BEST: What I agree with and what I disagree with – plus a call for additional transparency to prevent "pal" review

Thanks.
Point 3 of what you disagree with: should that say October 20th?

Willis is onto something vis a vis the UHI work.
———
“Willis Eschenbach points out this quote from the paper:
We evaluate the effect of very-rural station siting on the global average by applying the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature averaging procedure to the very-rural stations. By comparing the resulting average to that obtained by using all the stations we can quantify the impact of selecting sites not subject to urbanization on the estimated average land temperature.
He adds: That seems crazy to me. Why compare the worst stations to all stations? Why not compare them to the best stations?
——–
Crazy like a fox…I posted this at Bishop Hill’s. Like many moves in this game the comparison may very well show the butcher’s thumb on the scale:
“I read through the UHI paper and was more than a little surprised that Muller et al apparently compared these two sets of stations:
“very rural” and “all (including very rural)”. This procedure, comparing something to itself plus other stuff seemed odd.
How odd? Well, consider the following:
Imagine 5 “very rural” stations with average temps of +1,0,0,-1,1 for an average temp of 1/5=.2
Now consider 5 “not rural” stations with average temps of +2,+1,+3,0,-1 for an average 5/5=1.0
Quite a difference.
However that difference is reduced if you calculate the average of the “Not rural” plus the “very rural” which would be 6/10=.6
Now, obviously these are simplified made up values; but the point is that there was no need to add the “very rural” stations back into “the rest” if you are trying to compare trends. And, in fact, it appears to be a logical error.

Anthony, I truly admire your ethical and dignified stance in the midst of this farce!
Surely any editor who has received these BEST papers should resign now and apologise to Kevin Trenberth, given the precedent caused by Wagner?
ROFL

“The fact that 33% of the sites show a cooling is certainly cause for a much harder look at this. That’s not something you can easily dismiss, though they attempt to.”
I was taking a look at that thing some time ago (it’s not new information that 1/3 of stations shows cooling) and my conclusion was, it’s caused by the fact that the amplitude of global warming is comparable with (actually about half of) amplitude of statistical error. Or in other words, amplitude of chaotic temperature changes is about two times the amplitude of deterministic temperature changes (i.e. warming).

I just watched the video clip of temp anomalies since the early 1800’s thru 2009. Does it strike anyone else as rather odd that that there is plenty of variation from the blues to the reds till roughly 2000 when everything became mostly red to very red.?

Thanks for laying out your PsOV, Anthony.
“Since Dr. Muller and BEST wish to upset the apple cart of scientific procedure, putting public review before peer review..”
You will therefore recommend upsetting the apple cart of peer-review even further by removing the anonymity of reviewers? An alternative reading here is that we get to see the papers before and after review, and be witness to how they are corrected. They will let their mistakes be aired to the public also. In purely scientific terms, this is much more open than the usual process.
There’s no doubt in my mind that the media blitz of their pre-reviewed papers is wrong. It appears to have forced you, unfortunately, to call for a further abandoning of the proper process. This may be good politics, but puts you in opposition to the normal peer-review process, which you have otherwise maintained should be upheld – having learned to your cost the perils of circumventing it (per your comments in the other thread).
I propose an alternative. The papers should pass through two peer-review processes. One should be the normal anonymous review, satisfying the journal’s obligations, and the other should be an open peer-review, Care should be taken that they are not created or seen as competitive, but complimentary.
Because scientific imprimatur is given if the journal selects its reviewers, the journal should choose all six reviewers, three anonymous, and three open. This not only satisfies Wattians and mainstreamers, it also lends twice the assistance to strengthening the papers.
Does this seem equitable?
REPLY: Interesting, but only if the journal would be bound by the idea that the paper has to pass both reviews to be published, otherwise they just walk right by it while thumbing their nose at open public review. – Anthony

Stephen Singer says:
October 21, 2011 at 6:27 pm
I just watched the video clip of temp anomalies since the early 1800′s thru 2009. Does it strike anyone else as rather odd that that there is plenty of variation from the blues to the reds till roughly 2000 when everything became mostly red to very red.?

Actually, what struck me was the absurd amount of smearing early on. I mean, 1/3rd of the U.S. is covered by their first thermometer? Did they adjust their resolution later? If so, what determines their resolution, do they have a function wrt to time for it?

