Note: I spent the day with the BEST team yesterday at Lawrence Livermore Berkeley Laboratories and I’ll have a report on it soon, but here in the meantime is what Fred Singer has to say about it, via Climate Realists. – Anthony
By Dr. Fred Singer
The e-mails leaked from the University of East Anglia in November 2009 produced what is popularly called “Climategate.” They exposed the thoroughly unethical behavior of a group of climate scientists, mainly in the UK and US, involved in producing the global surface temperature record used and relied on by governments.
Not only did these climate scientists hide their raw data and their methodology of selection and adjustment of temperature data, but they fought hard against all attempts by independent outside scientists to replicate their results. They also undermined the peer-review system and tried to make it impossible for skeptical scientists to publish their work in scientific journals. There is voluminous evidence in the e-mails to this effect. In the process, they damaged not only the science enterprise — full publication of data and methods, replication of results, open debate, etc — but they also undermined the public credibility of all scientists.
However, the most serious revelation from the e-mails is that they tried to “hide the decline” in temperatures, using various “tricks” in order to keep alive a myth of rising temperatures in support of the dogma of anthropogenic global warming. There have now been a number of investigations of the activities of this group, mainly in the UK. These have all turned out to be complete whitewashes, aimed to exonerate the scientists involved. None of these investigations has even attempted to learn how and in what way the data might have been manipulated.
Much of this is described in the “Hockey Stick Illusion: Climategate and the corruption of science” by A. W. Montford. Meteorologist Joseph D’Aleo and others have made a commendable effort to show how data might have been altered. But an independent effort to reconstruct the global temperature results of the past century really demands a dedicated project with proper resources.
The Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature (BEST) Project aims to do what needs to be done: That is, to develop an independent analysis of the data from land stations, which would include many more stations than had been considered by the Global Historic Climatology Network. The Project is in the hands of a group of recognized scientists, who are not at all “climate skeptics” — which should enhance their credibility. The Project is mainly directed by physicists, chaired by Professor Richard Muller (UC Berkeley), with a steering group that includes Professor Judith Curry (Georgia Tech) and Arthur Rosenfeld (UC Santa Barbara and Georgia Tech).
I applaud and support what is being done by the Project — a very difficult but important undertaking. I personally have little faith in the quality of the surface data, having been exposed to the revealing work by Anthony Watts and others. However, I have an open mind on the issue and look forward to seeing the results of the Project in their forthcoming publications.
As far as I know, no government or industry funds are involved — at least at this stage. According to the Project’s website www.berkeleyearth.org, support comes mostly from a group of charitable foundations.
~~~~~~~~~~~~
Atmospheric physicist S. Fred Singer is Professor Emeritus of Environmental Sciences at the University of Virginia and former director of the US weather satellite service. He is a Senior Fellow of the Independent Institute and the Heartland Institute. He is the author or co-author of Unstoppable Global Warming [2007], Nature not Human Activity Rules the Climate [2008], and Climate Change Reconsidered [2009].
D. King says:
February 19, 2011 at 6:19 pm
JPeden says:
February 19, 2011 at 5:50 pm
“Just make sure the IPCC can’t adjust the satellite and ARGO data.”
Well said.
Agreed, but lawrie was the one who said it!
Minor correction to the above comment about Ben Santer’s “stamping ground.”
As I understand it, Ben Santer’s “ground” is at Lawrence Livermore Laboratory, about 50 miles east of Berkeley in the city of Livermore.
Professor Muller is at UC Berkeley and is also a Senior Faculty Scientist at the Lawrence Berkeley which is spread out on the hill behind the main campus.
I didnt’ see a damn thing in the methodology about correcting for UHI.
Anybody here willing to bet the results are more than 0.05C different than the hockey team’s pencil whipped result?
I wouldn’t bet on it. This is just an attempt to lend credibility to the extant claims. The data collection methods were just never designed or intended to have the kind of accuracy needed to detect a miniscule GHG signature riding on top of far greater natural variation. It’s an exercise in polishing a turd and everybody knows you can’t polish a turd.
