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[Citation needed]

There's nothing in the moderating FAQ that says it's against the rules to downmod for being wrong, just for disagreeing, which is not the same thing.

I would say "disagree" is a broader category than wrong. It's basically the psychological state of thinking that something is wrong which can happen both when it's wrong and when you yourself are wrong and disagree with something which is right. In both cases you shouldn't down mod for just because you think something is wrong.

However, there's a huge difference between being wrong and being boring and repetitively wrong. When someone posts something new and interesting about global warming scepticisim; that means for me something I haven't heard before; I will never mod it down. When someone posts something stupid like "temperatures have been going down recently" then I expect them to post a link to one of the stronger and clearer explanations of why that's wrong and then explain something new and interesting. Five years ago that might have been something about selective use of weather stations. Now you have to also debunk the statistical analysis that shows that this was actually wrong

If something is wrong, definitely don't mod it up. You can never be sure why the person was wrong and there are plenty of other people who will do that if they find it interesting. If you remember clear debunkings of that information on Slashdot before even in a different article and there's nothing new in the new comment then it's boring and not advancing the debate. You should mod it redundant.

Every time you deniers "call us on it", we link again and again and again to the real science. You ask for the data, the data is available. You cast aspersions on the data, and it's independently verified. You fund studies meant to show that there's no warming, the study shows that there really is warming.

When we "call you on it", you disappear into the woods.

Want the raw data? Here! The first segment, as you can see, is called "Climate data - Raw". Want the code? Here! They're cleaning up the scientist-written code to see if it performs the same as the published results.

There's plenty of scrutiny, that dosen't involve harassment or intimidation of scientists and shifting goalposts.

With that in mind, why spend literally trillions of dollars trying to prevent the climate from changing, when it's going to change anyway? Maybe not in the exact same way as it would sans humanity, but it's going to change. Better to use the resources and effort to address that, than using it tilting at the useless windmill of trying to make the Earth's climate static.

If you're going to die of cancer anyway, why spend literally tens of thousands of dollars in treatment to prevent it from metastasizing when it may happen anyway? What a question!

Here's my answer: I live on the coast. In a place about 7 metres above the mean sea level. In a "third world" country. In a part of the country that's relatively borderline between arid and lush. In the tropics, yet. My city and region both have several millions (several hundreds of millions, even) of people living here, and a good couple of billion should be living in similar areas around the world. A few degrees increase in the global temperature may not seem much for someone living in the arctic - indeed, it may even be welcome, but for us, this would mean the end of any kind of sustainable life.

Do you really want to create a billion-strong exodus of people who've got nothing to lose anymore if it can be prevented at all? If there's even the tiniest chance of preventing it?

In this case, it wasn't even about that... All the data we needed was there... But kept from anyone outside their group... And then modified, and the original data deleted.

This is a widely believed falsehood (you might want to consider who profits from propagating this canard).
In fact, the data has always been available. The groups that analyzed the data previously never owned the data, and never had control over it, so they couldn't have kept it from anybody else or changed or deleted it even if they wanted to do so. This is not even the first independent analysis of climate data. This group got the data from the same sources as everybody else.

Some guys claim that the data cannot be reanalyzed and compiled.
Meanwhile other guys are simply doing it.
Clear Climate Code is an independent group that is analyzing the publicly available GISTEMP data set, and also reviewing their analysis software and rewriting it for greater clarity.

So far, their results have been in good agreement with published work.

As far as these scientists and their statement, I agree with others here who've expressed the opinion that they're only hurting the pro-AGW camp. The best thing they could do would be to advocate for a full disclosure of all raw data and have it made available to anyone, and set up something like the X-Prize for anyone that can come up with a decently-working climatological model whose code and algorithms can be released publicly and tested by anyone willing to do so.

The notion that the code and algorithms for climate models is secret is an urban legend. Model algorithms are described in published scientific papers. Code for a number of models, as well as quite a bit of data, both raw and processed, can be found here.

Here is an independent group that is rewriting the GISTEMP temperature-reconstruction data as an open source project.

I can't? Why not - since it's the truth?

1) GISTEMP is closed source, closed algorithm. If you don't agree, you haven't looked at it, or you didn't follow the debacle that caused corrections and finally the release of code in 2007. Code that wouldn't be considered functional by open source standards.

http://cdquarles.wordpress.com/2009/05/02/fun-with-gistemp/

Now, that might change due to efforts like http://clearclimatecode.org/ - but we're not there yet.

2) CRN123 stations do look different than all put together. I know which study you're going to cite, and you might want to read up on how that was done. In short, watch out for "corrections" to the data - i.e, what are they really comparing?

3) GISTEMP and UAH are "all that different" ;) One is used to prove a political agenda, one measures variable climate fluctuations. You're interested in African UHI, amongs other things.

http://bobtisdale.blogspot.com/2009/06/part-1-of-comparison-of-gistemp-and-uah.html

http://bobtisdale.blogspot.com/2009/06/part-2-of-comparison-of-gistemp-and-uah.html

http://bobtisdale.blogspot.com/2009/07/part-3-of-comparison-of-gistemp-and-uah.html

Bascially, GISTEMP is worthless - as my first reply pointed out. When debating climate variability, we should at least try to use data we can believe in.