Good news travels fast. I’m a bit surprised to see this get some early coverage, as the project isn’t ready yet. However since it has been announced by press, I can tell you that this project is partly a reaction and result of what we’ve learned in the surfacesations project, but mostly, this project is a reaction to many of the things we have been saying time and again, only to have NOAA and NASA ignore our concerns, or create responses designed to protect their ideas, rather than consider if their ideas were valid in the first place. I have been corresponding with Dr. Muller, invited to participate with my data, and when I am able, I will say more about it. In the meantime, you can visit the newly minted web page here. I highly recommend reading the section on methodology here. Longtime students of the surface temperature record will recognize some of the issues being addressed. I urge readers not to bombard these guys with questions. Let’s “git ‘er done” first.
Note: since there’s been some concern in comments, I’m adding this: Here’s the thing, the final output isn’t known yet. There’s been no “peeking” at the answer, mainly due to a desire not to let preliminary results bias the method. It may very well turn out to agree with the NOAA surface temperature record, or it may diverge positive or negative. We just don’t know yet.
Professor Counters Global Warming Myths With Data
By Claire Perlman
Daily Cal Senior Staff Writer
Global warming is the favored scapegoat for any seemingly strange occurrence in nature, from dying frogs to hurricanes to drowning polar bears. But according to a Berkeley group of scientists, global warming does not deserve all these attributions. Rather, they say global warming is responsible for one thing: the rising temperature.
However, global warming has become a politicized issue, largely becoming disconnected from science in favor of inflammatory headlines and heated debates that are rarely based on any science at all, according to Richard Muller, a UC Berkeley physics professor and member of the team.
“There is so much politics involved, more so than in any other field I’ve been in,” Muller said. “People would write their articles with a spin on them. The people in this field were obviously very genuinely concerned about what was happening … But it made it difficult for a scientist to go in and figure out that what they were saying was solid science.”
Muller came to the conclusion that temperature data – which, in the United States, began in the late 18th century when Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin made the first thermometer measurements – was the only truly scientifically accurate way of studying global warming.
Without the thermometer and the temperature data that it provides, Muller said it was probable that no one would have noticed global warming yet. In fact, in the period where rising temperatures can be attributed to human activity, the temperature has only risen a little more than half a degree Celsius, and sea levels, which are directly affected by the temperature, have increased by eight inches.
To that end, he formed the Berkeley Earth group with 10 other highly acclaimed scientists, including physicists, climatologists and statisticians. Before the group joined in the study of the warming world, there were three major groups that had released analysis of historical temperature data. But each has come under attack from climate skeptics, Muller said.
In the group’s new study, which will be released in about a month, the scientists hope to address the doubts that skeptics have raised. They are using data from all 39,390 available temperature stations around the world – more than five times the number of stations that the next most thorough group, the Global Historical Climatology Network, used in its data set.
Other groups were concerned with the quality of the stations’ data, which becomes less reliable the earlier it was measured. Another decision to be made was whether to include data from cities, which are known to be warmer than suburbs and rural areas, said team member Art Rosenfeld, a professor emeritus of physics at UC Berkeley and former California Energy Commissioner.
“One of the problems in sorting out lots of weather stations is do you drop the data from urban centers, or do you down-weight the data,” he said. “That’s sort of the main physical question.”
Global warming is real, Muller said, but both its deniers and exaggerators ignore the science in order to make their point.
“There are the skeptics – they’re not the consensus,” Muller explained. “There are the exaggerators, like Al Gore and Tom Friedman who tell you things that are not part of the consensus … (which) goes largely off of thermometer records.”
Some scientists who fear that their results will be misinterpreted as proof that global warming is not urgent, such as in the case of Climategate, fall into a similar trap of exaggeration.
The Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature Study was conducted with the intention of becoming the new, irrefutable consensus, simply by providing the most complete set of historical and modern temperature data yet made publicly available, so deniers and exaggerators alike can see the numbers.