Don V
I’m inclined to agree with you when you list all the problems with the historic temperature record in various countries BEFORE adjustment.
How can BEST hope to cope with these when the extent of the problem is unknown and unknowable.
You need a certain lack of a sense of humour to be a climatologist.
Robert E. Phelan says:
February 19, 2011 at 6:21 pm
“correspondence between the instrumental and proxy records was close until 1960 when they began to diverge”
Sure they were. If you have enough trees to choose from it’s easy enough to find some that show what you want. Unfortunately none of those worked really well in the last several decades so they just stopped using tree rings and stitched in thermometer data instead which showed what they wanted to show.
The bottom line remains that if the tree rings weren’t a good proxy in the last 40 years you cannot claim they were a good proxy for the 800 years preceding that. What Mann did was bogus, dishonest, and several other adjectives which propriety prevents me from writing here. Anyone who argues otherwise can apply the same adjectives to themselves.
Now tree rings as an indicator of historic temperature also needs a certain lack of a sense of humour.
Consider the problems.
Mostly confined to the north hemisphere.
Confined to the land not the ocean.
Confined to a relatively few, scattered locations.
Confined to wilderness locations.
Uncontrolled and uncontrollabe confounding errors coming from variations in rainfall, competing species, variations in pest levels, etc etc.
Redherrings abound, Cadae has nailed the context of “Hide The Decline”, Fred Singer is accurate in his description of the multiple fraud by team IPCC. The period of climate being argued has steadily shrunk since Steve McIntyre started asking questions, soon the sky is falling section will be calling todays weather unprecedented since breakfast. Sort of like the concensus has fallen from 2500 to 0052. Or is it now 18? Saying the temperature increase since 1960 is significant is a deliberate ploy. The defense of the CRU emails ,of context ,was ironic to say the least.
Doug Badgero says:
February 19, 2011 at 5:03 pm
Thanks D King
Everyone should watch the Dr. Muller video. Watch the whole thing it’s only 11 minutes long.
I second that, Dr. Muller looks like someone who will follow the facts despite his beliefs.
Andrew30 says: February 19, 2011 at 3:59 pm
briffa_sep98_e.pro
Line 4:
—
; Reads Harry’s regional timeseries and outputs the 1600-1992 portion
Line 10:
—
valadj=[0.,0.,0.,0.,0.,-0.1,-0.25,-0.3,0.,-0.1,0.3,0.8,1.2,1.7,2.5,2.6,2.6,$
2.6,2.6,2.6]*0.75 ; fudge factor
—
========================
Notice that phrase “fudge factor” doesn’t sound like hiding to me!
========================
Lines 53-70
—
; APPLY ARTIFICIAL CORRECTION
I feel that briffa_sep98_e.pro is the encoding of a lie.
did you notice this:
;****** APPLIES A VERY ARTIFICIAL CORRECTION FOR DECLINE*********
Hiding????
Next file calibrate_nhrecon
; Specify period over which to compute the regressions (stop in 1960 to avoid
; the decline that affects tree-ring density records)
next file recon_overpeck
; Specify period over which to compute the regressions (stop in 1940 to avoid
; the decline
(I think they mean 1960 !! to agree with the code that follows)
Next File recon_esper.pro
recon_mann.pro
recon2.pro
recon_jones.pro
recon_tornyamataim.pro
All the same comment added in the header
Hiding?? I do not think so
recon_tornyamataim.pro
Seems to be the later version of your files:
densadj=reform(rawdat(2:3,*))
ml=where(densadj eq -99.999,nmiss)
densadj(ml)=!values.f_nan
Note no yearlyadj no valadj
So which programme was used to publish??
So cutting through all the above verbage, am I correct in saying that nobody gives the treemometers any credibility in the very recent past (and that’s why Mann dovetailed data from two completely different temperature sources)?
