ERRATA: I made a mistake regarding the 2% figure, I misheard what was being presented during my visit with the BEST team at Berkeley. As many of you may know I’m about 80% hearing impaired and the presentation made to me was entirely verbal with some printed graphs. Based on the confidentiality I agreed to, I did not get to come back with any of those graphs, notes, or data so I had to rely on what I heard. I simply misheard and thought the 2% were the Japan station analysis graphs that they showed me.
I was in touch with Dr. Richard Muller on 3/28/2011 who graciously pointed out my misinterpretation. I regret the error, and thus issue this correction about the 2% figure being truly a random sample, and not just stations in the Japan test presentation shown to me.
I am told of another correction, and that is that Dr. Caldeira was shown a paper they are working on related paper on oceans, and that contained the preliminary 2% graph from the surface analysis, but was not the full surface analysis paper, which hasn’t yet been written.
According to Dr. Muller, that 2% test run does not contain all the bias corrections they plan to apply for station moves, discontinuous records, UHI and other station effects. I look forward to seeing the data when those are applied to the full dataset.
This episode where Mr. Romm gets an email from Dr. Caldeira and creates a “finding” illustrates the danger in rushing to judgment on snippets of preliminary results, and as BEST says: “The Berkeley Earth team feels very strongly that no conclusions can yet be drawn from this preliminary analysis.”
I still believe that BEST represents a very good effort, and that all parties on both sides of the debate should look at it carefully when it is finally released, and avail themselves to the data and code that is promised to allow for replication.
– Anthony Watts
Last week Willis told you about how Joe Romm at Climate Progress botched a blog post so bad, Joe had not only to fix his own post by removing false claims about population trends, so did the paper’s authors. Then, rather than simply admit a mistake and move on, he spun it into some sort of twirling victory dance, bizarrely claiming that because Willis put up a chart of CO2 rates, “he” got us to admit that CO2 rates were increasing because Willis chose it as a reference. Heh, well if that floats your boat, you go Joe. WUWT has quite a history in discussing CO2 with graphs, rates, and guest essays, no news there.
This week, it’s the old pea and thimble trick combined with desperation and some silly claim of “exclusive”, like some cheap MSM news labeling graphic where they’ve caught some sex poodle on tape. After earlier writing a piece condemning the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature Project (BEST) he’s now put up his interpretation of an email from scientist Ken Caldiera who said:
I have seen a copy of the Berkeley group’s draft paper, which of course would be expected to be revised before submission.
Their preliminary results sit right within the results of NOAA, NASA, and HadCRU, confirming that prior analyses were correct in every way that matters. Their results confirm the reality of global warming and support in all essential respects the historical temperature analyses of the NOAA, NASA, and HadCRU.
Their analysis supports the view that there is no fire behind the smokescreen put up by climate science deniers.
The only problem is this: there’s no “draft paper” yet, there’s nothing that is “submission ready”, not even close. It hasn’t been written. In fact, BEST hasn’t even done a full global analysis yet. How do I know this? It’s simple; I’ve visited the team and asked them directly, something Romm has not done.
Caldeira was simply looking at the same set of data (some preliminary charts and graphs that Richard Muller carries around with him in a file folder), that BEST has been showing to several people, including me. The only difference is that people like myself, Steven Mosher, and his friend Zeke Hausfather who visited BEST with him, haven’t run off the rails to make early and unsubstantiated claims about it “confirming” anything yet. And now, Romm’s adding to his original blogpost, is backpedaling, while at the same time picking a fight with Steven Mosher for notifying him on the issue in comments. It is sad, comical, and oh-so-typical of the sort of thing we’ve come to expect at Climate Progress. Romm simply got excited and jumped the shark. He’s not doing himself any favors with this sort of thing.
Here’s the Initial Findings statement from BEST, written by lead scientist Robert Rhode (of globalwarmingart.com) which pretty much mirrors what Caldeira is saying:
The Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature project has not yet done the analysis of the full data set with the corrections to produce a global surface temperature trend. We are first analyzing a small subset of data (2%) to check our programs and statistical methods and make sure that they are functioning effectively. We are correcting our programs and methods while still “blind” to the results so that there is less chance of inadvertently introducing a bias.