“We believed that if we brought in the best of the best in terms of statistics, we could use methods that would be easier to understand and not as open to actual manipulation,” said Elizabeth Muller, Richard Muller’s daughter and project manager of the study. “We just create a methodology that will then have no human interaction to pick or choose data.”
Discover more from Watts Up With That?
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
Can’t get past this paragraph:
“””
In fact, in the period where rising temperatures can be attributed to human activity, the temperature has only risen a little more than half a degree Celsius, and sea levels, which are directly affected by the temperature, have increased by eight inches.
“””
What is the basis of that claim? I thought tide markers established in the early 1800s still held true.
Jerry says:
February 11, 2011 at 10:27 am
Would someone please explain to me where he found the 39,000 stations? Sure, having more stations has got to be much better than the shoddy and manipulated GHCN data we have now, but we still need quality control. What percentage of all these stations are properly sited, etc.?
##########
search back through comments i’ve made over the years and youll find the links
to many of the sources. The nice thing about most of the data is that it is raw and unhomogenized. No adjustments.
You get the same results using this expanded data set as you do with GHCN.
As for siting bias? well, we have one field study showing the magnitude.
Gary0: the wikipedia article on the subject even descibes how you average temperatures. Amazing we still have to argue such a basic premise.
Mark
Expect the same results as CRU … plenty of adjustments but no UHI corrections:
http://www.berkeleyearth.org/methodology
“REPLY: The word “deniers” was added by the reporter. And global warming “is” real. We expect some warming, my view is that it is exaggerated for political purposes. The key is find out what the true signal is. – Anthony
”
Ah, ok then. I understood that the opinion was taken from the scientist. At any rate, I am glad to see you offered the chance to contribute.
I tried mentioning your “surfacestations.org” website in an editorial I submitted a while ago, and it never saw the light of day. My article “a response from a climate skeptic” did however make it through a few months earlier (which is what made me think the paper might be open to more alternative views). Its too bad that people are giving you crap over the surface stations project because I feel its much closer to true science than most of the big budget productions out there today.
As for global warming being real, I agree with that too. However the meaning behind the words can be very different depending on the context which is what made me weary.
Muller: ““There are the skeptics – they’re not the consensus,” Muller explained. “There are the exaggerators, like Al Gore and Tom Friedman who tell you things that are not part of the consensus … (which) goes largely off of thermometer records.””
Muller is likely a good physicist, but he may have his own political issues. No one is restricted to only repeat what there is a consensus on. It is reasonable to suggest that the flooding in Australia may have been related to AGW. Obviously there is not a consensus on an event that just happened. It is not reasonable to say the flooding there is definitely linked to AGW. Sometimes people only hear in black and white and just ignore the caveats.
“Muller came to the conclusion that temperature data … was the only truly scientifically accurate way of studying global warming. … Without the thermometer and the temperature data that it provides, Muller said it was probable that no one would have noticed global warming yet.”
If this is what Muller thinks, he is wrong. The sea ice and glacier changes would be noticed even if the thermometer had never been invented. So too with the many ecological changes. It is hard to ignore the crabs in Antarctica. As for extreme weather, if concern for AGW did not exist it unlikely the recent extreme weather events would cause us to suspect AGW – so I would agree with him there. Perhaps that was all he intended. But, since we do know AGW exists and will likely impact weather at some point you are not going to stop people from looking for a connection.
I have been lurking here and a few other sites for several weeks now, trying to get my arms around this AGW issue, and like 95% (my supposition) of the people without any science background, I remain profoundly confused. I read here regularly, and elsewhere, that the earth is warming. I also read here, and elsewhere, that for the last 12 years the earth’s temperature has been stable or cooling. It seems to me that these do not have to be essay questions so I will phrase them simply:
Is the earth warming?
Is the earth cooling?
Is the earth currently warming but at a decreasing rate from before 1998?
