Where is West Antarctica?

Found myself asking the question "where is West Antarctica" because...well, since it is at the pole, the concept of west and east is a little vague. North, of course, is away from the center. So, I made this map for reference whenever I forget. I used Marble, an open source application. West is roughly to the left of the image, where the peninsula reaches towards the tip of South America.

Historical Climate Data

I have started participating in a project whose goal is to transcribe written weather records to a spreadsheet. The project is called Historical Canadian Climate Data. I read about it on Real Climate.

Along with the temperature, barometer and wind directions, there are remarks and sometimes sketches. Below are two examples. The sketch consists of a circle and squigly line above it.  I suspect that these images depict rising smoke. The weather is described as "calm" and "Wind light".

Calm

Wind light

Copenhagen Synthesis Report Climate Change

I started reading this report because the Real Climate (RC) blog responded to another scientist's (Roger Pielke Sr.) criticism of RC's commentary on the report. I have always liked what Pielke wrote, so I went over to Climate Audit (CA) to see what they were saying. They were trying to replicate the results in the first figure presented in the report. This attempt was thwarted by the original authors by not specifying algorithms and parameters that would allow a replication. And...CA's closest approximation to the figure was using parameters which they found suspect.

The situation is worsened by the fact that the figure in the report supports the warnings in the report. CA's creation of a similar plot (i.e. using the same data and filtering techniques) arrived at a different result which showed less dire consequences. What does this mean? Is it sloppiness? Was an embarrassing bug found in the algorithm? Was it data manipulation? How does one choose a particular technique based on desired outcome? How robust are these techniques if they can give such different results when operating on the same data?