RELATED ARTICLES, highly suggested:
Clarification on BEST submitted to the House
Pielke Sr. on the Muller testimony
Independent company station siting analysis demonstrates the problem
Quote of the Week – other scientists weigh in
Guest Post by Willis Eschenbach
Well, I had hoped for the best from BEST, the new Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature project looking at the global temperature record. I was disheartened, however, by the Congressional testimony of Dr. Richard Muller of BEST.
Photo Source He said (emphasis mine):
Global Warming
Prior groups at NOAA, NASA, and in the UK (HadCRU) estimate about a 1.2 degree C land temperature rise from the early 1900s to the present. This 1.2 degree rise is what we call global warming. Their work is excellent, and the Berkeley Earth project strives to build on it.
Human caused global warming is somewhat smaller. According to the most recent IPCC report (2007), the human component became apparent only after 1957, and it
amounts to “most” of the 0.7 degree rise since then. Let’s assume the human-caused warming is 0.6 degrees.
The magnitude of this temperature rise is a key scientific and public policy concern. A 0.2 degree uncertainty puts the human component between 0.4 and 0.8 degrees – a factor of two uncertainty. Policy depends on this number. It needs to be improved.
Why do I think his testimony doesn’t help in the slightest? Well, to start with, I’ve never heard anyone make the claim that the land surface air temperature (excluding oceans) of the earth has warmed 1.2°C since 1900.
He cites three land temperature datasets, NOAA , NASA (GISTEMP), and HadCRU (he presumably means CRUTEM, not HadCRU).
Here’s the problem. The actual land surface air temperature warming since 1900 according to the existing datasets is:
NASA GISTEMP: 0.72°C
NOAA NCDC: 0.86°C
CRUTEM: 0.92°C
So Dr. Muller, in his first and most public appearance on the subject, has made some of the more unusual claims about the existing temperature datasets I’ve heard to date.
1. Since the largest temperature rise in the three datasets is 30% greater than the smallest rise, their work is not “excellent” in any sense of the word. Nor should the BEST team “strive to build on it.” Instead, they should strive to understand why the three vary so widely. What decisions make the difference? Which decisions make little difference?
2. Not one of the three datasets shows a temperature rise anywhere near the 1.2°C rise Muller is claiming since 1900. The largest one shows only about 3/4 of his claimed rise.
3. He claims a “0.2 degree uncertainty”. But the difference between the largest and smallest calculated warming from the three datasets is 0.2°C, so the uncertainty has to be a lot more than that …
4. He says that the land warming since 1957 is 0.7°C. The records beg to differ. Here’s the land warming since 1957:
NASA GISTEMP: 0.83°C
NOAA NCDC: 1.10°C
CRUTEM: 0.93°C
Note that none of them are anywhere near 0.7°C. Note also the huge difference in the trends in these “excellent” datasets, a difference of half a degree per century.
5. He fails to distinguish CRUTEM (the land-only temperature record produced by the Climategate folks) from HadCRU (a land-ocean record produced jointly by the Hadley folks and the Climategate folks). A minor point to be sure, but one indicating his unfamiliarity with the underlying datasets he is discussing.
It can’t be a Celsius versus Fahrenheit error, because it goes both ways. He claims a larger rise 1900-present than the datasets show, and a smaller rise 1958-present than the datasets.
I must confess, I’m mystified by all of this. With his testimony, Dr. Muller has totally destroyed any credibility he might have had with me. He might be able to rebuild it by explaining his strange numbers. But to give that kind of erroneous testimony, not in a random paper he might written quickly, but to Congress itself, marks him to me as a man driven by a very serious agenda, a man who doesn’t check his work and who pays insufficient attention to facts in testimony. I had hoped we wouldn’t have another temperature record hag-ridden by people with an axe to grind … foolish me.
Perhaps someone who knows Dr. Muller could ask him to explain his cheerleading before Congress. I call it cheerleading because it certainly wasn’t scientific testimony of any kind I’m familiar with. I hear Dr. Muller is a good guy, and very popular with the students, but still … color me very disappointed.
w.