A preliminary analysis of 2% of the Berkeley Earth dataset shows a global temperature trend that goes up and down with global cycles, and does so broadly in sync with the temperature records from other groups such as NOAA, NASA, and Hadley CRU. However, the preliminary analysis includes only a very small subset (2%) of randomly chosen data, and does not include any method for correcting for biases such as the urban heat island effect, the time of observation bias, etc.
The Berkeley Earth team feels very strongly that no conclusions can yet be drawn from this preliminary analysis.
That 2% subset they refer to is some weather stations in Japan. They chose Japan because it made for a compact insular test case for the code, combining rural, urban, and airport stations under one organization’s output to keep it simple. Like Ken Caldeira, I’ve seen that preliminary 2% output. I’ve also seen a lot of other things, some things Caldieira hasn’t seen that the BEST team has shared with me. So has Zeke and Mosher, but neither they nor I are screaming “exclusive” and jumping to conclusions like Romm is doing over Caldeira’s general statement on that 2% sample run to test the code.
What’s even funnier is that whenever we mention USHCN trends for USA stations, AGW proponents are quick to point out that the USA has only about 6% of the land surface area of the Earth (USA: 9,629,091 km2, Earth: 148,940,000 km2 source), but they are now willing to go with the weather station data from 377,930 square kilometers of Japan’s land area which is 0.25% of the Earth’s surface area, as enough for “confirmation” of a global trend.
In response to this latest yapping from Romm, BEST has also now updated their FAQs page here, and says this:
NEW – What do your results show?
The Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature project has not yet done the analysis of the full data set with the corrections to produce a global surface temperature trend. We are first analyzing a small subset of data (2%) to check our programs and statistical methods and make sure that they are functioning effectively. We are correcting our programs and methods while still “blind” to the results so that there is less chance of inadvertently introducing a bias.
A preliminary analysis of 2% of the Berkeley Earth dataset shows a global temperature trend that goes up and down with global cycles, and does so broadly in sync with the temperature records from other groups such as NOAA, NASA, and Hadley CRU. However, the preliminary analysis includes only a very small subset (2%) of randomly chosen data, and does not include any method for correcting for biases such as the urban heat island effect, the time of observation bias, etc. The Berkeley Earth team feels very strongly that no conclusions can yet be drawn from this preliminary analysis.
Compare Romm’s “exclusive” to Zeke’s writeup over at Lucia’s last week which preceded Romm’s. Zeke’s essay has firsthand accounts, is a lot easier to read, and doesn’t need gratuitous exclamation points. For those who don’t know him, Zeke Hausfather is very much in the warming camp, but he’s also a reasonable person. Zeke wrote about a technique that I agreed to keep in confidence until they had a paper accepted for publication or chose to announce it on their own, but it may have been just a slip or communications misunderstanding:
Their major innovation, in addition to those that overlap the work of other bloggers, is to treat inhomogenities as the start of separate records. The least squares method of record combination has the major benefit of allowing relatively short records to be combined together without introducing biases. This means that instead of trying to artificially correct inhomogenities detected by comparing individual stations to their neighbors, they can simply treat these as break points, where subsequent measurements from the same site are treated as a separate record and are optimally fit to the larger series using the LSM approach.
The issue hasn’t been the slight warming over the past century, we’ve always conceded that there is some. The issue has always been magnitude, uncertainties, and cause. With the BEST project, we’ll get closer to the ground truth of magnitude and uncertainties, but it will say nothing about the cause, except perhaps to help define the contributions of UHI and station siting.
I’ll repeat what I said earlier about BEST:
And, I’m prepared to accept whatever result they produce, even if it proves my premise wrong. I’m taking this bold step [providing my surfacestations data to them] because the method has promise. So let’s not pay attention to the little yippers who want to tear it down before they even see the results. I haven’t seen the global result, nobody has, not even the home team…
…
My gut feeling? The possibility that we may get the elusive “grand unified temperature” for the planet is higher than ever before. Let’s give it a chance.