I am impressed by the breadth and depth of knowledge I find here, and feel somewhat intimidated by it when I am posting such simple questions. Can anyone enlighten me? Is it remotely possible that this Berkeley study could?
“”””” Jack Maloney says:
February 11, 2011 at 8:12 am
“We just create a methodology that will then have no human interaction to pick or choose data.”
In creating a methodology, human interaction to pick or choose data is inevitable. One can only hope that the BEST Study methodology is more transparent than the current ones. And that its authors are more open to constructive criticism “””””
No need; Mother Gaia already took care of that; and both the weather and climate are now exactly the way she said they should be. Problem solved.
Berkeley. Nuff said.
Mike “But, since we do know AGW exists…”
Coming after Demetris Koutsoyiannis’ work, among others, showing that GCMs are completely unreliable, that people can still write something like that shows a complete lack of understanding of the source of meaning in science.
Here’s the strictly scientific view on the cause of recent climate warming: no one knows.
Here’s the strictly scientific view of the effect on climate of recent rise in atmospheric CO2: no one knows.
In all the hoopla about AGW, no one knows what they’re talking about. No one.
Built in bias, at least by the Daily Cal Senior Staff Writer Claire Perlman.
“The Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature Study was conducted with the intention of becoming the new, irrefutable consensus, simply by providing the most complete set of historical and modern temperature data yet made publicly available, so deniers and exaggerators alike can see the numbers.”
Ms. Perlman,
Let’s have a look at the data, see the various analyses that derive from it, and have a good old fashioned debate about all of it, before we speak of “irrefutable consensus” and start calling people “deniers”.
Anthony,
Thank You and Many Thanks to your collaborators! We all look forward to a more reliable data base. Is there anything an average Joe or Josephine might do to assist this?
MtK
@Bigdinny
The answer to your questions depends completely on the time scale you use. There is no one answer.
If you talk about the past 3 months, it’s cooling. The past 3 years, it’s warming. The past 12 years it’s cooling. The past 30 years it’s warming. The past 1,000 years, it’s slightly cooling, or rather heading back up to “normal” on that baseline.
That’s the problem with the whole thing, the sense of scale. If you look back 10,000 years, we are in a warm, interglacial period coming out of an ice age, and nothing about this period is warmer or unusual than any other interglacial period. We’re both average in temperature and length of this period so far. So it could get warmer. It could last longer. Or things could suddenly get a whole lot colder for a few thousand years.
Saying Man has anything to do with the signal is a difficult assertion. But, that is what they are trying to do by looking at the sudden upward spike that was 1998. That is, the warming of the past 30 years, which coincides with the fact we now have satellite data and global temperature coverage that lasts only about that far back. We have a very short memory and experience with climate, so sudden changes spook us, and we think maybe we are to fault, maybe we did something wrong.
That’s what the scientific discussion is about. IS Mankind having an effect and to what degree, by adding 3% more CO2 to the air per year than would have been by purely natural sources, so it is said.
I wish those who would like to tread the middle zone would not use statements like:
“There are the skeptics – they’re not the consensus,” Muller explained. “There are the exaggerators, like Al Gore and Tom Friedman who tell you things that are not part of the consensus … (which) goes largely off of thermometer records.”
First science is not about consensus. Copernicus was a skeptic and not part of the 1000 year “consensus” of geocentricity. It was those who were part of the “consensus” who turned out to be totally wrong.
Not a good start in my book.
Why is having 39,000 stations with bad data an improvement? I accept as a given that physical location, instrumentation and time of observation has introduced errors into the existing data. I do not accept the premise that more observations statistically reduces the error. I would much rather see random validation of existing stations by putting up 3 stations near an existing station but in locations that meet the NOAA siting criteria. Data could be taken for a few months to a year and compared against the exiting station. For just over $100 I got a low end weather station that measures inside and outside temperature, wind speed & direction, dew point and rainfall and has a wireless console that stores data for several weeks. I would hope that for a few hundred dollars one could get a highly accurate instrument that would record and store temperature only. In all of the discussions of the problems with siting of the stations, I have not seen any description of collection of emperical data.
