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.”
Much more on San Francisco’s notorious microclimates can be found at Wikepedia.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microclimate
Anthony,
It is good to see that you are involved with the Berkeley temp record project.
Please encourage them to be open during all the processes of the project.
John
Actually I beg to differ with Anthony on this one; “There is warming etc” UAH satellite data shows cooling for the last two months (below anomaly). The argo data shows no warming for all years and SST are much more meaningful in my view, The SH shows no warming, there is no tropospheric hot spot, definitely no “Global” effect here. Of course I am a blatant denier by now… All that said, if the study uses only raw data and no cities I would believe the outcome which will show no change (flatliner). Temps are going to go up and down for the rest of everyones life here and your childrens children until everybody gets incredibly bored, like measuring respiratory rate in a normal patient LOL.
After thinking about this alittle more, I can’t see how this could be an honest effort (I hope I’m wrong), especially if done by US academics.
Big question: Are these researchers actually prepared to be ostracized culturally and even socially by their academic peers & friends if they don’t get the desired results? I truly doubt it….
The only honest analysis will come from Anthony & other independent researchers, I’m afraid. This is the unfortunate state of pathological conformity in modern, public-funded “climate science”.
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/
Interesting find. They appear to be most interested in geoengineering – kind of planetary hit squad when the tipping point comes along (presumably after large ransom paid).
They will undoubtedly be interested in having an accurate global temperature, otherwise, as Dr Kevin Trenberth is reputed to have said, ‘how will we know if it worked’.
DocMartyn says:
February 11, 2011 at 2:31 pm
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?
The same thing could be accomplished by doing the reverse. Keep only the good sites and see what the trends looked like.
In fact this has been done. In the US, only the stations acceptable by Anthony’s criteria were examined, versus the full set of stations. The result for the US temperature trend did not change significantly.
In addition, when urban stations were dropped from the global data set used by GISS, it made no difference in the trend. This result was reported in the peer reviewed literature.
I am glad the this larger data base is being examined. It is encouraging that it is being funded by one of the Koch brothers, who are opposed to the idea that global warming is a problem. It ensures that an objective study will be done, and makes it likely that it will be accepted by “skeptics”.
Richard Muller unequivocably supports M&M in the hockey stick fiasco (in 2003/2004).
http://www.technologyreview.com/energy/13423/page1/
http://www.technologyreview.com/energy/13830/page1/
Dave Andrews says:
February 11, 2011 at 2:23 pm
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?
#######
And what would be the difference? ‘coming of out the LIA’ explain nothing.
Here is the point. Regardless of the cause the temperature of the earth has gone up over the past 150 years.
If you sample 40,000 sites you will get one estimate of the trend.
If you randomly select 10,000, 5,000, 3000, 1000, 500, 100 you will get similar trends. That’s because the distribution of trends is fairly normal ( kinda spiky)
In Ar4 I belive they looked at the 4 longest records. Same general answer.
Thats because over century scales you don’t have areas of persistent cooling while the rest of the globe warms.
Welcome to the Law of large numbers.
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.
Oh please …. these muppets appear to have completely missed the point …… as usual. I don’t know anyone (at all) who says that there hasn’t been some global warming over the last century or so. How can these guys come out with a statement like the one above ? Honestly, whats the point ?
DocMartyn says:
February 11, 2011 at 2:31 pm
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?
######
thats been done over and over again.
The biases dont rise above the noise floor. Doesnt mean they are not real. They are just small.
The presumption that using ALL 39 thousand station records will somehow improve estimates of temperatures world-wide precipitates a sense of uneasiness that the essential nature of the problem is being missed. It can summarized in two sentences:
1) Records of adequate length are available ONLY from population centers of one size or another–not from locales untouched by civilization.
2) There are large regions throughout the globe where for which there are NO credible records–including most of the oceans.
