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.”
Bigdinny says:
BD,
Most of us started as ‘lurkers’ at WUWT and other sites. The debate is more civil and reasoned here, so we ‘come out of the AGW closet’ here. Welcome, seeker of more knowledge!
1. Is the planet warming? Yes, and it has been (with fits and starts) since the end of the last glacial epic about 10,000 years ago. The warming did not progress uniformly. There were shorter periods of cooling and warming within that 10,000 period.
2. Is the planet cooling? Within the general warming trend of the last 10,000 years, there have been notable cooling periods. The most often named is “The Little Ice Age” that started somewhere around 1400AD and may have ended as late as 1915AD. Most of the Anthropomorphic Global Warming debate centers about the shorter warming trend since then.
3. Is the earth currently warming but at a decreasing rate from before 1998? I’ll have to let others respond. My lunch break is inadequate!
Gotta go,
MtK
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.”
Do two studies side by side, one rural one urban, they won`t do this because they know what the results will show.
As Ken G (and others) have said, this does not feel right. “They already making value judgments on others’ positions and it sounds like they are starting off with an expected conclusion before they’ve even begun. I’m betting they will find exactly what they are looking for, and that it will fall right in line with this “consensus” view they mention….and we will be nowhere closer to the truth.
The comments in the article give me little hope this will be an unbiased approach.”
“There’s been no “peeking” at the answer, mainly due to a desire not to let preliminary results bias the method.”
“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”
“Global warming is real”
Hmmmmm…
Anthony – you describe it as “Good News“. I truly hope that you are right, but belief is pending.
This new enterprise looks good and I wish them well, BUT (there is always a but) when is the network of surface stations going to be built, or existing stations upgraded, that conforms to the standards already laid down? To my admittedly simple and unscientific thinking, I always have been a great believer in starting at the beginning, therefore a high-quality surface stations network should be the first priority in such an enterprise; messing about with statistics again, but with more existing stations included, seems a very complicated way of acheiving an unbiased measurement on an on-going basis. To simplify the matter again, a broken ruler is damned hard to get meaningful measurements from.
I’m sorry, I have not read all the comments so someone may have pointed this out. Has anyone looked into the organization behind this project, http://www.novim.org/ ? I have not had time to study up on them but it seems from a somewhat quick review of their web site and their participants that they are not exactly neutral observers. I do not want to falsely cast dispersions on what could be a very worthwhile project, but on the other hand I am a bit leery here of this based upon what I have found so far…just saying
Jer
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2011/feb/11/the-heretic-climate-change-review
A review of a play called The Heretic
As Diane’s relationships with her anorexic Greenpeace daughter Phoebe and her tweedily corrupt professor deteriorate, her scepticism turns to hectoring. “Green is proxy for anything. Class war. Hate your dad. Hate America. It’s the perfect religion for the narcissistic age.”
Her public profile grows and she tells Jeremy Paxman on Newsnight that “the real global warming disaster is that a small cohort of hippies who went into climate science because they could get paid for spending all day on the beach smoking joints have suddenly become the most powerful people in the world”.
———————-
I think we’re beginning to win this argument – as ‘art’ often leads the way in detecting new trends.
The warmist camp says that the current datasets of GISTemp and HadCruT are good enough. Hansen says that satellite data does not need to be nor should it be added into the land temperature data as it does not measure the same thing (nor, I suppose, show the same trends that exist in the land data). ARGO data is not used for … I’m not sure why, but it is also not good enough to be considered. In other words, all is good and there is no reason to re-do the historical data.
This 39,000 station data review will take a long time and, as far as the warmist camp is concerned, is unneeded and irrelevant. Right now New Zealand has had its NIWA data more-or-less confirmed by the Australian BOM. So, the reasoning would go, why are you doing this?
If you/we want the new analysis to be considered worth paying attention to, something small and clear must be done that can incontrovertibly be held up as a challenge in court, in Congress or on the cover of Time magazine. If, as the New Zealand Science Coalition says, the NIWA data is as bad as appears, and New Zealand is not warming at 0.9K since 1988 (or whenever) and is the fastest warming country on the planet, then New Zealand is the place for a first-attempt at record repair. A first-area comparison that is devastating to the New Zealand prior history will make further work relevant. (Australia and Canada would be second and third on the list, I’d suggest, followed by the continental USA with its UHIE problem).
We have been led to believe that skeptics have solid data that conflicts with the Hansen-Gore CAGW meme. Can we not focus somewhere and bring that out now, before the EPA and others get further into our homes? Can we not say, “This is wrong! and tomorrow I’ll be showing you how the rest of it isn’t right, either.”