What gives anybody any confidence that treemometers for hundreds or thousands of years ago are any more credible?
I’d say Mann’s move was quintessential climsci–bastardized data!
Dr. Singer is being generous when he says that “[The Climategate protagonists] undermined the peer-review system.” They MANIPULATED the peer-review system so as to try to exclude opposing research and to intimidate editors who did have an inclination to publish such work. Then, having contrived this nearly impermeable wall of opposition, they and their supporters could puff themselves up as self righteous and demean any work that was not “peer reviewed.”
The BEST project has the potential to begin to establish badly needed credibility in the field. But we have been burned before. “Trust but eerify.”
Are these the same charitable foundations that, though Tides, are trying to eco-subvert the leadership race of the “right-of-centre” party in British Columbia? For background, see Vivian Krause’s investigative reports in The National Post and elsewhere.
sharper00 says:
February 19, 2011 at 12:00 pm
“However, the most serious revelation from the e-mails is that they tried to “hide the decline” in temperatures, using various “tricks” in order to keep alive a myth of rising temperatures in support of the dogma of anthropogenic global warming.”
“I’m pretty sure that anyone even remotely familiar with the climategate emails, even people who think everyone involved should be stuffed into a cannon and fired into the sun, knows this claim is simply not correct.”
Jones, Mann, and others lied and presented graphs which falsely showed that tree ring data continued to show rising temperatures after 1960 when the data in fact showed a decline. Spin it how you want. They are liars.
I wonder if the trees are actually correct. We know the surface station records aren’t right, and the whole network is an almighty mess. The alarmists couldn’t make the trees tell the story they wanted them to like they could with the surface stations, so they hid that inconvenient bit of info.
Pretty soon the trolls are going to be so annoying that there will be no point in posting to this site. If there were some redeeming value in the trolls, I could maybe understand posting what they write, but I do not see it.
To John Robertson
Ah, sorry about that. 🙁
I’m staying cautious on this until we see more. There are few reasons for optimism:
– I suspect that they will likely release all the raw data, adjusted data, methods and code.
– The involvement of physicists (or anyone from the ‘hard’ sciences) is probably a positive. Even the ones with an agenda tend to have more rigor in their work than they typical Team ‘climate scientist’.
– The involvement of some lukewarmers.
– Seeking input from the skeptic community.
There are also reasons for pessimism:
– Some of the funding appears to come from agenda-driven sources.
– Focus on the temperature record is generally not conducive to promoting skepticism among the public. Most skeptics acknowledge that the temperature has increased since the little ice age, just not as much as the alarmists assert. The key point that remains unaddressed in this effort is “why the temperature is increasing”. Due to the last few decades of relentless propaganda, most members of the public will just assume that any increase they hear about is man-made, even if the “why” is left unaddressed. Therefore any improved data set that shows the temperature is increasing, even if less than previously thought, does little to help the skeptical viewpoint but is a PR “win” for the alarmists.
– If you were one of the leaders behind the climate alarmist movement, now that the existing temperature records are so thoroughly suspect, it would be a logical strategic move to commission a new temperature record that would appear more legitimate. In fact, if you were clever you would probably try to include (or appear to include) some of the things in the “optimistic” list above (as long as your desired outcome could still be guaranteed). It would be particularly damaging to your opponents if you could get some leading climate skeptics to endorse the methodology before the results are released.
Thus, even if the results are completely unbiased and accurate, it’s probably not going to be much help to the skeptics but can easily be spun to support the alarmist agenda (“see, the world actually is warming due to CO2 just not yet as fast as we thought. That means there’s still time for Cap and Trade to still save your children’s future!”)
Certainly, a more accurate and transparent temperature record will help the fundamental science (for those that want to pursue it honestly), however even the best case outcome for skeptics is still likely to be neutral-to-slightly-negative for the political battle and near-term public opinion.
Ooops! My second sentence should read “There are [a] few reasons for optimism”. That missing “a” inverts the meaning…
In the beginning was the decline.
