There’s lots of hay being made by the usual romminesque flaming bloggers, some news outlets and the like, over my disagreement with the way data was handled in one of the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature (BEST) papers, the only one I got to review before yesterday’s media blitz. Apparently I’m not allowed to point out errors, and BEST isn’t allowed to correct any before release, such as the six incorrectly spelled citations of the Fall et al 2011 paper I pointed out to BEST a week earlier, which they couldn’t be bothered to fix.
And then there’s the issue of doing a 60 year study on siting, when we only guaranteed 30. Even NOAA’s Menne et al paper knew not to make such a stupid mistake. Making up data where there isn’t any is what got Steig et al into trouble in Antarctica and they got called on it by Jeff Id, Steve McIntyre, and Ryan O’Donnell in a follow on peer-reviewed paper.
But I think it’s useful to note here (since I know some other bloggers will just say “denier” and be done with it) what I do in fact agree with and accept, and what I don’t. They wanted an instant answer, before I had a chance even to read the other three papers. Media outlets were asking for my opinion even before the release of these papers, and I stated clearly that I had only seen one and I couldn’t yet comment on the others. That didn’t matter, they lumped that opinion on one I had seen into an opinion on all four.
What I agree with:
- The Earth is warmer than it was 100-150 years ago. But that was never in contention – it is a straw man argument. The magnitude and causes are what skeptics question.
- From the BEST press release “Global Warming is real” …see point one. Notably, “man-made global warming” was not mentioned by BEST, and in their findings they point out explicitly they didn’t address this issue as they state in this screencap from the press release:
- As David Whitehouse wrote: “The researchers find a strong correlation between North Atlantic temperature cycles lasting decades, and the global land surface temperature. They admit that the influence in recent decades of oceanic temperature cycles has been unappreciated and may explain most, if not all, of the global warming that has taken place, stating the possibility that the “human component of global warming may be somewhat overstated.”. Here’s a screencap from that paper:
- The unique BEST methodology has promise. The scalpel method used to deal with station discontinuity was a good idea and I’ve said so before.
- The findings of the BEST global surface analysis match the finding of other global temperature metrics. This isn’t surprising, as much of the same base raw data was used. There’s a myth that NASA GISS, HadCRUT, NOAA’s, and now Berkeley’s source data are independent of one another. That’s not completely true. They share a lot of common data from GHCN, administered by NOAA’s National Climatic Data. So it isn’t surprising at all they would match.
What I disagree with:
1. The way they dealt with my surfacestation data in analysis was flat-out wrong, and I told them so days ahead of this release. They offered no correction, nor even an acknowledgement of the issue. The issue has to do with the 60 year period they used. Both peer-reviewed papers on the subject, Menne et al 2010, and Fall et al 2011 used 30 year periods. This is a key point because nobody knows (not me, not NOAA, not BEST) what the siting quality of weather stations was 30-60 years ago. Basically they did an analysis on a time period for which metadata doesn’t exist. I’ve asked simply for them to do it on 30 years as the two peer reviewed papers did, an apples-to-apples comparison. If they do that and the result is the same, I’m satisfied. OTOH, they may find something new when done correctly, we all deserve that opportunity.
Willis Eschenbach points out this quote from the paper:
We evaluate the effect of very-rural station siting on the global average by applying the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature averaging procedure to the very-rural stations. By comparing the resulting average to that obtained by using all the stations we can quantify the impact of selecting sites not subject to urbanization on the estimated average land temperature.
He adds: That seems crazy to me. Why compare the worst stations to all stations? Why not compare them to the best stations?
2. The UHI study seems a bit strange in its approach. They write in their press release that:
They didn’t adequately deal with that 1% in my opinion, by doing a proper area weighting. And what percentage of weather stations were in that 1%? While they do have some evidence of the use of a “kriging” technique, I’m not certain is has been done properly. The fact that 33% of the sites show a cooling is certainly cause for a much harder look at this. That’s not something you can easily dismiss, though they attempt to. This will hopefully get sorted out in peer review.
