I was rather surprised to see this interview in Physics World with Dr. Richard Muller (h/t to Bishop Hill) with this praise.
“If Watts hadn’t done his work, we would not have reliable data today. The fact that he did that means he’s a hero; he deserves some sort of international prize.”
Thanks for the kind words Dr. Muller, but I don’t think that will happen.
Here’s the full quote plus some other interesting things:
Muller also had four specific concerns with the scientific consensus on global warming, which the BEST project was designed to address. The first – and most serious, he says – is the “stations issue”, referring to a problem highlighted by controversial US blogger and former TV meteorologist Anthony Watts. In 2007 Watts initiated the Surfacestations.org project, which reported that 70% of temperature recording stations in the US were inaccurate to a level of 2–5°C. MulIer says that the BEST team has now cleared up this issue by showing that when it comes to specifically measuring change in temperature, the 30% of good stations are not significantly more accurate than the 70% of bad stations. “If Watts hadn’t done his work, we would not have reliable data today. The fact that he did that means he’s a hero; he deserves some sort of international prize.”
The other concerns are as follows:
The second concern Muller refers to i. the “data selection” employed by the three major groups collecting global temperature data: NASA; the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in the US; and the Met Office’s Hadley Centre in the UK. Muller says that the number of stations being used between 1980 and the present day has dropped from 6000 to less than 2000, with no explanation to be found anywhere in the literature. The third issue is that rapid urbanization in the regions surrounding temperature stations might have led to localized temperature increases, or what is known as the “urban heat island” effect. The fourth concern, which Muller calls “data correction”, refers to the small adjustments that the climate groups make to temperature readings as a result of changes in instruments and locations. Muller says the records describing why individual corrections have been made are very poor.
I emailed Professor Muller tonight, thanking him for the kind words. It was our first email exchange in months. He maintains that he has an open mind on the issues of surface data, and if new data is presented to him, he’ll re-evaluate.
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Funny…those are the exact concerns skeptics have been pointing out in the data for years.
In the global terms serious disconnect took place around 1970
http://www.vukcevic.talktalk.net/69-71.htm
I say, blame the Russians 🙂
Still in the same position of using ever more powerful computers to average crap until it turns into gold. Not buying it. Never will.
Someone should establish an international prize bearing your name. Perhaps the ‘Anthony Watts Prize for Trying to Keep Science Honest’?
Lord knows, we need one!
Cui Bono
+1
Does this mean that 100% of the stations are inaccurate to a level of 2-5 deg. C or somewhat better? Nice input for models that calculate average global temperatures to one thousandth of a degree C! Or am I missing something?
Careful Anthony…I’m sure Romm will gladly nominate you for any prize that includes a mandatory one-way trip to Pluto!
[snip . . the /sarc is really required for comments like that . . . kbmod]
Andrew Watts –
On the Bishop Hill site you had this to say (Apr 2, 2012 at 5:33 PM ): “Well, he “thinks” he cleared it up. My latest data says otherwise.”
Could you perhaps elaborate on that comment please? Thanks.
Sorry – Anthony Watts (!) not Andrew Watts. I do apologize.
My OED has prize = “Anything striven for or worth striving for; a thing of value won by or inspiring effort.”
By my appraisal Anthony definitely deserves a prize and praise for a truly inspiring effort 🙂
As ever scientists trying and failing to make a silk purse out of pigs’ ears.
Muller has his own problems in mixing up good data with bad.
Big thumbs up for you!! As they say in the Navy “Bravo Zulu, Shipmate”!! And you have received your award…sorta. Isn’t the Bloggies Lifetime achievement the equivalent to the Nobel Prize?
Richard Muller said: “The third issue is that rapid urbanization in the regions surrounding temperature stations might have led to localized temperature increases, or what is known as the “urban heat island” effect.”
