It was a series of interesting parallel threads; I didn't sense a resolution.
If the surface station record is inaccurate over LT (at least I think that's what you said),
The graph I posted in #73 indicated to me that they're showing the same behaviors; i.e., if one is accurate, so's the other one (and vice versa, naturally).
then why are you using it to bet on 1998 versus 201X El Nino peaks? Isn't that going to be affected by the adjustments also?
To put it simply, there's good adjustments and bad adjustments. Good adjustments are necessary to fix recognized systematic sampling errors/biases. Bad adjustments would be unnecessary, and also (perhaps) done to fix a perceived but unestablished bias. So I don't know if I'm answering the question you asked or not when I say: both surface and LT temperature records are affected by adjustments. I formulated the bet based on the reported trend in the surface temperature record.
Counter-question: is all of this about land surface stations? What about ocean temperatures?
As you can see from the graph I posted from RomanM, recent adjustments are all over the map and are presumably responsible for the 2005 "record" in the surface temp exceeding 1998.
I presume nothing; I need a clearer statement than that. As for 2005 vs. 1998, NOAA did not report 2005 > 1998. Only GISS did (and they said it was a statistical tie).
The reason that you sense no resolution to the adjustments argument is that GG has moved on. The statistical methods used for adjustments have satisfied him since there are even numbers of positive and negative trends in a gaussian distribution. That should be expected from a homogenization adjustment (not an adjustment for UHI or other physical error).
As Eschenbach showed (and verified by others, e.g. http://diggingintheclay.blogspot.com/2009/12/reproducing-willis-eschenbachs-wuwt.html, the effect of homogenization is to introduce artificial trends, positive in the case of Darwin (but also negative).
While the bottom line effect is "only" about a 0.15C to 0.2C rise per century overall (depending on methods), there are drops in 1940-1970 and much faster rises in 1975-2000. The essence of what GG is missing (or hiding) is that the adjustments vary over time to create recent warming compared to the raw data. It is impossible to see that on GG's graph that adds up all adjustments over all time periods. GG repeats that several times in his replies to critics. To quote one "If you adjust down first, then up you do NOT create a total warming trend: you create two trends one cooling and one warming that sum with each other. Why would you consider only the latter? It seems many people got stucked on this. I am going to explain it better in my post in a little while." He never explained it better.