Without proven techniques for identifying LOCAL man-made effects upon station temperatures–and removing them–merely using more records will NOT solve the intrinsic problem of data CORRUPTION. Nor, barring the discovery of a treasure trove of previously unknown records in the most unlikely places on the globe, will the GEOGRAPHIC COVERAGE be materially improved. Thus, despite a more punctilious minding of largely academic P’s and Q’s, I do NOT expect the findings of this panel to differ substantially from the indiscriminate data products of the “major” index manufacturers.
P. Solar says:
P. Solar and others. dr. Curry put me in contact with the researchers long ago.
My interaction with them has been favorable. Issues that I raised about metadata
are on the table. Their Approach or method is mathematically sound and in line
with the methods of RomanM and jeffId. Its the best method.
Sadly I don’t think Muller’s project will resolve a single solitary thing, because it addresses the least relevant and least interesting part of the controversy – adding needless precision to the argument about exactly how much the difficult-to-define “average” temperature has changed in the extremely recent (last 150 years or so) past.
Actual questions that are controversial:
Whether the change is a threat.
Whether and to what extent human activity affects the climate.
What can be done to ameliorate or adapt to that change.
Whether anything should be done to ameliorate or adapt to that change.
So far #1 and #2 are the big fighting points, and #3 is filled with pie-in-the-sky flying-windmills kinds of things at the moment, some of which is unfortunately costing money and resources.
I conclude that, as well-intentioned as it may be, Muller’s efforts are almost entirely pointless.
I say “almost” because, hey, a major database of raw temperature data combining existing data could be useful. It just won’t resolve the debate at all.
The satellite data do show some warming over the last 30 years and both RSS and UAH show that 1998 was the hottest year so far, although I have to admit that it could be argued that 2010 was a statistical tie with 1998. But with the Met Office also having 1998 warmer than 2010, even thought the race was close, the first thing that I will be watching for is whether or not 1998 still beats 2010 and retains its rank as the hottest year of the last 50 according to their results. With the great increase in the number of thermometers being used, this would naturally mean more thermometers in the northern Arctic about which there has been a lot of discussion. I do not dispute that the northern Arctic has warmed, however there is no way I believe it has warmed as much as GISS would have us believe.
The area in the north polar region above 82.5 degrees is 2.2 x 10^6 km squared. This is where satellites apparently cannot get readings. The ratio of the area between the whole earth and the north polar region above 82.5 degrees is 5.1 x 10^8 km squared/2.2 x 10^6 km squared = 230. So that area above 82.5 degrees is only 1/230 or 0.43% of Earth. This is not enough to allow GISS to give 1998 as low a ranking as it does.
Anthony,
Since most of the comments seem to be posted by people that have no
knowledge of Richard Muller I would like to see his credentials before
the comments.
Department of Physics at the University of California at Berkeley, and Faculty Senior Scientist at the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory, where I am also associated with the Institute for Nuclear and Particle Astrophysics.
Named by students as Best Class at Berkeley! (It has won this honor for the last two years in a row.)
Like most here, I look forward to a more accurate “global temperature anomaly” trend. However, they cannot settle the issue of CAGW with a temperature anomaly trend. I think most skeptics acknowledge that the earth has warmed since Franklin and Jefferson began measuring temperatures. There are the matters of attribution and sensitivity to solve.
DaleC says:
February 11, 2011 at 4:23 pm
Richard Muller unequivocably supports M&M in the hockey stick fiasco (in 2003/2004).
http://www.technologyreview.com/energy/13423/page1/
I don’t think that is accurate. He says they have an argument that must be considered, and time will tell. He is open minded on the question.
Last month’s article by McIntyre and McKitrick raised pertinent questions. They had been given access (by Mann) to details of the work that were not publicly available. Independent analysis and (when possible) independent data sets are ultimately the arbiter of truth. This is precisely the way that science should, and usually does, proceed. That’s why Nobel Prizes are often awarded one to three decades after the work was completed-to avoid mistakes. Truth is not easy to find, but a slow process is the only one that works reliably
It is 2004, before the NAS report, which weakened the conclusions of the Hockey Stick. Subsequently it was shown that M&M’s claim the the HS was invalid because it was an artifact of non centered PCI is incorrect. It was shown that centered PCI also gives a hockey stick if the correct PCI procedure is used.