The UHI paper shows the “very-rural” sections with a significantly greater warming trend. Obviously global warming must be thwarted by paving those areas.

Frank Lasner has developed a world wide, unadjusted, rural temperature index.
http://joannenova.com.au/2011/10/messages-from-the-global-raw-rural-data-warnings-gotchas-and-tree-ring-divergence-explained/#more-18275
A guest post at Jo Nova with implications for the rural/UHI question. I know this should be in TIPs but I feel it is relevant to your argument if you have not had a chance to see it yet.
No surprises, coastal stations match GISS ocean data.
However, inland, rural stations have behaved very differently over the instrument record (1880 to date) and Lasner correlates them with terrestrial glacier advance and retreat, greenland glacier melt rates and seal level variation over the instrument period . With a tip to Willis vs Grinsted Lasner’s correlation goes up and down with the sea level unlike that naughy trace gas.

Ooops, typo but I guess if sea level is changing then so is the seal level.

Why does the “Decadel land-surface average temperature” graph stop at 2005 ??
This is almost 2012 why have they dropped 7 years of data ???

This sounds very much like an issue I discussed some time ago with a friend (a scientific technician) who was involved in setting up experiments scientists at a certain major Australian University. It was a quite common response when the :”first run” of the experiment gave favourable results they would say “that’s enough stop” but as the technician explained to them, there was little cost in actually running the the process repeatedly over the next 48 hours as the main cost had been absorbed in the set up, therefore it would be silly to abandon after one run. As he explained to them, the ability to repeat the result would give their paper much more credibility, so they reluctantly yielded and waited anxiously for the confirmed results.
Of course some “scientists of worth” might consider themselves sufficient authority and excellence above all else to ignore technical or mathematical advice, after all they know what they want!!
We were discussing the mad rush to get poor results into the media and the sloppy work that can result.
Perhaps nervous desire dominated this research?

Why on earth do you think that ‘peer review’ consists only of getting comments from the journal referees? It is a much wider process that continues after publication, and it is not confined to the initial referees’ comments. These papers are undergoing ‘peer review’ right here right now, and clearly some of you do not like them. The ultimate ‘peer review’ however consists of those subsequent papers which are published commenting, favorably or unfavorably, on the original. So go publish something.
REPLY: Why on Earth do you think it is OK to list conclusions to the media prior to the papers being released to the public for that “extra review” you claim, and prior to publishing peer review? That’s what they did. Papers went out to MSM days before October 20th, and I got calls to comment on 3 papers I had not seen.
Explain how that is OK. Of course if it were “I” that had “published something” and done it that way, I’d be excoriated for doing so because we all know there are two sets of rules for:
People saving the planet rule: “end justifies the means”
Those rotten anti-science skeptics rule: “Peer review with impossibly high bar”
So go get a box of scruples or something – Anthony

Anthony:
Apparently, you are not aware of this:
Muller & Associates
Richard Muller , President and Chief Scientist

GreenGov is a service offered by Muller & Associates
Helping governments build energy strategies that are right for them
Government energy policy is increasingly confounded by the complex interplay of international treaties, fluctuating prices, declining reserves, and a rapidly growing array of technological developments. Energy policy involves economics, energy security, and climate change. For some initiatives, these issues may be addressed simultaneously. For others the potential solutions might be in direct conflict. Coal, as one example, is abundant in some countries, but it is also a strong emitter of carbon dioxide
Clean Energy – demystifying emerging technologies and avoiding costly “misinvestments
We know that in order to be effective, solutions must be sustainable.

Hats what they say, here is what you said:

3. The release method they chose, of having a media blitzkrieg of press release and writers at major MSM outlets lined up beforehand is beyond the pale. While I agree with Dr. Muller’s contention that circulating papers among colleagues for wider peer review is an excellent idea, what they did with the planned and coordinated (and make no mistake it was coordinated for March 20th, Liz Muller told me this herself) is not only self-serving grandiosity, but quite risky if peer review comes up with a different answer.
The rush to judgment they fomented before science had a chance to speak is worse than anything I’ve ever seen, and from my early dealings with them, I can say that I had no idea they would do this, otherwise I would not have embraced them so openly. A lie of omission is still a lie, and I feel that I was not given the true intentions of the BEST group when I met with them.
That’s some claim. Four papers that have not been peer-reviewed yet, and they KNOW they’ll pass peer review and will be in the next IPCC report? Is it just me or does that sound rigged? Or, is it just the product of an overactive ego on the part of the BEST group?