PS – Muller also said:
Let me now address the problem of
Poor Temperature Station Quality
Many temperature stations in the U.S. are located near buildings, in parking lots, or close to heat sources. Anthony Watts and his team has shown that most of the current stations in the US Historical Climatology Network would be ranked “poor” by NOAA’s own standards, with error uncertainties up to 5 degrees C.
Did such poor station quality exaggerate the estimates of global warming? We’ve studied this issue, and our preliminary answer is no.
The Berkeley Earth analysis shows that over the past 50 years the poor stations in the U.S. network do not show greater warming than do the good stations.
Thus, although poor station quality might affect absolute temperature, it does not appear to affect trends, and for global warming estimates, the trend is what is important.
Dr. Muller, I’m going to call foul on this one. For you to announce your pre-publication results on this issue is way, way out of line. You get to have your claim entered into the Congressional Record and you don’t even have to produce a single citation or publish a paper or show a scrap of data or code? That is scientific back-stabbing via Congressional testimony, and on my planet it is absolutely unacceptable.
That is taking unfair advantage of your fifteen minutes of fame. Show your work and numbers like anyone else and we’ll evaluate them. Then you may be able to crow, or not, before Congress.
But to stand up before Congress as an expert witness and refer solely to your own unpublished, uncited, and un-verifiable claims? Sorry, but if you want to make that most public scientific claim, that bad siting doesn’t affect temperature trends, you have to show your work just like anyone else. If you want to make that claim before Congress, then PUBLISH YOUR DATA AND CODE like the rest of us mortals. Put your results where your mouth is, or if not, leave it out of your Congressional testimony. Why is that not obvious?
Anthony’s unpublished and unverifiable claims are as strong as your similar claims. That is to say, neither have any strength or validity at all at this point … so how would you feel if Anthony trotted out his unverifiable claims before Congress to show that Dr. Richard Muller was wrong, and didn’t show his work?
Like I said … color me very disappointed, both scientifically and personally. Dr. Muller, I invite you to explain your Congressional testimony, because I certainly don’t understand it. I am totally confident that Anthony will be happy to publish your reply.
I also urge you to either a) publish the data and code that you think shows no difference in trends between good and poor stations, or b) publicly retract your premature and unverifiable claims. You don’t get to do one without the other, that’s not scientific in any sense of the word.
PPS – Does any of this mean that the BEST analysis is wrong or their numbers or data are wrong or that the BEST folks are fudging the results? ABSOLUTELY NOT. I am disappointed in Dr. Muller’s claims and his actions. The math and the data analysis is an entirely different question. Theirs may be flawless, we simply don’t know yet (nor would I expect to, it’s early days). I look forward to their results and their data and code, this kind of initiative is long overdue.
I want to be very clear than the validity of their actual methods depends only on the validity of their actual methods. The problem is, we don’t even know exactly what those methods are yet. We have rough descriptions, but not even any pseudocode, much less code. Which in part is why I find Dr. Muller’s testimony unsettling …
RELATED: See the rebuttal letter to congress:
Clarification on BEST submitted to the House
Pielke Sr. on the Muller testimony
=========================================================
UPDATE: in apparent response to Willis Eschenbach, BEST has added this below to their FAQs page. For fairness, I reproduce it here. – Anthony
NEW (4/1) – It appears that in Dr. Muller’s testimony he shows a temperature rise greater rise than others had previously published. Is this so? Can you explain?
The Berkeley Earth plot is for the land data only, since we have not yet begun analysis of ocean temperatures. Because we only analyze land, that was the fair comparison to make. The ocean temperature rise is less, and when included in, it reduces the value of the total temperature rise.
We started with the land data for several reasons:
- It is the data that is affected most by the most contentious issues: data selection bias, urban heat island, and station integrity issues. These are big concerns and we wanted to address them.
- The temperature rise on land is greater than on the oceans, mostly because the ocean distribute the heat over the mixed layer and thereby reduces the temperature rise. Land keeps the heat mostly on the surface. So the land temperature is actually more sensitive to greenhouse gases than is the world temperature.
