In a shocking development that may represent a singularity, I find myself in agreement* with parts of an opinion piece posted on Real Climate today called Berkeley Earthquake Called Off. Dr. Eric Steig writes:
Anybody expecting earthshaking news from Berkeley, now that the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature group being led by Richard Muller has released its results, had to be content with a barely perceptible quiver. As far as the basic science goes, the results could not have been less surprising if the press release had said “Man Finds Sun Rises At Dawn.” This must have been something of a disappointment for anyone hoping for something else.
True. As Maurizo pointed out in World is Warming. Pope Catholic, and as Dr. Roger Peilke said in No surprise about BEST.
Other excerpts: …
But Muller’s framing of the Berkeley results is still odd. His statement, that had they found no warming trend, this would have “ruled out anthropogenic global warming”, while true in a technical sense, would not have implied that we should not worry about human drivers of climate change. And it would not have overturned over a century of firmly established radiative-transfer and thermodynamics. Nor would it have overturned the basic chemistry which led Bolin and Eriksson (reprinted here) to predict in 1959 that fossil fuel burning would cause a significant increase in CO2 — long before the results of Keeling’s famous Mauna Loa observations were in. As a physicist, Muller knows that the reason for concern about increasing CO2 comes from the basic physics and chemistry, which was elucidated long before the warming trend was actually observable.
…
Muller’s other comments do very little to shed light on climate change, and continue to consist largely of putting down the work of others. “For Richard Muller,” writes Richard Black, “this free circulation also marks a return to how science should be done,” the clear insinuation being that CRU, GISS, and NOAA had all been doing something else. Whatever that “something else” is supposed to be completely eludes us, given that these groups all along have been publishing results in the peer-reviewed literature using methods that proved easy to reproduce using easily available data (and in the GISTEMP case, complete code). In one sense, though, we do agree with Muller’s quote: nobody has stolen his private emails and spun them out of context to make his research look bad.
…
Overall, we are underwhelmed by the quality of Berkeley effort so far — with the exception of the efforts made by Robert Rohde on the dataset agglomeration and the statistical approach. And we remain greatly disappointed by Muller’s public communications (e.g. his WSJ op-ed) which appear far more focused on raising his profile than enlightening the public about the state of the science.
It will be very interesting to see what happens to these papers as they go through peer review.
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* OK now for the asterisk. Like any opinion piece not everyone will agree with all of it. I’m no exception Steig writes about the station siting issue saying:
National Academy of Sciences study already concluded that the warming seen in the surface station record was “undoubtedly real,” that Menne et al showed that highly touted station siting issues did not in fact compromise the record…
I would point out to Dr. Steig, and to Dr. Muller, that science, by its very nature, is not a static enterprise. A second paper is in the works looking at the station siting issue from a much broader perspective will be sent for peer review (and hopefully publication) in the coming weeks. In the best tradition of Forest Gump I’ll borrow one of his famous lines:
“And that’s all I have to say about that”.
This guest post is an instructive read though: Unadjusted data of long period stations in GISS show a virtually flat century scale trend
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Anthony. I thought you had something up your sleeve…
“World is warming. Pope Catholic”….when did WUWT turn into a Alarmist den, everybody knows that NCDC manipulates readings to give false warming BEST is just the latest example of this corruption, the fact the Kocg brothers financed the study whows it is Alarmist as the Kochs are up to their necks with Al Gore etc.
“A second paper is in the works looking at the station siting issue from a much broader perspective will be sent for peer review (and hopefully publication) in the coming weeks.”
*facepalm* No no no, Anthony! The way science is done, first you issue a press release with your conclusions, next you write the paper, and only then do you submit it for publication! How do you expect to write a first class scientific paper without going through the crucial press review step?
Uhhh, sooo, whats the big deal? Sooo, we had a medieval warm period 1000 years ago, it was warm, people were happy. Then it got cold, people were not happy (those that lived through it). Now it is the same temperature as 1000 years ago (and people are happy again), so I have to ask, what, exactly, is “unprecedented” here? We have been this warm before, we are again now, what, exactly, has changed? What, exactly, is there to be concerned about? Or can it be shown that 1000 years ago was a time of danger and death from all that heat? Did the sea rise and cover all of them then? Did all the animals go extinct? All the forests and crops die off? What, exactly, did happen?
