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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Willis Eschenbach says:
April 1, 2011 at 9:30 am
“Why is Muller up there at all? He is clueless about the temperature records, he gives incorrect information about the simplest stuff, he presents no results of any type nor any data of any type … why is he up there?”
Yep, that is the big question that came out of the hearing. Apparently, he was there to promote the AGW scam. He did nothing else. No one asked questions that required him to do something else. We must press our people in Congress to explain these matters. This is critical.
Baffling, given a recent video I posted on my site and saw on WUWT, where he took
apart the “hide the decline” crew showing how the data was manipulated.
check this out
Dave Springer says:
April 1, 2011 at 3:41 am
Dave, yours is an interesting analysis, except that’s not what Muller said. He said it was 1.2°C warmer than the start of the 20th century, and 0.7°C warmer than in 1958.
w.
Thinking in wargame terms it would be:
Step 0. AGW encircled in desperate situation, old team no longer credible, weak, outnumbered and out-gunned, skeptics in the offensive on all battlefields.
Step 1. Introduce new player in the game
Step 2. Let him criticise the old team, build up reputation, show the errors that are already known and announce the build-up of a new correct data set (open a new front, the old ones – the positions “hockey stick” are anyhow considered lost, as un-defendable). In this way build up reputation, ensure cooperation with the “enemy” and confuse them.
Step 3. Attack by surprise, with unpublished data and make the most possible damage. Nobody can yet comment on the data as nothing published yet, nothing analysed, nobody expected it. Defend the core of AGW (“earth has fever because of us”) and not the lost positions.
The skeptics are now confused, divided, unsure, in full retreat – and timing matters!
Overall feedback: masterfully executed kamikaze attack against the skeptic positions by the AGW team. Hats off!
Thanks Willis to put for us a line of defence 🙂 where we can retreat to.
Well, we are lucky we are not playing wargames, aren’t we?
Poor, poor Dr Muller and the BEST project….
Already he has been dismissed by the AGW warmists as a Koch shill, (OOh, that sounds good – I’ll be using that again-g-) see this article –
http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-berkeley-climate-20110331,0,2472031.story
He certainly isn’t going to be part of any ‘team’…
Meanwhile he is getting shredded here because he has changed his mind in the light of his preliminary results –
“Despite potential biases in the data, methods of analysis can be used to reduce bias effects
well enough to enable us to measure long-term Earth temperature changes. Data integrity
is adequate. Based on our initial work at Berkeley Earth, I believe that some of the most
worrisome biases are less of a problem than I had previously thought.” -The summary from his testimony.
Of course he COULD have been ‘got at’ or ‘turned’, but not apparently to his advantage given he seems to be an anathema to both ‘sides’ now…!
Underlying all this is the reality that the instrumental land thermometer record is inherently inadequate if you want unequivocal observations of what the climate\te has done over the last century. The weather stations were originally set up to measure local weather fluctuations over days/weak or at most a few years. They are intended to measure temperature variations ten times the size of any predicted decadal term climate trend, with no attempt to make measurement consistent over decades.
ANY quantitative result will be a mathematical construct from the meta-data. It will always be open to methodological critique and alternative analysis.
As a measure of how the climate is changing the land thermometer record is only an indirect indicator beset with multiple sources of error and bias. The UHI effect is only one of these.
But it is a minor one. I know the host of the site, and probably many posters here have invested time and effort into grading the weather stations in the US for susceptibility to this effect, but given the rather small contribution the US record makes to the global average, and the smaller trend seen in the 48 states over the last 50+ years compared to the rest of the world the UHI effect on US records is NOT driving the trend that the big three and now apparently BEST find in the global record.
Given that there are a significant number of US48 records that show NO trend (one poster mentioned Texas) and most indicate that the 1930s were at least as warm as the present it is clearly impossible for there to be evidence that the UHI effect was imposing a warming trend on the land station data in the US.
Unless you are going to claim that it has ‘really’ COOLED since the 1930s!
But then you would need direct evidence from Nature, observations of physical processes that could not be influenced by measurement bias and were the ‘signal’ was not an order of magnitude smaller than the observational accuracy.
Or at least a robust (-g-) alternative methodology that showed clear cooling.
That is not the case.
Satellite observations, subject to their own independent biases, show warming.
Ice breakup on lakes and rivers shows warming. Global sea ice extent, glacier mass shrinkage and reductions in spring snow cover all indicate warming.
Then there are the earlier growing seasons, increased frost-free days and the change in migrations and range of various biological indicators.
Many of these are DIRECT ‘readouts’ of what the climate is doing. There is no erroneous mediation from instrumental measurement or meta-data bodging about when and how much ice melts. The triple point of water is a fixed physical constant. I understand it is nice for the mathematicians to be able to give numbers to these effects, and global temperature is a popular metric because it can be derived (with uncertainty!) from measurements and proxies – and then it can be compared with other calculations of how much it might change given the most likely physical causes. When those two numbers match, or at least are close all the mathematically inclined get that warm happy feeling….
But its all just maps of the territory, the direct observation of physical and biological changes is what matters. What Nature does is the final arbiter, not who can ‘BEST’ manipulate the numbers.