- The land issue, with 1.6 billion measurements, was a huge one to tackle. It made sense to divide the effort into two stages.
The land only data for the other three groups are available on their websites, and agree with the plot provided in Dr. Richard Muller’s testimony.
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” Hello ! Earth to Dr Muller: Station selection is BIAS; By DEFINITION !! ”
And you don’t have near enough stations to begin with; so you don’t have the luxury of not using all that you have. Mother Gaia has a thermometer in every molecule or atom; so she knows what the Temperature really is. Your puny list of stations may give you a consistent view of the average Temperature of your list of stations; but it can’t even come close to telling you what the earth’s average Temperature really is; or ever has been.
Gee, Pa, that man down at the girly show took my whole dollar and dint give me no change.
Willis, Anthony, et. al., it’s not all that surprising that we might not see the best from BEST. As I observed about a week ago professor Muller makes clear his views and conclusions but doesn’t provide much if any supporting evidence for those views and conclusions. A copy of the comment follows.
My comment from March 22:
While part of Professor Muller’s video takes the Team (Mann, Briffa, Jones, Wahl, et. al.) to task for stuff you can’t do in science, the longer version makes it clear that the Professor is biased towards the Catastrophic AGW hypothesis claims. Unfortunately the Professor doesn’t explain the reasoning behind his claims or his support for the CAGW claims.
The extract from the longer talk with Professor Muller taking the Team to task for what you can’t do in science and rebuking them by asserting that he now has a list of people whose papers he won’t read anymore. Ouch, cast them out of the science club. Three cheers for professor Muller for standing up for scientific integrity.
The full 52 minute talk where professor Muller makes clear his views and conclusions but doesn’t provide much if any supporting evidence for those views and conclusions (except for the portion where he takes the Team to task, that is explained very well, although he seems to let the Team off light).
I would really like to see professor Muller substantiate every Catastrophic AGW Hypothesis claim that he is supporting with direct hard evidence that can be openly verified by others along every step of the way from the assessment that the planet is warming (the BEST being a start) on through to every single conclusion that that is somehow “bad”. It’s not enough to simply assert that it’s the Green House Gases and we’re doomed, it needs to be substantiated with verifiable evidence – preferably experiments and direct observational data if possible – every step of the way on each and every doomsday claim [fully expanded upon in detail at how they arrived at such conclusions]. That would be something to see and review in depth.
The IPCC analysis that Muller cites as his authority on the extent of human-caused warming takes as its starting point the temperature records that Muller is supposedly questioning. Can he really be oblivious to the circularity, and to the larger problem of conflating temperature record issues with all of the other analytical travesties the IPCC is involved in.
The stated purpose of BEST is simply to establish a more reliable temperature record that can be used as an unbiased reference point for such questions as what what caused the warming. Any position on what caused warming is alien to the BEST project, and to be injecting it into testimony on BEST only introduces the reek of bias, contrary to the stated purpose.
Oops, the link to the earlier comment is “professor Muller makes clear his views and conclusions but doesn’t provide much if any supporting evidence for those views and conclusions.”
Richard Muller owes Anthony (& Willis & the rest of us) an explanation on here. Otherwise, he’s just more of the same from Bezerkley…
Maybe Babs made him an offer he couldn’t refuse.
Here is a quote with the words “ashamed” and “tricks” in it. Read it and see why I think Prof. Muller should have started out without a number already in his head.
“We have learned a lot from experience about how to handle some of
the ways we fool ourselves. One example: Millikan measured the
charge on an electron by an experiment with falling oil drops, and
got an answer which we now know not to be quite right. It’s a
little bit off, because he had the incorrect value for the
viscosity of air. It’s interesting to look at the history of
measurements of the charge of the electron, after Millikan. If you
plot them as a function of time, you find that one is a little
bigger than Millikan’s, and the next one’s a little bit bigger than
that, and the next one’s a little bit bigger than that, until
finally they settle down to a number which is higher.
Why didn’t they discover that the new number was higher right away?