Anthony: Looking forward to your paper. Why is it taking so long, when Menne was able to take some of your preliminary data and get his paper out so quickly?
Overall, and ignoring the “denier” labels being added by the reporter, I think the idea is good. I look forward to seeing the product.
I have been familiar with Mullers web sites for a couple of years. He publishes the ice core data that screams”no unusual warming”, and yet he toes the global warming party line. He does not fudge the data and he has my respect.
I’m a bit concerned about the handling of UHI, but I’ll reserve judgement for now, at least (especially since you said you had a good deal of input).
On a similar note, though, I would be quite interested in seeing a series of comparative graphs for each station, with annotations as to their location (urban, rural) and noting when changes were made to said stations (ie replaced equipment, moved, etc).
Is there anything of this nature available, or in the works?
Or, is it something that could possibly be worked on in conjunction with your surfacestations project? (In which case I would be interested in helping)
Better yet, Scorcher-Scam Scoffers.
Hay Sharperoo,
Do yourself a favor.
Find graphs that plot loss of thermometers to rise in temperatures.
Find satellite “data loss” areas on Earth that correspond to surface temp data loss.
Find record low temps in heat island city(s)..
Most of that has been posted on this site in the last month.
The more data points the better.
If temp history is your thing then, record data from the same locations for a long long time, don’t move the thermometers, and don’t remove them.
no warmists or skeptics should be involved period … data gathering and data evaluation should be completely independent … until thenm is is just another exercise in bias …
this should be independently staffed …
you don’t need a statistician to gather data … you don’t need a climatologst either …
Another decision to be made was whether to include data from cities, which are known to be warmer than suburbs and rural areas, said team member Art Rosenfeld, a professor emeritus of physics at UC Berkeley and former California Energy Commissioner.
“One of the problems in sorting out lots of weather stations is do you drop the data from urban centers, or do you down-weight the data,” he said. “That’s sort of the main physical question.”
Drop the urban stations, obvious if you want a clean unbiased study, how will they down weight them, deduct 0.05 C from the result.
A wise person once said, “Trust, but verify!”
The idea sounds great, but from what Dr. Muller has revealed so far, I am not optimistic. Perhaps the best news is the promise that the code and data sources will be open so that we can see what it done with UHI concerns, siting issues, TOB, missing data, station moves, homogenization, and extrapolation.
I’m so tired of this “AVERAGE TEMPERATURE” Crap. It is MEANINGLESS!
I’ve been thinking about it and realizing the ONLY thing that matters is “length of growing seasons”. That’s determined by first frost and last frost.
I’ve NEVER heard anyone comment on that.
And what else matters? CLOUD COVER! As once it is below 32 F, the only losses from ice/snow are due to SUBLIMATION in the sun. (Sublimation under cloud cover = virtually zero.)
It is the CLASSIC confusion of energy versus temperature. What we are concerned about is AVERAGE ATMOSPHERIC ENERGY.
Another problem with the “historic record” based on “hand recorded” results is you haven’t the FOGGIEST idea of when the results are recorded!!!!
Are the the REAL high and low? Does this guy understand that the DEW line and BMEWS people regularily LIED about the low value to confuse the Soviets? (I.e, their winter values are worthless!)
Chasing a ghost. Of course SOMEONE is paying them.
“A fool and his money…”
Max
“so deniers and exaggerators alike can see the numbers.”
This is from Berkeley, so there should be no surprise at the slant. But letting them constantly get away with using the pejorative “denier” label is just like letting them get away with the “tea bagger” label. They’ll keep using it until it sticks. Hey? If we use the “N” word enough, will that make it meaningless?