@ur momisugly Matt
What I was trying to get at is this. UHI was originally modelled to have a log relationship with population. This may be inaccurate now, but probably a reasonable start point.
So, the biggest UHI *effect* is on small, growing communities. I would expect these to show a higher trend than stations that have been rural throughout the period. He mentioned no effect of UHI over 50 years. So I’m asking about stations that were rural 50 years ago and may be more developed now – i.e. ones that would have scored “good” back when and “bad” now.
If that makes any sense at all.
izen says:
April 1, 2011 at 10:57 am
Are you suggesting that the global temp sensors which show the greatest temp increase are better than those in the US which show a more modest warming at best. If you were a betting man and had to choose either the US or the ROW records as a proxy just before a magical correction of the world record takes place which would you choose to be the closest to the actual.
Jit: “So, the biggest UHI *effect* is on small, growing communities.”
4.0C in Singapore.
Data from Singapore suggests it is the amount of greenery.
http://www.bca.gov.sg/ResearchInnovation/others/UHI%20_2004-001_%20rev.pdf
UHI has to be determined for each urban area. There should be experiments done on each weather station. And trying to determine historical UHI without continuous updates of UHI measurements is impossible.
Coming up with one measure like .15C is totally silly. Unless the people who did the Singapore data are stupid (zero evidence).
Again, please be clear that I have said nothing about the BEST data or algorithms. No one can say much of anything about either one, because we haven’t seen them yet.
Which is why Dr. Muller’s “science by Congressional fiat” is so disturbing. If he had posted e.g. the data and code underlying his claim that Anthony is wrong, then no problem.
Do I think this is some kind of complex “war game” strategized by AGW folks? No way, that’s both not in their plans and beyond their abilities. Everything we’ve seen to date is adequately explained by hubris, foolishness, incompetence, and desire for power. Add to that the panic caused by sunlight, and you have the perfect Congressional storm …
w.
@ur momisugly Mosher
I seriously hope you are not serious.
Will Congress know to take “preliminary” results with a grain of salt? Will they know it’s pointless to even talk about it (so why was he there?) and make policy and laws and economic decisions about it till the full and finalized data is out? Will people with an agenda keep their hands off such unverified statements, or will they use them to ram through regulations that affect the lives of everyone in this country?
This is Congress. These are the leaders of our country. Their decisions, their actions, and thus their opinions, affect the lives of everyone here. To go before them with flippant, unproven, incomplete data is a veritable sin.
You really don’t understand what manipulation is if you believe what you’ve said, that this was fine to do, that there’s no difference between doing this on a blog or BEFORE THE LEADERS OF A NATION. Leaders with the power to affect us all for decades to come, even if they are ousted at the next election.
To manipulate our leaders, be it intentional or completely not, our people, our future…
People will take what was said here as fact. Get your head back in the real world for a change. Those with agendas will be using this incorrectly, on purpose, to scare and manipulate and control those without the breadth or access to knowledge that you have.
The things you’ve said are a highly to everything that’s wrong with our current age, and why the system is in turmoil around the globe.
[snip – take your f-words elsewhere, opinion is not a scientific paper, happy to look at that]
izen says:
April 1, 2011 at 10:57 am
Thanks for making your unreasoned prejudices crystal clear. I am sure everyone will benefit from knowing how you FEEL. However, in the future, wait until we ask for them, ok?
Luboš Motl says:
“It seems unthinkable to me that if the warming were an artifact of mistakes, one would get this precise agreement between HadCRUT3 and randomly selected 2 percent of the datasets in the BEST record. The agreement of the tiny selected subset shows that the errors of the surface-measured global mean temperature are really small.”
How random was the random selection when a few points of noise is in agreement with a preferred presumption?
Essentially, choosing next to nothing of just random noise there shouldn’t be much agreement to the whole? Unless, of course, one makes a more or less perfect selection, but then one would need to question the randomness I think.
Another thing to note about randomly choosing a meagre 2% is that you might end up with choosing only stations located in one particular country. Or you might end up with 75% of those 2% being non-working so you end up with only the stations from New York. :p
The road to hell is paved with good intentions.
What does the acronym BEST stand for, Big Ego of Scientist obscures Truth!
Luboš Motl says:
April 1, 2011 at 10:03 am
…So the 20th century warming on the lands where stations existed could have been 0.75 plus minus 0.15 degrees Celsius, so the probability that it was zero or negative, assuming a normal distribution, is a 5-sigma effect i.e. around 1 part per million.
—————————————————————————————
I assume the 5 sigma estimation is only valid for Gaussian, random errors.
UHI neglect is not an error of this type. Land use change as well, though this only affects the contribution attributable to greenhouse gases.
Perhaps even more important are the systematic changes in ocean temperature measurements.
izen says:
April 1, 2011 at 10:57 am
…That is not the case.
Satellite observations, subject to their own independent biases, show warming.
Ice breakup on lakes and rivers shows warming. Global sea ice extent, glacier mass shrinkage and reductions in spring snow cover all indicate warming.