Since then many papers have been published which confirm the hockey stick shape of the NH temperature anomaly. Muller subsequently changed his mind.
Errors have been discovered in the “Hockey Stick” statistical model that shows the potential for dramatic future increases in global temperatures. This claim arises from a February 2005 article in Geophysical Research Letters by Stephen McIntyre and Ross McKitrick claiming various errors in the methodology of Mann et al. (1998) in the principal component analysis they used to generate the “Hockey Stick.” McIntyre and McKitrick first made this claim in 2003 in the social science journal Energy and Environment. The same paper was later unanimously rejected by the editors and reviewers of the journal Nature before being printed in Geophysical Research Letters at the urging of physicist and McArthur Fellow Dr. Richard Muller. In response to the 2005 article scores of scientists worldwide verified the statistical methods used by Mann in the generation of the “Hockey Stick” and no peer-reviewed claims doubting its veracity have arisen since
In fact, Professor Muller has changed his mind since then, based on what has been written since then. In his 2009 power point, he shows the Hockey Stick graph as something political decision makers need to know. Check out page 67 of the following presentation that he gave:
http://www.strategicstudiesinstitute.army.mil/pdffiles/strat20/muller/muller.ppt
Physics for Presidents and other World Leaders
Mac the Knife says:
February 11, 2011 at 12:39 pm
…
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.
Actually, no. The planet warmed from the approximate end of the last major glacial epoch, which was around 20 to 17 kya (thousand years ago), until about 8 kya. Since then the overall trend has been cooling. Warm episodes have been trending both shorter and cooler over the Holocene, and cool episodes both cooler and longer during the same span. The planet recently – geologically, that is – seems to have been warming over the last 200 years or so, but you should read Pat Franks’ (2010) paper on the real measurement error of the available global surface temperature record, which IIRC is, at two sigma, about +/- 0.92 degrees C (one-sigma is +/- 0.46 degrees C). Franks concludes that the trend over that span is statistically indistinguishable from a 0-degree trend. We do know that geographic plant distributions and thermometers all seen to show evidence of warming, but the instrumental record is simply too uncertain to offer any really good estimate of the magnitude of the change.
…
Cheers,
Sorry, this looks tainted already. The statement: “Global warming is real” is itself suggestive that man is causing it. And if your period looks back 1000 years, it is likely false, not true. Global warmth variability is real. If the 1930s were warmer than today, and so understood, no one would say warming is real. It may not be. Warmer today than 1977? Sure. So what?
And without solid ocean and humidity data over the last few hundred years, we really don’t know anything. So is there really any point to a global mean temperature comparison? Not much.
“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, this makes more sense now, a clear indication of bias in the media (What a surprise!). Still, would Muller have not been given the chance by the reporter to “eyeball” the article first before publishing?
eadler, see my paper, here (free pdf download).
I’m talking of systematic error in the temperature record due to problems at the instrumental level. Inaccuracies enter field-measured temperatures because of solar loading on sensor shields and wind speed effects, which cause the sensor to record something other than the true air temperature.
There are empirical ways to account for this and remove the error from each measured temperature, but they require independent precision monitoring of insolation intensity and wind speed (and variations in albedo, too, actually). None of that was ever done at USHCN climate stations during the 20th century, nor likely anywhere else. Some of the new CRN stations may include that capacity, but monitoring now won’t do anything for systematic inaccuracies in the prior 150 years of the instrumental record.
I didn’t see any recognition at the Berkeley site of the systematic effects that cause sensor error in the field. Systematic error won’t show up in any statistical test of the raw data, or in cross-comparisons of regional temperature-time series.
Because systematic effects at the sensor are caused by the same processes that govern air temperatures (insolation, wind, albedo), the resulting systematic errors will be pretty much as regionally correlated as the air temperatures themselves.
I will be interested to hear of how they handle the incredibly vexing question of station classification. I.e. rural or urban
I’ve seen plenty of evidence of stations still classified as “rural” whilst having already in reality transitioned into what should be an “urban” classification. This is where adjustments for UHI can be done incorrectly and skew your whole data set.