Then there was the desire to CONCEAL (sorry, HIDE) the decline.
Then there was the HIDING of the decline.
Then there was the discovery of the HIDING of the decline.
Then there was the protracted discussion about which decline was being HIDDEN.
Okay, the HIDING wasn’t a roaring sucess, but the intent was not HIDDEN.
TWE says:
February 19, 2011 at 8:03 pm
I wonder if the trees are actually correct. …….
———————————————————————————————
I’ve been out for a bit, so I’m late. And I apologize beforehand for the demeanor that may be conveyed.
The trees being correct? By what significance?
“By this tree ring, I can determine, without question, within a 1/10th of a degree what the temp was 500 years ago, globally.”
That’s horse [snip]. I know it’s horse [snip]. The people that did the studies knows its horse [snip]. Any cogent person in this universe knows this is horse [snip]. And here’s the [snip] kicker. I can prove that in today’s world, they can’t come to even one degree of accuracy, much less a 1/10th. But they can 500, 100, 1000 years ago. ………… buying that.
People practicing in fictional history should be horse whipped.
sharper00 says:
February 19, 2011 at 12:00 pm re Climategate –
“knows this claim is simply not correct.”
Sharperoo, precisely in which way is the claim wrong?
My only criticism is the inference that the “trick” and “hide the decline” were the most serious revelations. There were other serious revelations, depending on where ones interests were.
A vexatious fool might argue for the sanitised meanings of trick and hide, but in the world of reality, we know better, don’t we.
Berkeley doing the compilation?… Berkeley? Really? Ummm, I’m don’t I trust tenured scientists anymore.
Dave Springer says:
February 19, 2011 at 7:03 pm
Dave: May I humbly suggest that you sit down and attempt to stop hyperventilating and start engaging your thinking processes. There was nothing I wrote that could be construed as defending Dr. Mann, his methods or his tactics and I resent your implication that’s what I was doing and impugning my character. Steve McIntyre has had an extensive discussion of the divergence problem, the hockey stick and the apparent cherry-picking of data from Yamal to support the hockey stick. No one who has studied the issue claims that the pre-1960 correlation of tree rings with the instrumental record was the result of cherry-picking or innovative statistics. If I understand McIntyre correctly, the correlation existed but it was accidental. Cores with rings dating after 1960 are interpreted as showing lower temperatures than those yielded by the instruments. McIntyre also argued that the cores, which by this time are thirty years old, should be updated with new cores from the same trees to see if the divergence has continued; something that Michael Mann and others have resisted. The only accurate statement you made was if the tree rings weren’t a good proxy in the last 40 years you cannot claim they were a good proxy for the 800 years preceding that which of course, is the whole point behind “hide the decline”, splicing the instrumental record on to the proxy record to avoid inconvenient questions about the reliability of the proxies.
The whole point of my comment, Mosher’s and others is that “hide the decline” was not about a decline in temperature. All we are asking is that someone with Dr. Singer’s prominence and visibility keep the facts straight. Anything else just gives the alarmists fodder.
Just correcting errant bold fields.
There are several current projects examining the temperature record (at last). Some are global, some national, some land only. Some are concentrating on specific adjustments. The rationale is that a second look might not go amiss. By analogy, it is quite common in business for a budget submission to go back back for a sharper pencil repeat.
In the specific case of land thermometer temperatures, I’m sure that several readers have formed views as to the main points needing attention in a reanalysis.
It would be most appreciated if you would give some thought to these – especially to innovative approaches and algorithms – and send your thoughts to me either through here (OK, Anthony?) or to my email sherro1 at optusnet dot com dot au
I’m proposing to experiment with discarding infilling of missing data by guesswork in favour of deleting missing days for all adjacent years in the surrounding decade. This, of course, depends on the missing values not being biased to a time, like summer holidays. I’m also proposing to do away with TOBS on the basis that the ups and downs will cancel on examination over long terms. Comments appreciated.