More science, less barking.
I have seen a copy of the Berkeley group’s draft paper, which of course would be expected to be revised before submission.
Their preliminary results sit right within the results of NOAA, NASA, and HadCRU, confirming that prior analyses were correct in every way that matters. Their results confirm the reality of global warming and support in all essential respects the historical temperature analyses of the NOAA, NASA, and HadCRU.
Their analysis supports the view that there is no fire behind the smokescreen put up by climate science deniers.
“I’m taking this bold step [providing my surfacestations data to them]”
FOI request – Please send me a copy of your data ASAP.
guys
do you not understand the difference between data and hypotheses.
If BEST works out, we will have quality-assured data for the land temperature. then let the theoreticians loose.
re; “We are watching science being done.”
Hardly. We are watching statistical analysis being done.
To be fair though the lines between math, science, and engineering get pretty blurry in pratice.
For Rocky Road – yes, I was a professional in computer science and was so good at it I was able to retire at the tender age of 43 to pursue my lifelong interests in other sciences. Much of that time was spent studying molecular biology and the evolution of life.
Pretty much what everyone else calls science I call reverse engineering. Reverse engineering is taking an extant system of some sort and figuring out how it works by any means at your disposal. In practice this is how science is done. One can pedantically drone on about the scientific method but in practice science is done by any means that yields answers. To me nature is like any other black box. It doesn’t matter whether the black box is a natural or man-made item. The principles behind the means and methods of reverse engineering remain the same – you take what you know about the inputs and outputs and formulate hypotheses about what happens in between. You test your hypotheses by altering inputs (perform experiments) and making predictions about how that should change, or not, the outputs. Sometimes experiments aren’t designed to test predictions but rather just to yield more data which may or may not help solve the puzzle.
I just posted this over at Joe’s … we’ll see if it shows up.
w.
Romm is justified. Skeptics have made a big hoo-hah over the records, claiming such things as a station dropout in the 90s caused the warming, so it’s only fair that skeptics are held accountable if independent studies such as this BEST record end up supporting HadCRUT and GISTEMP. Skeptics have not just been dispassionate observers waiting for results, they’ve been heavily leaning on the warming in the records being exaggerated, adjusted, fabricated, etc.
http://onlinedictionary.datasegment.com/word/experimental+science
I spent a good fraction of my adult life (waking hours) chained to a bench in commercial R&D labs. I know about the importance of experimental repeatability.
Exactly how does one go about repeating outdoor temperature measurements taken in the past? Climate “science” isn’t scientific research. It’s observational research. Hence the need for statistical analysis and a handy explanation of why Rutherford famously said “If your experiment requires statistical analysis you should have designed a better experiment”.
Joe who?
I don’t trust this BEST group (and I hope I’m wrong in this.) And I wouldn’t be surprised if the come out with the same results or maybe even worse warming than what Hansen shows.
Jeff Carlson says:
“this “project” is nothing more than a revenue and prestige program …
“they know that the station data is useless on a global scale due to sighting, time, possible UHI and observation differences … they also know that only a tiny percentage of the planets surface has more than 40 years of records ”
I disagree. If you read the BEST pdf, you will see that the study is designed to identify spatial and temporal inhomogeneities at the individual station level and correct for them. Spatial inhomogeneities would of course include the possible presence of UHI and other observational differences (for example locating an observation station on a airport tarmac). Temporal inhomogeneities would include changes in observational methodology, incorrect readings for some period and unrecorded station movements. If you read the BEST pdf, you will see that the study is designed to make use of relatively short station records but that such data receives a lower weight in calculating the GT anomaly than do longer term records. Furthermore, BEST will eliminate gridding by integrating the weighted, adjusted anomalies for each station across the entire earth’s surface. This is conceptually a far better approach than what is currently being done by GISS, CRU and NOAA.