Now, if you can show me that it is much much warmer than it was 1000 years ago, much warmer than it has ever been, why, that would be something else.
And the 1990’s huh, what about the 2000’s, what about the 2010’s? What has happened since those 1990’s, and why?
Mr Mann, call me when you actually have something to say.
It’s’s sort of a “toldyaso” as a crackdown to the “deniers” that don’t think much of the warming.
Mark
Smackdown, not crackdown. Autocorrecting phone with a dictionary that would be embarrassed by a pre-schooler.
Mark
Am I unreasonable in concluding that Richard Muller et al have managed to piss of both the skeptics and the warmista’s by making a craven play for publicity? Who does the guy think he is? Al Gore??
Well, his company, Muller & Associates, seems a very likely reason for this. The title of the op-ed, “The Case Against Global-Warming Skepticism
There were good reasons for doubt, until now”, strongly supports the idea of global warming, and is obviously against the idea of skepticism. If global warming is real, Muller & Associates can get business. If he raises his profile, he can get a lot of business. If he actually gets into the IPCC report, he gets even more. Conclusion, he has a conflict of interest. Therefore, no matter how honest he may appear, I must suspect him, at the very least. In addition, it is possible he may make a semi honest BEST project, yet spin it to make AGW look real and thus increase his business. It is also possible that the press, who are all for AGW, will slant their coverage as well, and, like I said, he has a conflict of interest and thus may not exactly appose this…
Also, his method of telling if there is UHI bias seems very inadequate. The only way one could actually tell would be if the folks whose job it is to tell us the temperature would actually get out there and do their jobs, take a portable measuring station, set it up nearish but out of the way of any urban effects of the station they wish to check, and see if there is a difference in the two. Heck, at the very least, they could actually go out and look at the station, rather than trying to tell if it is rural or not with some satellite. Heck, if they really want to get frisky, they could fly over it at fairly low altitude and look down with infrared film or detectors (war surplus stuff might be good enough), see if the area around the station shows up as a hot spot, has no one ever tried this? They may even want to make sure that their portable station will calibrate with old stations with, dare I say it, whitewashed screens. After all, we are trying to compare new data to old data, we need to know we are doing an accurate comparison. want to get super frisky, well, actually make an old style station manufactured and calibrated the same way it was done say, 50 or 80 years ago, then us that, now that would be true apples to apples.
BTW, the first post I made above should have been under the next article down.
Anthony, this post is 206 days too early 😉
http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=number+of+days+between+today+and+april+1%2C+2011
Oops I put in the wrong year. its only 160 days too early, or 206 days too late.
Earth warms. Earth cools. Bear goes in Yamal woods.
The more we see and hear of Muller, the disingenuouser and disingenuouser he looks and sounds. The gratuitous put-downs littering his text are really juvenile.
How sweet! That was my favourite bed-time poem when I was a kid.
Just to counterpoint my post above, I just looked at Richard Muller’s “Hide the Decline” Youtube video ( http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8BQpciw8suk ) and it does not surprise me that Realclimate bags him considering what he inferred about the culprits. Not a lot of love there I imagine. Maybe BEST is a Trojan Horse playing the media for the cretinous, lazy suckers they are. We’ll have to wait for the final papers and the final results. Who knows?
The two important things that BEST adds to the debate are:
1. A substantial part of the warming from 1975 — as much as 70% — may be due to natural forcings such as the AMO. BEST says that the AMO (and PDO) cycles could be caused by GHGs, but my sense is that this is just being scientifically cautious. It certainly appears that these cycles were in operation before significant increases in GHGs occurred. IF the temperature increases due to the AMO are part of a natural variation, then as pointed out on pg. 12 of the BEST temperature report, then no more than 0.25 degrees or so of the 0.8 degree temperature increase over land since 1975 would be due to GHGs. That is a rate of less than a degree per century. Someone check and see if Richard Lindzen is chortling. If ocean surface temps were included in this analysis, temperature increases would be lower.
Maybe this is why Steig doesn’t seem impressed by BEST?
2. In 2010, BEST finds that temps plunge by 0.1 degrees, in one year. The other three records show temps increasing by a slightly smaller amount. Why?? If BEST is right, the other records are high by about 0.15 degrees at the end of the temperature record. It is important to find out if this is anomalous or not.