It’s a thing that scientists are ashamed of–this history–because
it’s apparent that people did things like this: When they got a
number that was too high above Millikan’s, they thought something
must be wrong–and they would look for and find a reason why
something might be wrong. When they got a number closer to
Millikan’s value they didn’t look so hard. And so they eliminated
the numbers that were too far off, and did other things like that.
We’ve learned those tricks nowadays, and now we don’t have that
kind of a disease.
CARGO CULT SCIENCE by Richard Feynman
Adapted from the Caltech commencement address given in 1974.
http://www.lhup.edu/~DSIMANEK/cargocul.htm
Thus, although poor station quality might affect absolute temperature, it does not appear to affect trends, and for global warming estimates, the trend is what is important.
I have seen this behaviour before, ignore absolutes and how they are calculated (this is a deliberate put-down of the surface station project) and go for the trend. This comes across as a ‘reasonable’ assumption to a general non-scientific audience. But the ‘trend’ can go both ways, Dr Muller, and as Smokey says, watch those start dates.
Excuse me if I don’t get it – I have trouble keeping up but I do manage to at least check out headlines. I thought the BEST project was pretty new on the scene and, of course, the project was incomplete.
So why was he invited to testify? Would he have been anyway, before the project was announced or if it had never been undertaken in the first place?
Muller is quoted as saying:
“The Berkeley Earth analysis shows that over the past 50 years the poor stations in the U.S. network do not show greater warming than do the good stations.”
“Thus, although poor station quality might affect absolute temperature, it does not appear to affect trends, and for global warming estimates, the trend is what is important.”
This is nonsense on a stick. One of the great worries is about UHI effect and another is about change of station site. These factors can influence readings in steps that are not apparent in trends. For example, if a station is moved from grass to concrete then its temperature readings will take a step up that is caused by the move. That trends are not the only thing that matters is falling down easy to demonstrate. Suppose that a station shows the trend expected by Muller but in the data for that station there is a step-up that accounts for 99% of the upward trend. Then what is being measured is not a trend but an absolute step up. So, tell me again how absolute temperature does not matter. It damn well matters if it occurs as steps overlooked for the sake of the trend.
There is another crucial flaw. Muller assumes that the poorly sited stations do not present a problem if they trend up in the same way as the other stations. But what if the poor siting hides the fact that their trends would have been less, non-existent, or negative if they had not been poorly sited?
Clearly, Muller is another greedy ex-scientist on the make. You can’t overlook the 1 2 3’s and A B C’s without revealing an intent to mislead.
The problem Muller is has is doing enough enough boot-licking to keep his cred with the Warmist establishment and still offer well-grounded scientific criticism.
The problem BEST has always had is this: if you are going to authoritative, use open data and reproducable methods, then how can your revisions be released without a sound, comprehensive data base management plan? To date, I see no evidence of any “plan”~
DickH (above) says, after watching Muller’s November 2010 lecture:
“What i found striking is that Muller talks freely about *all* the uncovered mistakes in the IPCC report, emphasizes that the uncertainty is much greater than they conclude yet still is convinced that his (the warmist) side has the basic science right – including the questionable, never observed global positive water vapor feedback.”
Muller lays out evidence to indict the integrity of the players, yet choses not to exercise judgement. Is this a dodge or a deferral?
Maybe it is not his role to judge until the evidence fully supporting the conclusion is made available. The timeline for his BEST project was to take three years. I expected successive revisions of the data. However, how the releases will be managed has yet to be explained.
This maybe the Achilles heel of his hopes.
“Does any of this mean that the BEST analysis is wrong or their numbers or data are wrong or that the BEST folks are fudging the results? ABSOLUTELY NOT.”
No, but it means that they too are unwilling to discuss scientific method and unwilling to act in accordance with scientific method by making their work transparent. If you are not willing to discuss scientific method and your work is not transparent, then you are no better than a Mann, a Jones, or any other Climategater. You are not practicing science and the usual reason for that is that you are cheating.
Joshua Corning says:
March 31, 2011 at 1:31 pm
When one looks at what Anthony and I actually said it appears that your fears amount to not what we said but the fact that you do not like the way we said it.
You are blowing our testimony way out of proportion as well as missing some pretty important stuff.