Your suggestion to establish a global temperature sighting initiative is a good one, but this does nothing to help us to better understand historical temperature trends. BEST is a high-level approach to raise the standard for historical global surface temperature analysis. We should be looking forward to its results. I am.
It’s too bad that a “global surface temperature” is completely meaningless. These folks should really spend their time more constructively.
Jeff Alberts says:
“It’s too bad that a “global surface temperature” is completely meaningless. ”
If I had temperature sensors at every point on the earth’s surface each measuring the air temperature at exactly the same height off of the surface then the average value of those temperature sensors across all sensors at any point in time would represent the average global temperature at that point in time. The same would be true across time. Therefore, it seems very reasonable that there exists an average “global surface temperature”. Can you please explain why you believe the concept is completely meaningless?
John Tofflemire says:
March 22, 2011 at 7:15 pm
Well, we don’t have that, and never will. As to why it’s meaningless, E.M Smith explains it very well here: http://chiefio.wordpress.com/2010/11/26/small-tyrants-large-tyrannies/
Jeff,
I have read Smith’s piece and in no way is he saying that the concept of an average global surface temperature is meaningless. He is saying that the existing methods of measuring this average global surface temperature (GISS, CRU, NOAA) has serious flaws. I agree and so does Richard Muller. If you read the BEST pdf explanation of their proposed algorithm, you will see that his approach is responding to many of the criticisms given by Smith.
One things that Smith tries to say (unfortunately poorly) is that the current GTA approach may have a high level of uncertainty. My example of placing sensors at every point on the earth is the best case. Then the question is, what is the level of uncertainty around a GTA measurement as the placement of sensors around the globe becomes less and less dense? The BEST algorithm is designed to measure this uncertainty based both on the density of sites (that is, the higher density, the less uncertainty) and on the quality of data (that is, the higher the quality of data at a location, the less uncertainty of the temperature at that location).
The concept of an average global temperature is not meaningless. Please read the BEST pdf and see what they are trying to accomplish.
Actually he is saying that.
That’s pretty unambiguous. Of course, one guy on a blog isn’t the last word on anything, but his explanation makes more sense to me than taking temperatures from hundreds of disparate locations, averaging them, and expecting that to mean something.
The BEST project is admirable, but I have serious doubts that they’ll be able to come up with tenths or hundredths of a degree accuracy that wasn’t there in the original data. The bottom line is, .5c is no better than noise with the data we have. No amount of manipulation is going to give more accuracy, only new readings with different equipment than we have now will get us there. I don’t think the historical data is useful for this exercise.
Every conservative redneck farmer and rancher I have asked tell me that it got pretty damned warm during the last half of the last century. Dryland farming was a nightmare, cool weather crops didn’t grow high enough to be harvested. Wheat, oat, and barley yields were dismal. And then they will add that those down years have been replaced with good years here recently.
Don’t label them as flatland skeptics unless you want an ear full of wisdom along with a face full of spattered tobacco chew. Regional warming is readily admitted to. And regional cooling is being prepared for. What makes them laugh out loud are all the folks who think the world is coming to an end because they experienced just one cycle of warming and cooling. These farmers, many of them 80 plus years old, have experienced several, both worse and more mild than this last cycle.
Let’s temporarily put aside the important consideration of whether an average GST has any significant intrinsic meaning in evaluating the climate compared to other observations of our earth’s climate. But only very temporarily put it aside, just to focus on what positives the BEST project might potentially provide.
If the BEST project [ http://www.berkeleyearth.org/ ] accomplishes their published goals of openness, transparency and data /methodology /software access while maintaining the integrity of their processes, then I will applaud them just for that.
That behavior by BEST would be a significant scientific breakthrough in and of itself
compared to the often non-transparent /protective /defensive behaviors of: GHCN with its temperature data/products (under NCDC which is maintained by NOAA); NOAA with its temperature products, GISS with its temperature products and HadCru with its temperature products.