Sometimes things are so badly broken that they cannot be reassembled. I suspect this is the case when your looking at reconstructing a temperature record from surface station measurements.
Larry Hamlin wrote on February 11, 2011 at 9:00 am:
QUOTE
In reading the methodology material I was unable to determine how the Urban Heat Island (UHI) impacts are going to be addressed in this study. I would hope that this critical issue is to be evaluated in this independent temperature data study.
Is that the case? If so can someone please explain where this issue is addressed in the methodology. Thanks.
UNQUOTE
Thanks Larry.
I agree completely.
From my observations of various Australian individual locations, UHI explains ALL the long term trend.
And there are all the problems of unsuitable sites, faulty instruments and housing, etc that Anthony has written about.
It seems to me that expanding from a few thousand data points to over 39,000 makes the task of getting the answer right, in terms of truely reflecting the agverage global temperature, much, much, much more difficult.
Open source data and programs would be a real advance.
But I am still very doubtful about programs that attempt to spread the data over the surface of the globe, beyond the actual spots where the temperatures are taken.
Forget the possibility of manipulation or bias.
Just what does the gridded output mean?
We know, thanks to very close attention to data by ancients long ago, that moving the thermometer at Sydney Observatory Hill in 1917 – about 150 metres down hill to the south east, made a significant difference to the measured temperature – max & min, month by month and annually.
Those gridded outputs are just grizzled mish mash, in my opinion.
And downgrading some of the data relative to others, seems to be unacceptable as well.
With 39,000 plus data points, why not just add them up and divided by the number?
The answer may not be the mean temperature of the earth, but it would sure tell us more as it changes over the years, than any complex output from programs that even if open source, the man in the street cannot understand.
Gentlemen
I going into this, I am going to presume “innocence” with an expectation of honest effort. And further, I am prepared to tentatively applauded what appears to be a well intentioned and refreshing effort to conduct climate science in a transparent and open manner.
That said, I must echo many of the comments above in that I am far more interested in the future collection of long-term surface temperature data using instrumentation that is properly located, is properly and consistently QA/QC’d, is routinely checked using independent instrumentation, and is inherently accurate enough to measure ambient surface air temperatures within the range of interest (say +/- 0.001 degrees F).
Unfortunately for CAGW advocates and skeptics alike, our historically surface temperature data is: highly fragmented; of uncertain, inconsistent, and poorly documented accuracy; lacks common/consistent quality control; and we are attempting to discern differences in an exceptionally narrow temperature range.
This leaves reasonable doubt as to wither any analysis of the historical instrument record truly has scientific value. In the face of this uncertainty, we are relying of the “magic” of statistics. While I value the views statisticians and firmly believe statistics is a valuable tool; no amount of statistical analysis can make-up for inadequate data. Absent reliable and accurate readings, we must recognize we are simply “making do”.
Sadly, in my view, the historical surface temperature record is simply too crude to have conclusive scientific value. I remain inclined to place far greater weight on satellite data – the UAH data in particular – and very little weight on even properly analyzed historical surface temperature data.
On balance I’m willing to give “Berkeley Earth” the benefit of a doubt. But, like most science, the resulting product will only be a part of the picture. We will still be left to judge the “preponderance of the evidence”.
Regards, Kforestcat
As a Stanford man, I can almost guarantee that these doofi from Berkeley can and will find that, in fact, the globe has warmed 35 degrees C. in the last 10 years, and we have until tomorrow morning to raise the hammer and sickle flag and retake our world from the evil, carbon dioxide-spewing capitalists or suffer catastrophic…whatever.
Mike Haseler says:
February 11, 2011 at 9:24 am “…An institution like Berkeley can’t afford to get it wrong (unlike the UEA)…” Well as a matter of fact Berkeley can hardly ever get it right on anything these last 40 years or so.
And finally, @sharper00. There’s nothing sharp about you. The double zeroes at the end of your monicker say it all. I would favor Anthony simply scrubbing all you have to say all the time, but he won’t do that, and I understand why. He’s just a nice man.