————————————————————————————
Satellite observations divided by appropriate troposheric to ground based adjustment factors show no warming since the 1940s.
Global sea ice extent of the 1940s is not well known, though historic reports spoke about a 40% reduction in arctic ice volume then.
Glacier mass shrinkage has to be seen in the context of the built up during the little ice age.
Luboš Motl says:
April 1, 2011 at 10:03 am
“There are interesting issues about the ways to eliminate mistakes in individual stations, their doubling etc. as well as the non-uniform density of the stations over the globe.
But when it comes to the question whether some “better fixes” of the surface record may substantially change the HadCRUT3 and other graphs and eliminate the warming – sending it to zero – please count me as a skeptic.”
Indeed, data errors per se are not the major reason that the GHCN data base does not provide a reliable indication of the course of temperatures around the globe. Thermometers don’t lie. But what they measure at a particular station is the temperature of a small parcel of air, which is subject to a host of extraneous, nonclimatic factors. Given that the great majority of the station records come from urban sites world-wide, UHI is the major culprit. Contrary to what defenders of the “global temperature” indices claim, urban stations have manifest a rising trend of 0.5 to over 2.0 degrees C over the 20th century that does not appear in neighboring small-town records. Sadly, small-town records spanning the entire century, which can be corrupted no less by land-use changes, are very sparse in the GHCN data base outside the USA. Even in densely populated Europe, they are very few. Thus what we get in the indices is very unrepresentative coverage of the continents.
What the available small-town records do show is oscillatory temperature behavior, with swings usally greater than in the cities. But, unlike urban stations, they generally show very little secular trend. World-wide cooling was evident in them from the ’50s through the mid-70’s, followed by warming to the 1998 peak. Neither the cooling phase nor the warming one should be in dispute. The issue is the imputation of AGW to the latter phase, based largely upon UHI-afflicted station records world-wide.
Although some point to the fact that CET last year stood exactly where it started in 1659, that is simply one year in one region. What the ever-changing climate brings in future decades remains nature’s mystery.
It’s a goldmine of logical fallacies. Would be funny if it weren’t so scary.
ice9
Do we actually know the result of the vote yet? (I thought I read yesterday that they were voting “today”, yet I haven’t seen the result yet).
Greg (in Australia, and a very different timezone ;^)
The BEST project was set-up to construct a better temperature series.
Muller basically said the three existing series are already “excellent”.
Why then are they still wasting money. It is time to shut it down – mission accomplished. Everyone can start looking for another job. There is no need to set-up an even most costly ARPA-like agency that is just going to parrot the data from the NCDC like there is nothing wrong with it.
Technically, I don’t know how they could have used the “Raw data” with no adjustments and come up with exactly the same line as the other three which have at least 0.2C added for the Time of Observation Bias alone.
Willis is right about the effect of Muller’s testimony on useful idiots like Clan @ur momisugly 12:24.
Clan claims Muller’s uninformed opinion is “proven” the AGW line which has “proven” to be a believer of the AGW faith and ignorant of the scientific method.
Moderator has some snipping to do.
I suggest we all send emails and letters to the members of the committee with our concerns. You know the warmists will.
Does anyone here have access to the addresses?
I don’t understand the feeling of being upset here. There was a lot of Kudos for Steve McIntyre, and Anthony Watts in that presentation. Furthermore, if I’m reading the proposal correctly, there is a goal to create a climate-ARPA which would include people like the aforementioned.
Given everything is open, the data sets, the algorithms, and apparently the openness to criticism, and reaction to criticism, I don’t understand what the big deal is. The numbers are what they are, the methodology can be examined, and will probably be trusted. Seems like good stuff to me.
@Theo Goodwin April 1, 2011 at 8:22 am
I agree with you. The Scalpel can be a huge source of bias. Consider my March 31, 7:27 pm.
It seems that it is only the slope of the regression they consider important. Finesse the UHI, the class rating of the surface stations. They say the absolute temperature does not matter, only the trend.
Ok, as long as the siting bias is a constant (which it isn’t).
Now, the use of the scalpel is to take one temperature stream between times A thru D. Then by some algorithm, that will someday be transparent, the scalpel will divide the series A-D into two series A-B, C-D.
So now you have three regressions f(A-B), f(C-D), f(A-D) [original]
the scalpel will have induced a bulk SHIFT(B) = f(C-D)@C minus f(A-B)@B.
SHIFT(B) will necessarily be non-zero, otherwise why split it?
Now we start slicing madly away (as only a computer can do) thousands of time series creating SHIFT(i) for each slice i. Lets find the SumShift = Sum(i)[SHIFT(i)], for i =1 to 10,000 time series.
SumShift might be 1000. Or -1000. Can everyone sleep at night with this result?
Even if SumShift = 0, do we know there is no bias? The time series are of unequal lenghts.
I sure hope there is something important I completely missed. It sounds like a numerical perpetual motion machine milking good data out of bad.
Put another way, isn’t the BEST project to come up with better estimates of the low frequence content of the timeseries data? Weather is high-frequency, Climate is low frequecy. Yet, isn’t the scalpel a LOW-CUT filter?