If the data is bad globally, it must be bad regionally. An initial small region showing how manipulated the public has been would be more than a shot across the bows. For both sides
Anthony – like you, I am happy to judge the project on its own merits when it meets the light of day.
The NOVIM group, private sponsors of this study, seem (to me anyway) to be rather odd. They use Alarmist Warmist language, and seem to be interested mainly in things like rapid geo-engineering solutions to “climate change”. On the face of it, this suggests that they may have a financial interest in the outcome of related research. Their people seem young (e.g. PhD in 2005).
May I suggest it would be wise to find out who are the private funders of NOVIM? Other readers may be able to help.
All the best.
For those who might be interested in R. Muller, he speaks about AGW and climategate here http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U5m6KzDnv7k
Climategate @ur momisugly 6:03 mark.
Seems like a pretty upstanding guy to me although he also appears to place too much confidence in GCM’s for my liking but, hey, nobody’s perfect. 😉
I’m looking forward to their report.
Also, look at the team membership here: http://www.berkeleyearth.org/aboutus
7 physicists, 2 statisticians and 1 climatologist (Judith Curry). Encouraging.
Regarding funding, their donors are listed here: http://www.berkeleyearth.org/donors Draw your own conclusions.
Jer 12:49
Thanks for the link – great breathless prose to be found there. Pure Sci-fi as far as I can see. CAGW is a given with the need for crazy geo-engineered “solutions”. These guys are scary.
I sure hope this data will be on line, downloadable.
Suggestion, would be nice to see how many records, and range of data, for each station before one downloads it, that way we don’t have to hunt for stations with long good records.
Oslo says:
February 11, 2011 at 9:33 am
You could be right. Its a bit depressing though.
Well I sure do wish them success – and hope that in their process of checking for empirical homogeneity they consider other factors – siting issues ala surfacestations.org, lat-long precision (Mosher), existing geographic variation, humidity, climate bands, etc.
They also might need (at some point) to conduct analysis in a map-based framework (GIS). What is homogeneous at one large scale might reveal important variation at quite another.
Good luck with this Anthony. What an impact you’ve had.
Actually, what would be better, would be the ablity to send sql statements to the database and get records back.
“Prejudice” a. An adverse judgement or opinion formed beforehand or without knowledge or examination of the facts.
b. A preconceived preference or idea.
People, let’s see what this program produces, let’s see the raw data, the methodologies of data interpretation etc. before we rush into giving judgemental opinions.
Is this not what Anthony, McIntyre et al have been working for all this time? Let the group publish their findings, along with all of the associated data, and then let us form some sort of conclusion.
Remember, what is being published in this post is written by Claire Perlman
Daily Cal Senior Staff Writer, not anyone from the group involved in this project.
The proof of the pudding is in the eating. Shall we wait for the pudding to be served up before giving our opinions as to its quality?
What’s the big deal. Just because the data shows warming over the past 100+ years says nothing about the cause. This is a zero sum game at best.
Patrick Davis says:
February 11, 2011 at 8:24 am
I call this BS.
“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.”
Is this just US based? Or global? How is this possible considering the cat ate the raw, real, unadjusted, data? Also the use of the word “deniers” along side “exaggerators”. To me this seems their “program” is set firmly in the AGW, alarmist, camp.
=============
Hmm, yes I caught the deniers language give away too. Neither did I like the “irrefutable consensus” bit.
As has been said many times, science does not work on consensus, that’s a political term. Neither can any such global average from a huge stack of crap quality data, never intended for climate, be considered irrefutable.
When crap from tens of thousands of homes gets churned up and homogenised at the local sewage treatment utility, you still end up with a tank full of shit. The only consensus is that it’s irrefutably smelly.
I do not find anything in their methodology blurb that says how they will deal with UHI , airport temperatures and sub-standard weather stations but the comment in this article about “down weighting” is both vague and worrying. Down-weighted bad data is still bad data.
So it seems the object is to water down the UHI by some unspecified factor and hope we’ll accept the ensuing warming as “irrefutable”. Does not sound too promising.
If they want to call it BEST , I hope they can live up to it. Though best is only relative. Seeing the opposition, they are not setting the bar too high trying to do better.
GregP says:
February 11, 2011 at 1:35 pm
For those who might be interested in R. Muller, he speaks about AGW and climategate here http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U5m6KzDnv7k
========
Thanks for the link. This man looks like he knows what science means and has the integrity to be disgusted by “hide the decline” and whitewash (non) enqiries.