Now do you begin to understand? Look above, their website, they call it greenGov, sounds like a mixture of green and government to me, sound like skeptics to you? They want to “help” you avoid “climate change” (their words) to avoid “carbon dioxide” (their words), sound like skeptics? They want to help you with “clean energy” and to be “sustainable”, (their words”, sound like skeptics? They have a prior agreement to appear in the IPCC report (that’s sure what it sounds like), sound like skeptics to you?
Sooo, why might they have a media blitz? It’s rather obvious, actually, Muller & Associates wants business, and the BEST project assures that they will get it. Having a media blitz, and actually being in the IPCC report, sets them up as “the experts”, you know, the ones to call if you need “help” (P.S., bring cash). Does it begin to make sense now?
And they want you associated with them, you and Judith Curry, and as many other bigger name skeptics as they can get. That way they can say, “see, even the skeptics agree with us, we are that good”. That way, they can even get business with people who are somewhat skeptical, which is at least half of them now. Hey, double the business of all those other companies, who wouldn”t want that?
You say that some people are going overboard (“There’s lots of hay being made by the usual romminesque flaming bloggers”), suspecting the BEST people of bad motives, then you come here and provide practically definitive proof that, yes, they are doing exactly that. Look at their own website, figure it out for yourself.
Well, thats what it looks like to me, I would sure love to be proven wrong, but if this thing gets pal reviewed, and gets into the next IPCC report, that’s pretty much an open and shut case.

Anthony, Did I say that I approved of the way the BEST papers were pre-published? No? Then do not make assumptions please.
The simplest way to publish something is as a comment to the same journal. As soon as the papers officially appear, submit a criticism. You actually have an advantage – you have already seen these papers.

Ummm,
Let’s not lose our focus here.
Temperatures are not, in the U.S., (or as measured in the developing world, with their long and accurate data), rising at a rate exceeding natural variability.
There are political and capitalistic forces looking to expand their reach, by exploiting any method to drive opinion.
The thing they fear most, is the voter.

Jeremy: I’ll do what they were unwilling to do, photograph the sites they chose as “rural”.
You’ll have to get in line….
: < )

I realize that the discussion on this thread is very focused but I think that eventually we must finally look at these issues in a wider view. I did a presentation last year that looked at the land use of the earth and found some interesting land use information about forests-32%, pastures-26%, arable land-10.6%, urban areas-2.4% and other-29% (of which deserts make up the more than half of this “other” category).
I’ve lifted the few slides from the Urban part of the presentation. It mostly shows that the definition of urban areas is still in flux and is often controversial. I wanted to see if we used a fairly liberal definition of an urban area what percent of the earth would be represented. I suspect that historical surface temperature measurement sites might be encompassed or very near these urban areas especially as these areas have been spreading out to surround the older sites. As controversial as definitions might be, I suspect that defining 1% of earth’s land area as urban is too low and does not represent the present reality.
•Surface of the Earth is water 70.8% (361.132 million km2 ) and land 29.2% (148.94 million km2 )
DISCUSSION OF URBAN ISSUES
•Until recently most studies have used 1.5% of global land as urban (CIA Factbook included)
•The definition of urban seems to wander between the use of population density (preferred), light pixels at night, and/or surface disruption characterizations
•With the advent of more detailed satellite image analysis new values of land use seem to favor a higher value of perhaps 3%
•Some reliable sources claim that 3% has been fudged too high and that 2.4% is probably closer to the correct number
•2.4% = 3.575 million km2
•There is some controversy on this point but I expect to see more effort and greater accuracy of this value in the next few years
•In 2010 about half the world’s population lived in urban areas (3.5 billion) while about 3.4 billion lived in rural areas
•I found a study that estimated that roads and parking lots covered between 1.5 to 2% of the world’s land surface
•I am assuming that a significant portion of roads and parking lots are already included in the 2.4% value of urban land use
CONCLUSION (Relating to the Urban part of the presentation)
•Land use questions grew out of climate issues and questions about where surface temperatures were being measured (mostly in urban areas?)
•Does surface temperature measurement (especially if it is mostly done in cities) tell us much about global climate?
Bernie

Anthony, you state that the GAO agreed with your conclusions that “The U.S. temperature record is unreliable.” But GAO did not assess that.
This is from the conclusions in the GAO report.

