I think you will have easily inferred last time around, I am in the UK. The Met Office have all the raw UK temperature readings on their site going back to the early 19th century for some stations. France is similar. Stations have come and gone, or moved, and there has been a growth of overall number as the decades have passed. They feed into global readings. If they are being adjusted I would want ot know why, but they are not being adjusted on the public site, or in the historic dataset you can download. I wouldn't assume every adjustment is fraud, as stations have indeed moved.

Second, if temperature declines across the continental US, as a fast skim of the first link claims to show, that in no way disproves an increase in global temperature. For decades the prediction has always been some areas will get warmer, some might get colder, just as some will dry and others get wetter. Europe has bloody obviously been warming, unmissably so, across the last 40 years. So neither are necessarily in contradiction with global heating.

It might be reasonable for NOAA to bring formal rigour to their software, but MilSpec or Nuclear safety level programming costs. If they're in from the start Unit Tests need not, if they're added after they cost too. That would have budgetary implications. I have no idea how viable funding for a project to improve the software would be - though throughout the software industry rewrites have an ignominious track record. And via a funding source you inexplicably appear to trust least of all. Personally I am much, much more leery of industry research and funding. But that's our previous discussion. :p

Still, having found what you believe are questionable adjustments, you can't just dump the lot and say "dada, see nothing to see, the raw graph shows the opposite!" because we haven't established that all the applied adjustments are incorrect, or actually any of them, yet. You yourself gave a couple of valid reasons why adjustment may be necessary for accuracy, there are many others. For unmanned remote stations, calibration curves may need to change or be refitted as sensors age.

You do neatly identify the point down these rabbit holes where I see bad faith, or intent to mislead - or very poor practice if I wish to be charitable. It's the throwing out of absolutely everything to prove a point and curve on a graph - despite acknowledging there could be multiple good reasons to adjust, or showing that any are mistaken. It's a very simple - to the layman - presentation of "adjusted == fraud", here's the raw, see I can show black is clearly white. It sounds superficially convincing until you dig, even a little.

To close, and expand:

+ You can't just scream "FAKE DATA" and remove the lot, or MCAS would have resulted in all Boeings having no wings (shite analogy, but hey)

+ You audit the data going back

+ you establish which adjustments are questionable and why, and make a credible case as to what the problem is, and the case for discarding.

+ you accept others - for, as you mention, a station that had to move etc. Or is the premise that no adjustment is ever permissible?

+ you present a graph with the suspicious entries only, along with the processed entries with the suspicious removed, you also show the combined curve of all adjusted entries - suspicious and not. Now you can get a feel for extent of error.

+ what you very probably should never do unless your intent is to mislead, is simply present 100% raw data on a graph, as we've already established there are very valid reasons to need to adjust some data.

Were they playing it that way I might have much more time for some of these blogs. Mainly I find they are doing, at some point, the sleight of hand of proving 1=0 we used to amuse ourselves with in maths class.

That really is all I have time for this evening. :)