Joshua, take a breath, relax … then go back and think about what Anthony and I said, rather than what you think we said.
I await your return. In the meantime, consider a) how condescending you sound, and b) how little actual content your post contains. You might want to fix both of those before exposing yourself to further laughter from the crowd.
w.
Pardon me for using this word but this is retarded.
While Muller claims that poor station quality did not exaggerate the estimates of global warming he exaggerates that the earth has warmed 1.2°C since 1900.
Conclusion: One doesn’t need poor station quality or any other poor data as an excuse or reason to exaggerate global warming.
You only have to be an unethical [snip].
It’s looking more and more like BEST is going to be a “Lucy holding the football for Charlie Brown.” 🙁
Best stands for, at it’s start, BERKLEY. Berkley is chock full of socialists. This makes sense, Berkley is a college town, professors don’t have to actually interact with reality, and socialism looks good on paper, you only see it’s insolvable problems when you meet in in real life, which these people never do. AGW supports socialism (and then some!), and therefore Berkley people support AGW. AGW depends on warming, which is detected by temperature measurements.
Therefor, a Berkley temperature measurement team will be stuffed with people who very much want the temperature to be going UP. To do otherwise in that town would be to subject yourself to massive peer pressure to conform to everyone else there. This is not rocket science, if it has Berkley in it’s name,the chances of it NOT supporting AGW are slim. The reason anyone here believed otherwise is pure wishful thinking.
The claims made by these people of impartiality and such are pure propaganda, designed to make you believe, when they come out with their finding that “it’s worse than we thought” that they are presenting a mo’ better temperature record. They know that they must present a better seeming one because an increasing number of people don’t believe the ones associated with climategate. So, this team was chosen, they aren’t directly associated with climategate, thus, they can say the same ol’ thing over again but this time presented with an air of impartiality.
Plus they need to say good sounding things about what they are doing to get that grant money. The better it sounds, the more money they get.
Stop believing that they SAID, start believing what they DO.
@ur momisugly Jit what he said was that while the good and bad stations DO show different temperatures, they show the same TREND – and that the absolute numbers are not important for the question of warming but the trend is. So irrespective of the numbers, it gets warmer, no matter what stations you are looking at. That’s what he said.
[snip – no WWII references]
The graph of “GISS”, “HadCRU”, “NOAA” and “Berkeley” on Pg 4 of Dr. Muller’s submission to the committee shows a warming of about 0.7 C from 1960-2010.
I believe Dr. Muller is saying that he estimates 0.6 C of this over the 50 year period is due to agw; or 1.2 degrees /century if the trend continues. This is where the 1.2 C figure comes from.
My impression is that BEST built an algorithm that they genuinely believed theoretically eliminated any local condition bias, ran it on 2% of the data, and it came back showing no significant difference with the current datasets.
As Dr. Muller states, they found this surprising but that was their result.
Personally, I have a hard time understanding how their process is any different than the other land records- they all are trying to correct for local warming by averaging it out over adjacent stations. How do you know you are not simply averaging stations with uhi bias with other stations with a greater uhi bias?
Badly Estimated Surface Temperatures. BEST.
Willis I think you are being too kind.
It sure looks like an attempt to marginalise Anthony’s SS project.
Very sad.
@ur momisugly author
well, if I put “global warming 1.2 since 1900” into Google to satisfy my curiousity, I do get a number of clues as to where that figure might have come from instantly. One of them being the Environmental Protection Agency (in Fahrenheit); another states this to be the rise of temperature in the Arctic, etc.
‘…….The Berkeley Earth analysis shows that over the past 50 years the poor stations in the U.S. network do not show greater warming than do the good stations. – Muller
Makes me wonder what he saw in the first half of the 1900’s.
Is this post the first of many pre-emptive strikes against the BEST project just in case it does not show what was wanted from this site? Can another study showing significant warming be swept away with a wave of the hand?
There’s more to it than that.
There was an equipment switch. The newer equipment had a cool bias but was worse sited.
Until those factors are separated out, one cannot tell.
My guess is that in the last 30 years the errors canceled out, but prior to that the trend is exaggerated.