NOAA also stated that it understood that, given the scope of our review, we did not assess the effect of stations not meeting siting standards on the reliability of the agency’s analysis of temperature trends. Nevertheless, NOAA added that it was important for our findings to include a discussion of the published peer-reviewed studies that have explicitly examined the USHCN’s data quality and its effects on the reliability of NOAA’s temperature trend data. We did not include such a discussion in our report because this issue was outside the scope of our work.

It is unscientific to assume NOAA has failed to winnow a reliable temperature record from problematic data. This is where quantitative analysis must be done, not qualitative. You also cite NOAA’s own 2002 directive on the USCRN. Here again, this points to shortcomings with the data and siting, but is not a ‘conclusion’ that NOAA’s temperature record, which tries to overcome problems with the data, is unreliable. The latest quantitative assessment shows that there is very close agreement between USHCN and USCRN. This is not proof positive that the temp record is reliable – although it does corroborate – but certainly there is little evidence from proper quantitative analyses that the record is unreliable.
It is important not to forgo accuracy in the heat of this debate. GAO does not support your conclusion on the (non)reliability of the US temp record. It does support your observations on siting issues. You were right in the other thread to say that your previous, non-peer reviewed conclusions were hasty. Don’t let your enemies, real or imagined, encourage you to muddy objective analysis with politics.
(I have offered the same advice to the ‘other side’, most recently at Deltoid. If this game of tribes is to abate it will require discipline from all participants, whatever the extenuating circumstances)

jimmi_the_dalek says:
October 21, 2011 at 8:05 pm
“Why on earth do you think that ‘peer review’ consists only of getting comments from the journal referees? It is a much wider process that continues after publication, and it is not confined to the initial referees’ comments.”
You are making up your own meanings on the fly. Peer Review is managed by a journal editor to serve the purposes of the journal editor. The journal editor will usually accept the recommendations of his peer reviewers though he is not obligated to do so. Once the journal editor has decided that peer review is finished for a particular submission then it is. There is nothing else in the world of scientific journals that qualifies as “peer review.”
Once an article has been published, the authors have received all professional benefits that can flow from that article. Most authors will not read published replies to an article unless it is written by someone who is prominent in the field. To talk of “peer review” after publication is silly romanticism.

I nominate Steve McIntyre and William M. Briggs as peer reviewers.

Steve Mosher and Nick Stokes.

This post from Jay Currie earlier sums up so much about the total lack of understanding about the temperature record and how it is calculated.
‘Imagine 5 “very rural” stations with average temps of +1,0,0,-1,1 for an average temp of 1/5=.2
Now consider 5 “not rural” stations with average temps of +2,+1,+3,0,-1 for an average 5/5=1.0
Quite a difference.
However that difference is reduced if you calculate the average of the “Not rural” plus the “very rural” which would be 6/10=.6’
Jay tries to present an example of what the impact of rural vs non-rural temps is based on AVERAGING their temperatures. In this he is reflecting a profund misunderstanding about how the temperature record is calculated. And this has an important bearing on the surfacestations.org results, the ‘march of the thermometers’ argument etc.
Simple take-home-message.
The temperature record IS NOT CALCULATED BY AVERAGING TEMPERATURES!!! That would be a mathematical nonsense!
If you want to understand why, you could read the following series of posts I published at SkS earlier this year.’Of Averages and Anomalies – Part 1A. A Primer on how to measure surface temperature change’, http://www.skepticalscience.com/OfAveragesAndAnomalies_pt_1A.html
If you are reluctant to read them, ask yourself this question. Do I understand the implicartions of the difference between averaging temperatures and averaging temperature anomalies? Do you really know the difference between the two? If you don’t, how can you be certain that all this kerfuffle isn’t a storm in a thimble.
An earlier poster commented that they were going to look at some stations in California. Someone else suggested there would be a queue. Simple question. Why? Do you think that looking at a few stations provides any relevent information.
I repeat my point. Do you think that the temperature record is calculated by averaging temperatures so if a station is warmer for some local reason that biases the average? If so you are wrong! Not because a falsely warm station wouldn’t bias a calculation based on averages of temperatures. Of course it would. But the temp records ARE NOT CALCULATED BY AVERAGING TEMPERATURES. Precisely because averaging temperatures would be a mathematically ‘fragile’ approach – just plain Dumb, NOBODY DOES IT THAT WAY. NOBODY. Not, GISS, Not NOAA, Not HadCRU, Not JMA or the Dutch of the Australian BoM or anyone else. Averaging temperatures is mathematical nonsense!! So nobody does that.
If you don’t understand why averaging temperatures is a SERIOUSLY dumb way of calculating a temperature record, perhaps doing some research before you comment might be a worthwhile activity.