3. The release method they chose, of having a media blitzkrieg of press release and writers at major MSM outlets lined up beforehand is beyond the pale. While I agree with Dr. Muller’s contention that circulating papers among colleagues for wider peer review is an excellent idea, what they did with the planned and coordinated (and make no mistake it was coordinated for October 20th, Liz Muller told me this herself) is not only self-serving grandiosity, but quite risky if peer review comes up with a different answer.
The rush to judgment they fomented before science had a chance to speak is worse than anything I’ve ever seen, and from my early dealings with them, I can say that I had no idea they would do this, otherwise I would not have embraced them so openly. A lie of omission is still a lie, and I feel that I was not given the true intentions of the BEST group when I met with them.
So there you have it, I accept their papers, and many of their findings, but disagree with some methods and results as is my right. It will be interesting to see if these survive peer review significantly unchanged.
One thing we can count on that WON’T normally be transparent is the peer review process, and if that process includes members of the “team” who are well versed enough to but already embracing the results such as Phil Jones has done, then the peer review will turn into “pal review”.
The solution is to make the names of the reviewers known. Since Dr. Muller and BEST wish to upset the apple cart of scientific procedure, putting public review before peer review, and because they make this self-assured and most extraordinary claim in their press release:
That’s some claim. Four papers that have not been peer-reviewed yet, and they KNOW they’ll pass peer review and will be in the next IPCC report? Is it just me or does that sound rigged? Or, is it just the product of an overactive ego on the part of the BEST group?
I say, if BEST and Dr. Muller truly believes in a transparent approach, as they state on the front page of their website…
…let’s make the peer review process transparent so that there is no possibility of “pal review” to ramrod this through without proper science being done.
Since Dr. Muller claims this is “one of the most important questions ever”, let’s deal with it in an open a manner as possible. Ensuring that these four papers get a thorough and non-partisan peer review is the best way to get the question answered.
Had they not made the claim I highlighted above of it passing peer review and being in the next IPCC report before any of that even is decided, I would never think to ask for this. That overconfident claim is a real cause for concern, especially when the media blitzkrieg they launched makes it difficult for any potential review scientists to not notice and read these studies and news stories ahead of time, thus becoming biased by media coverage.
We can’t just move the “jury pool” of scientists to the next county to ensure a fair trial now that is been blathered worldwide can we?
Vote on it:
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Muller may be [snip] Crazed with fulfilling his political agenda without any weather facts whatsoever. That is my opinion.
This post from Jay Currie earlier sums up so much about the total lack of understanding about the temperature record and how it is calculated.
‘Imagine 5 “very rural” stations with average temps of +1,0,0,-1,1 for an average temp of 1/5=.2
Now consider 5 “not rural” stations with average temps of +2,+1,+3,0,-1 for an average 5/5=1.0
Quite a difference.
However that difference is reduced if you calculate the average of the “Not rural” plus the “very rural” which would be 6/10=.6’
Jay tries to present an example of what the impact of rural vs non-rural temps is based on AVERAGING their temperatures. In this he is reflecting a profund misunderstanding about how the temperature record is calculated. And this has an important bearing on the surfacestations.org results, the ‘march of the thermometers’ argument etc.
Simple take-home-message.
The temperature record IS NOT CALCULATED BY AVERAGING TEMPERATURES!!! That would be a mathematical nonsense!
If you want to understand why, you could read the following series of posts I published at SkS earlier this year.’Of Averages and Anomalies – Part 1A. A Primer on how to measure surface temperature change’, http://www.skepticalscience.com/OfAveragesAndAnomalies_pt_1A.html
If you are reluctant to read them, ask yourself this question. Do I understand the implicartions of the difference between averaging temperatures and averaging temperature anomalies? Do you really know the difference between the two? If you don’t, how can you be certain that all this kerfuffle isn’t a storm in a thimble.
An earlier poster commented that they were going to look at some stations in California. Someone else suggested there would be a queue. Simple question. Why? Do you think that looking at a few stations provides any relevent information.
