Pielke Sr: No surprise about BEST

Once again, it’s proven you can’t pull a bucketful of gold out of a septic tank, and all the bucketfuls pulled out will look remarkably similar, smell about the same as well. Go figure.

Oh gee, they’ve toned it down a hair. We’re “doubters” now. But what they seem to forget is that nobody doubts or denies anything. The world warms. The world cools. The sea rises. The sea falls. Sorry, we just doubt that the world is climatically invariant, which is your REAL issue, and one you cannot sidestep. The whole crumbling house of cards is built on that constancy premise, so any change must have a “cause”, but it can’t be just normal…or natural. Get over it….!

The arithmetic mean of Tmax and Tmin is not the ‘average temperature’.
In order, get an ‘average’ you would need to sample randomly or at fixed times and average.
Its time to move on to better datasets than Tmin/Tmax, which do exist, eg in Australia there are fixed time temperature datasets going back 60 years.
And surprise, surprise these datasets don’t show anything like the warming the Tmin/Tmax datasets show.
What they do show is a marked warming just after dawn that reduces thru the day and no warming at all at night.
Something is increasing Tmin, and that something is increased early morning solar insolation due to reduced haze and particulate pollution over the last 50 years.

Even with 95% overlap in the underlying data, having three independent analyses does serve a purpose. Namely it constrains the extent to which the results can have been bent to achieve the desired result. Also the Climategate revelations essentially completely destroyed the credibility of the CRU so having other people look at the data is helpful.

I think Muller et al may need to do more to distinguish between (1) absolute levels in UHI and non-UHI sites, (2) respective trends thereof, (3) trends in the rates of change of the trends, and (4) eliminate all data sets before 1950, as it was only then that global coverage reached 70%.

Dr. Pielke,
I believe the BEST results using all 39,000 stations can be found here: http://berkeleyearth.org/movies.php
As Mosh mentions, the data and code is also available for download.

“philip Bradley says:
October 20, 2011 at 11:31 pm
The arithmetic mean of Tmax and Tmin is not the ‘average temperature’.”
It is definitely an average. However, it is not necessarily an accurate arithmetic mean of all possible temperatures in that population (of a particular moment in time), which is, I think what you are getting at. A single non-random measurement from a population is NEVER an accurate representation of a normal distribution (n=1 lol), which means that many of the parametric statistics employed by AGW “scientists” could and probably does generate misleading and inaccurate results.
.

Unless, Muller pulls from a significanty different set of raw data, it is no surprise that his trends are the same.
————-
I also would have been surprised if the results had been different, as I also understood that the raw data was pretty much the same.
However the point of the exercise was to prove whether or not the other analyses were faulty due to either bad analytical techniques or due to deliberate data fudging.
It is now proven that that many of the accusations made against climate scientists in this area were false.
Although I expect that many of the people who will not believe no matter, what will now expand the scope of their favorite conspiracy theory to include the BEST researchers.

Curious statements found in that two page summary (bold added):

The Berkeley Earth study did not assess temperature changes in the oceans, which according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) have not warmed as much as on land. When averaged in, they reduce the global surface temperature rise over the past 50 years — the period during which the human effect on temperatures is discernable — to about two thirds of one degree Celsius.

and

What Berkeley Earth has not done is make an independent assessment of how much of the observed warming is due to human actions, Richard Muller acknowledged. As a next step, Berkeley Earth plans to address the total warming of the oceans, with a view to obtaining a more accurate figure for the total amount of global warming observable.

1. They know the human effect is “discernable” (should be discernible) in the last 50 years, although they have not assessed how much of the warming is human caused. Thus the revealed assumption is that humans have had a large enough effect to discern from the records. Is that a valid assumption?
2. They also know how much of a difference figuring in the oceans makes when figuring the land+sea global warming amount, and will now start figuring how much ocean warming there was to get accurate numbers to figure out what is the land+sea global warming amount. Nothing like the confidence of knowing what the result will be before looking for it.
And having read here many times about the paucity of historical ocean temperature data and the headaches of constructing records resembling anything like reliable and accurate, the BEST team must indeed have a very confident set of cojones!