There is an article mentioning you here
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/10/21/berkeley_earth_surface_temperature_study/
and this is what Muller has for your peer review / pre-print criticism:
‘When contacted by The Reg, Muller responded in an email that he believes scientific papers should be widely circulated in “preprint” form before their publication. “It has been traditional throughout most of my career to distribute preprints around the world,” he writes. “In fact, most universities and laboratories had ‘preprint libraries’ where you could frequently find colleagues.”
This preprint system, he told us, is being stifled by major journals. “This traditional peer-review system worked much better than the current Science/Nature system, which in my mind restricts the peer review to 2 or 3 anonymous people who often give a cursory look at the paper.” ‘

Anthony, I greatly admire your transparently honest and gentlemanly approach to this. Many other commenters are also trying to engage with the “scientific” basis of BEST’s 4 reports.
Not being so “gentlemanly”, I suggest that all you need to know is:-
(1) BEST got $623,097 funding for this.
(2) 20 October (before Durban) was scheduled for a media storm “demonstrating” that the “deniers” had been decisively trounced and cAGW was “confirmed”.
(3) Muller used “tarbaby” tactics to try to cover you and other sceptics with the tar of the media storm.
(4) They have a pre-ordained slot reserved in the IPCC’s AR5 and no doubt the commentary there has already been sketched out by Schmidt, Trenberth, Santer, Jones & Mann.
Personally, I have no doubt that all this was written into the Contract with Muller before he started work.
The reports he produced were produced purely to fulfil the agenda set out above.
If (as seems improbable) Muller ever had any integrity, he sold it for a mess of pottage.
But, if the “Team” seriously believes that this will solve anything, then they are being very naive indeed. Sooner or later the truth will out.

“Four papers that have not been peer-reviewed yet, and they KNOW they’ll pass peer review and will be in the next IPCC report?”
Wahl & Amman managed it!
http://bishophill.squarespace.com/blog/2008/8/11/caspar-and-the-jesus-paper.html

Anthony, I for one would like to thank you for your effort and time not principally for the surface stations but for this blog.
You may not sense it yet but the effect of this site opening up the discussion of climate change for scientists and non-scientists alike has been instrumental in getting to this point.
The discussion being open is why the blog achieves awards and has such a high hit rate.
If the peer review process finds anything different from this open discussion then the reviewers will not have contributed to the open discussion and the next question would be why did they not participate or if they did then why do their views differ from the views of the open consensus?
The movement towards open scientific discussion has to continue in this, it’s revolutionary, again thank you.

I’ve seen a couple lectures by Muller on YouTube
– he seems to have a sensible approach to Global Warming
I think the reason that he lumps ‘deniers’ as ‘unscientific’ is that you have to ignore all the scientific data to ‘deny’ Global Warming – even WUWT concedes that there has been Global Warming over the last century.
A skeptical position is reasonable, there are many reasons to be skeptical about the political bandwagon and gravy-trains that surrounds the issue.
That’s why people like Muller are worth listening to, as they try to point out where the science is, and also where the reality of CO2 output is (i.e. CO2 output of the developing world is the real problem)
Anyway, worth a watch:

Also, several important points about the BEST work:
1) Even though the raw data they use is largely the same as others have used, they have returned to the original data as much as possible, rather than using ‘adjusted’ data (which has always been one of the complaints about the other data sets)
2) Their methods allow much more of the data to be used, including incomplete sequences.
3) They publish both their data & their programs freely for others to see & use. (No more need for FOI requests!)

So the delinquent teenager is growing up quickly and is now finding new and more sophisticated ways of getting its own way. In the past the cabal that as been bullied into submission, no longer provides the legitimacy it needs so a new ally is sought. Step forward leading sceptics who get a few promises that this time things will be done properly get involved with the delinquents friends. On the platform of open and transparent conduct these friends decide to confirm the answer to a question no one disputes and gets rewarded with access to the teenager’s exclusive club where fortunes are to be made. The delinquent teenager smiles to itself in the mirror realising that no matter what it does it will always get its own way.