I repeat my point. Do you think that the temperature record is calculated by averaging temperatures so if a station is warmer for some local reason that biases the average? If so you are wrong! Not because a falsely warm station wouldn’t bias a calculation based on averages of temperatures. Of course it would. But the temp records ARE NOT CALCULATED BY AVERAGING TEMPERATURES. Precisely because averaging temperatures would be a mathematically ‘fragile’ approach – just plain Dumb, NOBODY DOES IT THAT WAY. NOBODY. Not, GISS, Not NOAA, Not HadCRU, Not JMA or the Dutch of the Australian BoM or anyone else. Averaging temperatures is mathematical nonsense!! So nobody does that.
If you don’t understand why averaging temperatures is a SERIOUSLY dumb way of calculating a temperature record, perhaps doing some research before you comment might be a worthwhile activity.
So now we’re back on the Conspiracy Train?
That didn’t take too long, now did it?
There is an article mentioning you here
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/10/21/berkeley_earth_surface_temperature_study/
and this is what Muller has for your peer review / pre-print criticism:
‘When contacted by The Reg, Muller responded in an email that he believes scientific papers should be widely circulated in “preprint” form before their publication. “It has been traditional throughout most of my career to distribute preprints around the world,” he writes. “In fact, most universities and laboratories had ‘preprint libraries’ where you could frequently find colleagues.”
This preprint system, he told us, is being stifled by major journals. “This traditional peer-review system worked much better than the current Science/Nature system, which in my mind restricts the peer review to 2 or 3 anonymous people who often give a cursory look at the paper.” ‘
The deals done , come up with the ‘right results ‘ and peer review and IPCC acceptance are in the bag and they get the full resources of the ‘Team’ and friends to support them.
AGW has long been a dirty game which has more to do with PR than science , BEST has merely joined in under the rules of the game.
Anthony, I greatly admire your transparently honest and gentlemanly approach to this. Many other commenters are also trying to engage with the “scientific” basis of BEST’s 4 reports.
Not being so “gentlemanly”, I suggest that all you need to know is:-
(1) BEST got $623,097 funding for this.
(2) 20 October (before Durban) was scheduled for a media storm “demonstrating” that the “deniers” had been decisively trounced and cAGW was “confirmed”.
(3) Muller used “tarbaby” tactics to try to cover you and other sceptics with the tar of the media storm.
(4) They have a pre-ordained slot reserved in the IPCC’s AR5 and no doubt the commentary there has already been sketched out by Schmidt, Trenberth, Santer, Jones & Mann.
Personally, I have no doubt that all this was written into the Contract with Muller before he started work.
The reports he produced were produced purely to fulfil the agenda set out above.
If (as seems improbable) Muller ever had any integrity, he sold it for a mess of pottage.
But, if the “Team” seriously believes that this will solve anything, then they are being very naive indeed. Sooner or later the truth will out.
“The thing they fear most, is the voter”
Not in the UK, where we are ruled by the EU, the decisions of which are made by unelected persons while the elected persons board the gravy train.
“Four papers that have not been peer-reviewed yet, and they KNOW they’ll pass peer review and will be in the next IPCC report?”
Wahl & Amman managed it!
http://bishophill.squarespace.com/blog/2008/8/11/caspar-and-the-jesus-paper.html
Anthony I do think you are over reacting to BEST, but that aside, for me the real story of BEST is the reasons behind the need for BEST. Muller is on record as saying he had lost faith in GISS temp & CRU because of the behaviour of Jones, & Hansen. Muller said he couldn’t trust their ‘science’ any more and because of this BEST was necessary. I posted a comment to this effect on Richard Black’s column in the BBC but it was deleted. I deliberately didn’t include names of people & data sets in the post, but still they deleted it anyway…
I was also thought it was perverse that the BBC used a picture of the hockey stick to promote the Black’s story. Again the hockey stick was something that Muller said offended him.
Anthony, I for one would like to thank you for your effort and time not principally for the surface stations but for this blog.
You may not sense it yet but the effect of this site opening up the discussion of climate change for scientists and non-scientists alike has been instrumental in getting to this point.
The discussion being open is why the blog achieves awards and has such a high hit rate.
