warmest year in the US. Apparently just by leaving this year off the graph the climate change clowns can forget about the heat waves and record temperatures of that year and convince themselves that the US is cooling!

Compensating for a well documented change in time of day of observation in temperature data is not fiddling or fabricating data. Would anybody argue seriously that ignoring this factor gives a more accurate picture of how temperatures have changed?

But there is no serious argument from global warming bozos of course, just stupid conspiracy theories, endlessly echoed by bozo journalists and bloggers.

And I haven't even asked how US temperatures supposedly cooling is taken to mean that global warming is in question.

With each echo, the stupidity grows and the accusations become more clownish.