My next thought was that if one third of the temperatures are cooling and the other two thirds are warming over only 25% of the planet surface surely the word “Global” is not in any sense of the word applicable. So why do we continue to be bombarded with this fallacious statement when everyone already knows and agrees that there are areas of increasing temperatures and areas of decreasing temperatures. Rising sea levels and falling sea levels, accumulating sea ice and receding sea ice. No one has yet to my knowledge demonstated that any supposed warming is any more than the noise in the signal. Statistical hoop jumping does not improve the historical record. When there is 60 or 90 years of satelite data you can dig up my corpse and etch “you were wrong” on to my bleached bones. Until such time as that I will continue to see projects such as Best as the interpretation of garbage using flawed computer models and confirmation bias for political purposes.
Why do I always misread the word “Our Finding” as “Our Funding” in all these PR exercises? Is it that the two words are so inextricably linked that the first cannot be written without an eye to the second.

Anthony,
When you wrote

I’m prepared to accept whatever result they [the BEST group] produce, even if it proves my premise wrong,

which premise did you mean? It’s being quoted in a number of places, e.g., here with a presumption that it’s quite clear what ‘my premise’ refers to, but I can’t be sure from the blog post.

There are two levels here. Firstly there is the papers. Then there is the PR campaign. The problems in the papers are of less concern to me. I trust that these will be addressed and dealt with by the scientific process … eventually. The real problem as I see it is the PR blitz which is purely propaganda. I find the massive straw man arguments particularly offensive.
Efforts to address issues with the papers themselves really do nothing to address the PR campaign. The propagandists that wrote this drivel obviously don’t care what the papers say since they massively misquote and misrepresent it. I suspect they really couldn’t care less if the papers are revised. The papers are not being reported on, they are merely being used as an excuse for mounting an independent propaganda blitz.
The PR blitz needs a direct response in my opinion.

The reason for the media blitz on Oct 20 is right here:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/10/21/california-commits-business-suicide/

“And what percentage of weather stations were in that 1%?”
Very valid question and it is the first the statisticians should have dealt with. It answers the question of how representative the sample of measurement is.
Interesting to note that the discrepancies between HadCRU and Berkeley is bigger then the statistical uncertainty interval.
Why is there no comparison to UAH? (for the period 79-now)? Would this not make sense?

To Glenn Tamblyn !
You are 100% coorect when you address issues on avering temperature data.
Even well known sceptic jumps happily into this trap of “validating” GHCN temperature data and the like by averaging blindly exactly as they are supposed to do, and then afterward can be quotedd by even scepticalscience who says: “See, even sceptics approve of our temperature data”.
Even sceptics are happily doing as they designed to do, and do so with great authority.
Heres why it make more error in temperature data to average blindly (with “correct math”) perhaps than UHI and adjustment can cause:
http://hidethedecline.eu/pages/ruti.php
see ex1a,b,c … to ex4.
And Glenn, im happy that im not the only sceptic thats aware of this essential problem. We are being fooled like complete [I snip this myself] by a wolf dressed like a math teacher 🙂 and end it up that we dont see tha banal overwhelming issues in temperature data.
SELECTING temperature data and periods for these is MORE effective way to control the resulting temperature trend than adjusting. – and then its “clean”, you did not adjust…! just average so that warm trends occurs where there where none in the real world.
K.R. Frank

“There’s lots of hay being made by the usual romminesque flaming bloggers, some news outlets and the like, over my disagreement with the way data was handled in one of the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature (BEST) papers, the only one I got to review before yesterday’s media blitz. ”
Couldn’t all the disagreement with BEST and Dr. Muller have been kept private with them rather than posting on the WUWT blog? That would have attracted far less attention and wouldn’t have publicly detracted from Dr. Muller and the BEST team’s reputation as much. If the results changed following peer review, then one could write an op-ed or get a retraction from the Economist or other news outlets, etc. That would seem to be the quiet professional’s route, imo.