“When I see our own officers being shot to encourage the others I know the war is lost”.
Not my words: but a fair summary of the current state of play.
Kindest Regards
“Man Finds Sun Rises At Dawn.”
Of course the sun doesn’t really rise at all, the earth rotates. Ok not really a big deal, but it is just another example of how the people at Real Climate seem not to care at all about getting the scientific facts correct at all.
Remembering Steig’s contribution to basic physics and statistics in his Antarctica temperature paper, his opinion may still be regarded as pretty lightweight.
“As a physicist, Muller knows that the reason for concern about increasing CO2 comes from the basic physics and chemistry, which was elucidated long before the warming trend was actually observable.”
Typical highjacking of physics and chemistry! If you are against us you are against the laws of physics… conveniently forgetting that they are using equations approximating what they think is the physics happening. Pierre Morel founder of the LMD was very clear about this and how the model freaks try this little magic.
You have to be pretty naive to believe anything else would come out of Berkley.
All delivered with the barely-disguised snark so typical of the ballpark. Playing field is now a quagmire due to climate change.
Anthony,
The fact that you have another paper coming up showing different results could be the reason for this PR Blitz by BEST.
Dr.Judith Curry wrote this in her blog about the BEST PR Exercise
QUOTE
In my relatively minor role in all this, I have had virtually no input into the BEST PR strategy. I have encouraged making the data set available as soon as possible. They were reluctant to do this before papers had been submitted for publication, and cited the problems that Anthony Watts had with releasing his surfacestations.org dataset before papers were accepted for publication. IMO, two of the papers (decadal and surface station quality) should have been extended and further analyzed before submitting (but that very well may be the response of the reviewers/editors.) I agree that it is important to get the papers out there and not be scooped on this by others, especially since Muller and other team members have been giving presentations on this. I have no problem with posting the papers before they are accepted for publication, in fact I encourage people to post their papers before publication.
UNQUOTE
She specifically mentions ” not to be scooped on this by others ” which makes me suspect that they had wind of some other papers coming up showing different results.
Dr.Muller and BEST have scored an own goal here with this hasty and deliberately misleading PR before on papers which have been shown to have significant errors. I have no doubt that all of this was planned for rushing through the papers into AR5. But I believe this is going to backfire on BEST.
I have no trust on Dr.Muller who exactly deserves what he gets, as eloquently described by Willis Eschenbach. Willis called him out as an unprincipled and untrustworthy jerk when he gave that testimony to senate trashing your papers. Dr.Muller has fully lived up to that description.
Unfortunately, with this hasty PR and shoddy work, because of her association with BEST, Dr.Judith Curry, who’s one of the few honest people in the climate science field, is going to also have her reputation affected.
@TomRude : Too true! The crudity of the “physics” is astonishing. You take an abstract column of gas standing over a shiny surface, project a beam of light energy through it and measure the irradiated heat return. Now add some extra CO2 to the column and the escaping heat reduces. That’s the basis of Bolin’s thought experiment upon which this whole farrago is based.
In the real world we have a massively complex interaction of different gases and water vapour (clouds). The completely unfounded assumption that this complex system will *reinforce* any minor heating due to increased CO2 rather than reacting to mitigate it is what feeds the scare story. In reality, the Earth’s systems are rather stable — for which we should be grateful — and tend towards homeostasis. “Oscillation” — which is often seen in climate phenomenology — implies negative feedback, not positive.
Convincingly disprove that and I’ll stop being skeptical about the Climate Disruption panic.
In poker this silly BEST double down is called a bluff. The card being played here is one of reputation. It is the Joker that has been played for years. It means nothing in real terms, but if one does not condescend, it means that your reputation as a poker player will be smeared.
A couple of days ago on Grant Foster’s “Tamino” blog there was an anti-WUWT, anti-Keenan rant entitled Fake Skeptic Criticism of “Decadal Variations in the Global Atmospheric Land Temperatures” in which Foster criticizes Keenan’s criticisms of the Muller et al paper. Buried somewhere in the comments was the following interesting remark by Eric Steig:
In response, Foster stated that he also disagrees with Muller and that he’s working on another post about that very topic. That post is now online.