Posted on October 20, 2011 by Anthony Watts
By Dr. Roger Pielke Senior
Comment On The Article in the Economist On Rich Muller’s Data Analysis
“The nearly identical trends is no surprise as they draw from mostly the same raw data!”
I think there are some excellent high frequency global temperature reconstructions for the last two millennia (A. Moberg et al.) and they should be the reference for any scientific method to explain the causes. Because of the well known oscillations of the axis of the earth (chandler wobble), atmosphere (QBO) and ENSO [frequency ratio: 4:2:1] it seems to be important to discriminate these terrestrial impedances from the heat power current variation from the Sun.
There is no scientific need for trends in understanding the reconstructed global temperature spectra; each high frequency peak has a cause.
There is a difference in the meaning of reconstructed (absolute) temperature values and its frequencies. The meaning of the frequencies is higher, because they my lead to a physical mechanism. There is no real global temperature, there is a variable heat source named Sun which drives the local temperatures over the time superimposed by the terrestrial impedances.
There is a temperature table from UAH since AD 1659 available including the average temperature of each year. Despite the amplitude of that data it is remarkable look at a comparison of this high frequency data with some synodic frequencies of couples in the solar system with rough hand fitted amplitudes:
http://www.volker-doormann.org/images/uah_1650_2010_ghi6.gif
This graph may demonstrate that the method filtering (“trend”) high frequency temperature data is problematic; it suppresses important high frequency data for the idol of a ‘democratic best absolute global temperature trend’.
V.

Also I forgot to ask, why does their graph stop in 2006, this is tail ending 2011 now so why the convenient cut-off date? That makes me suspicous for a start!

I’ve been looking at the GHCN data from a different perspective, so I wasn’t looking at the data from a global trend standpoint. Yesterday, I did a quality control exercise. By selecting 15 stations at random, 4 had series that lasted nearly a century, but contained minimal data, 3 had unexplained “jumps” in the data of well over 2oC ,two showed negative trends and the rest showed positive trends in region of 1.2 C/century. Were one asked to make a judgement on data of this quality in process control or medicine, one would decline to do so.
The primary data appears to me to be very uncertain. I am well aware that statistics is the art of making judgements in the light of uncertainty, but I am unimpressed by the quality of the primary data.

izen says:
October 21, 2011 at 12:07 am
@- Pielke Sr
“Unless, Muller pulls from a significanty different set of raw data, it is no surprise that his trends are the same.”
The point is not that three groups find the same trend in the same data, its that NONE of the studies show any significance difference in trend between urban and rural sites. The meme that the warming is exaggerated by the UHI effect is refuted.”
Concerning UHI I think that Roy Spencer did some work showing that UHI effect can and does happen in very small rural communties, which if true brings UHI back into force as a strong factor in average temperature. Lucy does a good write up on UHI here…http://www.greenworldtrust.org.uk/Science/Scientific/UHI.htm which I would like to see Steve Mosher comment on.

Zeke Hausfather – I realize that he has a much larger set of locations, but many of them are very short term in duration (as I read from his write up). Moreover, if they are in nearly the same geographic location as the GHCN sites, they are not providing much independent new information.
What I would like to see is a map with the GHCN sites and with the added sites from Muller et al. The years of record for his added sites should be given. Also, were the GHCN sites excluded when they did their trend assessment? If not, and the results are weighted by the years of record, this would bias the results towards the GHCN trends.
The evaluation of the degree of indepenence of the Muller et al sites from the GHCN needs to be quantified.
Perhaps they have done these evaluations. However, from my reading of their work, I have not yet seen it.

Why don’t we all just accept the fact that the earth is warming and move on from there? How many studies coming to the same conclusion does it take?

I agree with the comment early on in the thread. The so called “average” of Tmax and Tmin cannot be statistically supported. If global warming is real, the signature will be much clearer in the details of temperature over a 24 hour period, each day, over each season, and over at least 70 to 80 year periods.

Philip Bradley said

The arithmetic mean of Tmax and Tmin is not the ‘average temperature’.

BioBob and Pamela Gray had the same complaint, and I’ll add to it.
If you had a signal that had upper and lower bounds, such as an analog pusle-width modulated signal (commonly used to control servos in robots and model airplanes, where the ratio of how much 1 to how much 0 is what matters), the max is ALWAYS 1 and the min is always 0. By their method, the average is always 0.5 no matter what’s being sent, which means they can’t even detect that the signal carries information.
Yet if you had a constant-energy noise spike on a DC ground wire in an electrical cable (sometimes a sharp narrow peak and sometimes smaller and fatter, based on random things like the capacitance coupling to your hand) instead of 0 volts with an occassional constant energy spike, they’d be claiming the AVERAGE voltage in the ground wire was running from 50 to 200 with dramatic and intereting trends.
So already, they get a FAIL is signal processing and analysis.