I don’t get this.
For the past two years, skeptics were claiming that the Climategate faux “scandal” and other alleged malfeaseances proved a conspiracy of scientists and faked or manipulated data to exaggerate, perhaps even fabricate, the warming trend of the last half century.
Now that the Berkley team (which was in fact headed by scientists who were sympathetic to the claims of skeptics) have confirmed that the temperature reconstructions of NOAA, HadCrut and NASA are all credible and robust, skeptics are belatedly saying the knew all along that these warming trends and reconstructions were real and credible; that their “only” complaint is with regard to attribution.
How can both of these contradictory positions be true at the same time?

Steve Piet says:
October 22, 2011 at 7:59 am
“The mistake was in thinking that a U.C. Berkeley effort of this importance and this visibility would be politically neutral. Imagine what pressure BEST is getting from virtually everyone else at Berkeley to get “the right answer.””
____________________
Well, if that is the case, then you can run their code when they put it on the website. As I understand it, all the work (and maybe the source code I heard) will be put on the website. Or, you could develop your own code, analyze the data, and then publish a peer-reviewed rebuttal to the BEST team’s results if they are biased to get the “right answer”.

peter stone says:
October 22, 2011 at 7:53 am
“How can both of these contradictory positions be true at the same time?”
__________________________
That brings up a good point. I guess the datasets themselves are vindicated from accusations of manipulation now?

peter stone says:
October 22, 2011 at 7:53 am
“Now that the Berkley team (which was in fact headed by scientists who were sympathetic to the claims of skeptics) have confirmed that the temperature reconstructions of NOAA, HadCrut and NASA are all credible and robust, skeptics are belatedly saying the knew all along that these warming trends and reconstructions were real and credible; that their “only” complaint is with regard to attribution.”
I guess you missed my post above which ends with the following paragraph:
In summary, the claim that the percentage of weather stations found in urban areas has grown greatly in the last 30 years and caused there to be a disproportionate number of all weather stations in urban areas has not been investigated. The only evidence relevant to the claim is the evidence that Anthony has collected over the last 30 years. BEST simply blew off the question entirely.

Goodness gracious… “the movement” is back in full swing. They only need to prove warming because everyone already believes that only human activity can cause warming.

It appears that BEST has posted their monthly Land Temperature data in a text file (which covers the full dataset at:
http://berkeleyearth.org/analysis.php
So, here is the Monthly Land Temperature chart and the 12 Month Moving Average going back to 1800 which you have not seen as yet. It is highly variable.
http://img202.imageshack.us/img202/3230/berkeleymonthlylandanom.png
Here is the 12 month Moving Average and the 5 year Moving Average.
http://img838.imageshack.us/img838/2748/berkeleymovavglandanom.png
A couple of notes, the data ends in May, 2010. The moving averages were appropriately cut-off at the end of the chart (but not at the beginning which signals they were using data prior to 1800 to be able to maintain the moving averages in January 1800). April 2010 has an anomaly of -1.035C (which carries through the moving average values so is not a typo).
The overall trend over the whole period is 0.059C per decade. Starting in 1976, it is 0.28C per decade. Starting in 2000, it is 0.176C per decade. Starting in 2005, it is down -0.68C per decade.
[two of the three sites referenced are blocked. . . are you aware of this?]

Glen Tamblyn: Do you think that looking at a few stations provides any relevent information.
Well, yes, as a matter of fact I do. On-site developments can swamp larger scale trends, from global all the way down to UHIs. Observed anomaly trends can come from any level; the immediate vicinity is surely relevant. Or perhaps you think that not looking provides some relevant information? : > )

Why do the temperature anomalies look to be higher now than in the 1930s?

UHI should be called thermal emissions as the use of the word island suggests that heat goes directly into space and there is no green house effect at all. These numbers if you use watts/m2 for certain countries are very significant in theory. I worked them out for some countries based on energy use creating 70% as thermal emissions for 2009 as follows USA 0.20 watts/m2 China 0.19watts/m2 France 0.38watts/m2 Germany 0.74watts/m2 United Kingdom 0.75watts/m2. Another point the graph shown above ends in 2006 and is 10 year moving average so as not to show relatively stable temperatures for the last 12 years or so.

EFS_Junior says:
October 22, 2011 at 12:43 am
“So now we’re back on the Conspiracy Train? That didn’t take too long, now did it?”
Judith Curry calls for disbanding the IPCC. Is she on the conspiracy train? You do not have to believe in a conspiracy to believe that a group of people are behaving as if they were conspirators. It is called GroupThink.