Hmmmm. That’s a change of tune. There is a paper by Wickham, Curry, …, Muller et al saying they investigated the urban heat effect and it wasn’t there.
http://www.desmogblog.com/sites/beta.desmogblog.com/files/BEST%20UHI.pdf
“We compare … linear temperature trends for [all] sites to the distribution for a rural subset … the difference of these shows a slight negative slope over the period 1950 to 2010 …, opposite in sign to that expected if the urban heat island effect was adding anomalous warming to the record.“. [my emphasis]
The method the paper used was, to put it politlel, useless, and I said so at the time.
http://climateaudit.org/2011/12/20/berkeley-very-rural-data/#comment-318366.
“IMHO the station classification method is useless. It is described in Wickham et al 2011 http://berkeleyearth.org/pdf/berkeley-earth-uhi.pdf
Of the 1313 Australian stations in Berkeley’s site_detail.txt, 878 are (as per the file posted on CA) “very rural” and the other 435 are “other”.
The 878 “very rural” stations include 100+ airports and 111 post offices. I suspect that heaps of the stations are in minor or moderate conurbations which are just as susceptible to UHE as major towns and cities. As Anthony has pointed out, growth and change matter more than size.“.
This was a comment on a Steve McIntyre post in which he raised serious questions about their station selection methodology.
http://climateaudit.org/2011/12/20/berkeley-very-rural-data/.
Some people think that Muller is not fit to lick Anthonys thermometer clean.
But I think he is
The first comment gives a credibility to WUWT which will sit in the craw of so much of the extremist element that it has to be welcomed and ultimately honest and credible data is required to educate the masses. The second is a concise summation of the suspicions we all have, but have not heard from the established scientific sector before this, it has to mark progress, and judje him and it on its merits. We all have to start somewere.
But Mr Watts, you already have the highest international award, a Noble Award: the accolade of millions of independent people, who collectively visit your blog in vast numbers because they trust you and acknowledge your credibility and science.
None of this is based on narrow ideological grounds by a closed group of smug, self-satisfying, incestuous individuals for political reasons.
Mike Jonas,
Many times I see examples of what I can only describe as the phenomena where people making public statements haven’t adapted or understood the fact that things live forever in the interwebs, which becomes evident every time someone notices that what they say today is NOT what they said in the past.
AND…there are people who have enough interest to keep track 🙂
JimB
There is a prize named after the best known British climatologist
The Hubert H. Lamb Memorial Prize
worth all of £100 sterling, awarded by the University of East Anglia, the home of the infamous CRU.
That would be the ultimate irony; only joking. (mod- if comment is inappropriate please delete)
“the 30% of good stations are not significantly more accurate than the 70% of bad stations”
doesn’t that just make people want to keel over with laughter ! :-)))))
Perhaps Muller has finally seen the writing on the wall for the Alarmist’s side and is getting himself relocated in the debate ahead of the IPCC report killing off extremist alarmism once and for all? The report yesterday detailing how the IPCC have accepted that there is no scientific basis for concluding that we are seeing human induced increases in extreme weather activity may also point in that direction.
Keep to the scientific method, follow the empirical evidence, don’t assume anything and the truth will become more and more apparent.
The Nobel committee lost all credibility when awarded a prize to a politician for the act of simply winning an election (Barack Obama).
The argument for not taking UHI especially seriously is that one is dealing with delta temp, and this is unaffected by UHI, in that 100.000 people are still 100.000 people and their effect on the local temperature, while admittedly being enormous (3-4 degrees celcius in f.ex. London) does not change over time.
That is of course nonsense.
Are there studies of UHI which specifically look at changes in (delta) population and (delta) energy consumption over time.
Energy consumption should be researched, as there must be a direct link between emissions of CO2 and energy consumption and UHI.
And does anyone know how much energy we are putting directly into the earths energy balance when we are producing that much CO2 ?
No disrespect to Anthony, but I would also like to see Steve McIntyre and John Daly accorded hero status when the history of this miserable episode comes to be written. Steve, in particular, fought long and hard when it was him alone against the assembled might of the warmist fraternity, and fought a completely clean battle defending pure science against unquestionable fraud.
We were very lucky to have people such as Anthony, John and Steve on our side….
REPLY: I couldn’t agree more. McIntyre and Daly were the pioneers. – Anthony