I think the most important accomplishment of the BEST project would not be the actual temperature product that BEST publishes. Rather I think it would be their potential opening of the scientific gates to everyone. BEST temperature products will be instantly improved over the short and long haul by openness, transparency and availability of their data /methodology /software. Wow, think of all the feedback to them. It might really make them the BEST.
Will all of BEST’s papers, data, methodologies, software and related docs be behind a
paywall?
John
REPLY: I am told they will be fully open and transparent – Anthony
Jeff,
Then the issue here is the uncertainty around the estimate and yes, the degree of uncertainty around a value is in many ways more important that the value itself. Note that BEST will derive uncertainty bands around each given GTA value.
I disagree with the idea that one cannot get more accuracy across a set of values than is found in the original data. If one knows with some degree of accuracy the amount of uncertainty across time at a location and the amount of uncertainty across locations at a given point in time, then the uncertainty in the average would be reduced and we would have more confidence in the results. BEST may in the end come up with results similar to those of Hansen’s, but more likely than not the error around those estimates will be significantly less.
w,
Your CP post?
There it isn’t.
The global temperature index is not meaningless.
NOTE: its an index.
here is what it means operationally.
1. Pick any point on earth you like. That same point was colder in the LIA, on average
2. Pick any point you like. That same point was about as warm in the MWP, on average
So if you you ever use the words LIA or MWP, then you obviously have something in mind. If you dont believe in a global average, then stop talking about the LIA and MWP.
next it means this. The ‘average’ of all thermometers is about 14.5C
I’m thinking of a place on the earth. Guess the temperature.. Go ahead..
My guess will be 14.5C. I dont know what your guess will be, but ON AVERAGE
my guess will be closer. We can test this. Guess any number you like, then we will
generate 100 random positions and see who’s guess is closer. The point is This.
The GTI is the number than minimizes the error in this game. THAT is what it
means. Now, if you get confused you might think its an “average” many people make this mistake.
This will also help you think about what we mean when we say the average is 14.321546752134256322
Gosh.. we dont know it to that accuracy! thats true we dont. But thats not what we mean. what we mean is that this number minimizes the error. What error? the error you would get if I asked you to estimate the temp at a random location.
Now think about the same thing in time. What does it mean to say that it will be 1C warmer 50 years from now. same kind of thing.
No big mystery.
The more I see what is going on in global warming the more I wonder if they are not wrong just evil.
But that’s too strong.
Just a note that Joe Romm actually answered me! He said:
So I replied as follows:
In response to:
onion2 says:
March 22, 2011 at 3:28 pm
“Romm is justified. Skeptics have made a big hoo-hah over the records, claiming such things as a station dropout in the 90s caused the warming, so it’s only fair that skeptics are held accountable…”
Fair would include equal funding, equal air time, equal time at the policy table for all scientists skeptic and believer in CAGW alike. Accountability would include appropriate punishment for those who took public funds and deceived for fame and fortune alike. To date, it has been an asymmetrical debate funded primarily with taxes and utility rates.
I for one will hold those who take funds from the government and ratepayer and succor from the media more accountable than those who don’t. This is fair.
Note that the Berkeley group is using ten datasets, with 39,000+ stations. However, the data includes only 4 daily sets, and 6 monthly sets. No way, in my definition, can the six monthly datasets (from CRU and GCHN) be considered raw data. GIGO.
BEST are saying that the 2% sample was randomly chosen but this post is saying that the sample data was specifically used from Japan. Surely it can’t be both. Are there two different 2% samples?
I posted pretty early on in the peice that I thought Joe was being deceitful on this. He answered back with some snide comment on how wrong I was about the draft being based on analysis of a small part of the data as per the Berkeley FAQ and how I am part of the anti-science crowd.
I find it hilarious that he was so badly wrong on this and unsurprisingly I’ve had every subsequent post deleted.
This man and his blog are a joke. I’m actually thinking now that he wasn’t actually being deliberately misleading. He’s just completely incompetent. Gotta love Joe. If you need someone to make the pro-AGW community look foolish then he’s your man.