If the rest of the team are of the same calibre as him and Dr. Curry we may finally see some climate science here.
Steven Mosher Feb11 11.05am,
Are you really saying that 10 stations with long histories can adequately tell you how the temperature of the whole earth has progressed, rather than just point to the fact that there has been some warming, which of course is to be expected as we come out of the LIA?
First, it is good that a group of competent scientists — including statisticians –are attempting to be honest brokers in retailing ground station measurements. Second, the process involved is entirely transparent. There is absolutely nothing to whine about here. Please move along and find something else to bitch about.
why not do a positive control. Deliberately pick sites that fail the criteria, inside growing cities, airports and the like and see what contamination looks like, with respect to Tmax/Tmin and changes in the yearly temperature warming cooling rates?
DJ says:
February 11, 2011 at 8:34 am
Sorry, but I think we’re off on the wrong foot already, if the article itself isn’t biased towards AGW.
The statements ” the skeptics – they’re not the consensus”, “..intention of becoming the new, irrefutable consensus”, and “not as open to actual manipulation..” Not AS open?? But still open to manipulation, and by whom?”
My thoughts – when I read the word denier and the ‘new consensus’ I have to ask just when did science become consensus? And when did skepticism become not science based? It is a bit like the ‘null hypothesis’ advanced by Mr Trenberth, it doesnt make sense.
Either the good gentleman has a bit of a problem with language and communication, or we are on a hiding to no-where. No can trust. Be careful Anthony that you are not dragged by implication of association into some quagmire of maybe not deceit, but distortion.
Like was said above, test it on knowns such as NZ first.
One reporting station at San Francisco airport is used to characterize all weather in the Bay Area for the GISSTemp data set. Anyone who has lived for any length of time in that area knows that this is preposterous. That station cannot reliably measure conditions anywhere in San Francisco. It can be raining in the Avenues and remain sunny in the Mission District. In just 25 square miles you can choose your climate by choosing your neighborhood. As GISS uses only four thermometers to deduce weather everywhere in California this problem scales up. Forget statistical sampling. Some thermometers have good predictive value for large areas while others can’t be relied upon for small areas. The more thermometers the better.
Elizabeth says:
February 11, 2011 at 9:48 am
Having done more reading on the Berkeley site I found: “The Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature study has been organized under the auspices of the non-profit Novim Group.”
Link to the Novim group page, http://www.novim.org/
Scan the page and you see, “Despite efforts to stabilize CO2 concentrations, it is possible that the climate system could respond abruptly with catastrophic consequences” followed by extensive discussion on climate engineering projects.
The integrity of the research team notwithstanding, further inquiry into the nature of Novim Group’s mandate is warranted.
You are skeptical because of the participation of the Novim Group. You don’t need to be concerned. Their influence will be cancelled by the participation of the Charles H Koch Foundation, a creature of the polluting Koch Industries. They have funded anti AGW conservative think tanks like Heritage, Cato, AEI etc.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_activities_of_the_Koch_family
You can now relax.
It seems that many of the same methods used by GISS to correct bad data will be used by this new effort. They are however hoping to get away without gridding because they are using more stations.
It is doubtful that there will be a large effect on the recent temperature record. The 2 satellite records, and the three leading thermometer records show the same behavior for the recent record.
REPLY: eadler I swear you are some sort of “polluting creature” too. Mind pollution maybe? Koch sponsors the PBS NOVA TV program, it’s right there at the bottom of the web page, soooo…..be sure to close your mind to that too, they can’t possibly have a decent science program if Koch is involved now, can we? – Anthony
Pat Frank says:
February 11, 2011 at 10:09 am
Looking at the methodology described at the Berkeley site, they do not even mention systematic error. Systematic error inevitably contaminates the surface temperature record. If they neglect to discuss or evaluate that error, they’ll end up producing yet another centennial global temperature anomaly trend with plenty of statistical moxie but with no physical meaning.
There is no way to remove systematic error from an old data set. One can only estimate how large it might have been, and put conservative uncertainty bars on the result.
In either case — ignoring the systematic error in the 20th century record, or adding an estimated uncertainty width — there’s no doubt but that the global (or any local, for that matter) centennial temperature anomaly trend will be no better than almost entirely spurious.
If the Berkeley group ignores that empirical truth, their product will only kick up more controversy and be yet one more entry in the obscure the issue sweepstakes.
Please define what you mean by systematic error. Looking at their web page, they allow for station moves, the UHI, and equipment changes. These are sources of systematic error. They also check adjacent stations to look for discrepancies, in as similar manner to GISS and CRU. This is a means of catching systematic errors.