This is a complete furfy…. the BEST data only goes to 2007! Am I correct? That’s what the graph above shows. No wonder its a joke. PLease add in 2007 to current its gone way down! Current anomaly for Oct 2011 is about +0.18C see UAH satellite data. If the above graph is true the BEST data should be completely discarded as it does not reflect the past 6 years trend which is crucial for the AGW premise.

Izen,
“The point is not that three groups find the same trend in the same data, its that NONE of the studies show any significance difference in trend between urban and rural sites. The meme that the warming is exaggerated by the UHI effect is refuted.”
Is that really what the data shows? I thought they applied “corrections” for UHI, and that is what is used in the published temperature datasets.

The earth is warming. We already knew that, but thanks for at least making the effort in getting the station data correct now, which is at least in part due to the efforts of this blog and the surfacestations.org project. Congratulations on putting the pressure on and advancing science, guys.
Either way, this result does not negate the null hypothesis of this warming being caused by natural variation or other non-CO2 causes such as land use as we continue to develop. This is particularly apparent in light of no additional warming for the past 13 years and accelerating CO2 accumulation. This shows dissonance with the CO2 = warming link.
And no, aerosols aren’t the cause of the no variation. Nor is deep ocean heat accumulation likely either.
I don’t understand that virtually every other scientist of any reputation can admit when they don’t know and put forth the best arguments as to why their theories could be incorrect – then make a case why their conclusion is more likely – and AGW scientists just tow the doctrine line and express undue certainty.
Maybe this will be the next domino to fall and quality will finally permeate this field.

Alarming that:
http://thewatchers.adorraeli.com/2011/10/21/2-shallow-earthquakes-strike-near-berkeley-san-fransisco/
it’s all man’s “fault”
/sarc

@- S Basinger says: October 21, 2011 at 9:32 am
“Either way, this result does not negate the null hypothesis of this warming being caused by natural variation or other non-CO2 causes such as land use as we continue to develop. This is particularly apparent in light of no additional warming for the past 13 years and accelerating CO2 accumulation. This shows dissonance with the CO2 = warming link.”
‘Natural variation is a description, NOT a cause. The only alternative you suggest is land use?
Would this match the pattern of warming seen in the data?
How dissonant is the “no additional warming for the past 13 years” and the rising CO2? How much do you think it should have warmed in the last 13 years from CO2 if AGW theory is correct? I think BEST comes up with around 0.09/decade, perhaps double that for the recent decades. So around 0.2degC might be coming from CO2 rises. But ENSO variations can equal that through a single cycle so it is not improbable the smaller signal could be swamped over 13 years. Perhaps make it a few years longer, 15 maybe…
-“And no, aerosols aren’t the cause of the no variation. Nor is deep ocean heat accumulation likely either.”-
I admire the certainty with which you make these claims and would welcome some supporting argument. especially in the light of –
-“…– and AGW scientists just tow the doctrine line and express undue certainty.”
@-tegirinenashi says: October 21, 2011 at 10:15 am
“It is much easier to follow just two stations, not subject to UHI
-[link to Antarctic data]-
They are remarkably flat which confirms hypothesis that nothing really changed in the climate.”
So Antarctic stations are representative of the global climate?
Perfectly Obvious Exactly. -grin-

Why ten year average and why end at 2006? I smell a rat. Completely obscures the fact that there has been no warming since 1997 (15 years). Anything to keep the gravy train rolling, I guess.

Izen,
No warming for 15 years (1997-2011). At 3-4C per century rise (IPCC estimate), then temp increase should be 0.45 – 0.6 C. This is not even close to the satellite data record. Finally, how many years of non-warming disproves CAGW? 18 yrs? 20 yrs?

tegirinenashi: “It is much easier to follow just two stations, not subject to UHI”
As BEST says, one third of the stations in their record show cooling. The problem with using only two records is that it is very easy to claim that they are cherry picked.
But I do think you have a point. I think if we could find 50 stations around the world that were pristeen; never moved, never had their elevation changed, no construction around them, continous record for fifty years, and simply used their averaged raw output, I would trust that result more than all of the over processed data that we currently call global temp records. The trick would be to identify those pristeen stations before you ever looked at their records. And then trust their result after you do get their record. That way you would avoid allowing yourself to cherry pick.

Tito;
I also recall seeing recent info that the UHI effects start very small, and are almost logarithmic (diminishing returns). The first level of habitation build-up does most of the work; thereafter it’s gilding the lily.

Henry;
Will 600 in the US do?
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/10/24/unadjusted-data-of-long-period-stations-in-giss-show-a-virtually-flat-century-scale-trend/#comment-776101