If the peer review process finds anything different from this open discussion then the reviewers will not have contributed to the open discussion and the next question would be why did they not participate or if they did then why do their views differ from the views of the open consensus?
The movement towards open scientific discussion has to continue in this, it’s revolutionary, again thank you.
It would appear to me that this, so called, new interpretation of the already mashed and mangled data is actually the first stage in the proof that CO2 is not the main driver of climate. I have heard from Dr Santer that CO2 is considered to be well mixed in the atmosphere yet Best is showing an enhanced hockey stick for the “Land only” component of global temperature, about 1 degree in 60 years.. As they themselves seem to infer that their next great PR exercise will be the release of the sea based air temperature record and they expect that to show much less warming, (to balance the figure with their mates it will have to be about 0.3 of a degree), does this not infer that a consistant mix of CO2 somehow increases temperature more rapidly over the land than the sea. Surely a more logical explanation of any land warming would be that induced by the increasing use of land for agriculture and building. Therefore whilst Man’s use of the land area may well be linked to a small amount of temperature change it is not the CO2 that causes it but the change in Albedo.
My second thought is the use of the word “Island” in UHI. This seems to infer that the land area is in a constant state of still air when in fact the movement of warmed air over rural and Urban areas is constant and sometimes dramatic especially in the corn belt and central tornado corridor.
My third thought is that they are using a set of thermometers put in place at the end of runways to check whether the wings need de-icing, and sea temperatures taken by ships designed to assist Chief Officers in their assessement of the relative humidity in the ships holds not to interpolate to the “Nth” degree for political reasons.
I have other thoughts but the cat is walking across my computer key board and needs feeding.
I’ve seen a couple lectures by Muller on YouTube
– he seems to have a sensible approach to Global Warming
I think the reason that he lumps ‘deniers’ as ‘unscientific’ is that you have to ignore all the scientific data to ‘deny’ Global Warming – even WUWT concedes that there has been Global Warming over the last century.
A skeptical position is reasonable, there are many reasons to be skeptical about the political bandwagon and gravy-trains that surrounds the issue.
That’s why people like Muller are worth listening to, as they try to point out where the science is, and also where the reality of CO2 output is (i.e. CO2 output of the developing world is the real problem)
Anyway, worth a watch:
Also, several important points about the BEST work:
1) Even though the raw data they use is largely the same as others have used, they have returned to the original data as much as possible, rather than using ‘adjusted’ data (which has always been one of the complaints about the other data sets)
2) Their methods allow much more of the data to be used, including incomplete sequences.
3) They publish both their data & their programs freely for others to see & use. (No more need for FOI requests!)
From the screen shot of their text:
http://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2011/10/best_uhi_capture.png?w=640&h=174
“The UHI effect is locally large and real …”
Hang on , I thought they came to the rather surprising conclusion it was negative.
So the delinquent teenager is growing up quickly and is now finding new and more sophisticated ways of getting its own way. In the past the cabal that as been bullied into submission, no longer provides the legitimacy it needs so a new ally is sought. Step forward leading sceptics who get a few promises that this time things will be done properly get involved with the delinquents friends. On the platform of open and transparent conduct these friends decide to confirm the answer to a question no one disputes and gets rewarded with access to the teenager’s exclusive club where fortunes are to be made. The delinquent teenager smiles to itself in the mirror realising that no matter what it does it will always get its own way.
My Tamblyn
Having read your highly informative discussions at the weblink in your post, would you indicate to the readers here if any analysis of ‘average of anomalies’ takes place AFTER discontinuities of anomalies in any individual station records have been taken into consideration.
If one assumes that there are only three reasons for such discontinuties:
1. Change in weather station siting or instrumentation.
2. Change in environment surrounding weather station site.
3. Rapid climatic change (such as 1977 PDO shift in oceanic temperatures near Alaska)
you will presumably be able to stress test your temperature graphs based on eliminating the effects of such discontinuties through simple subtraction or readdition of the size of the discontinuity from all subsequent records?
It would again be a major point of bringing concordance to the discussion by eliminating a valid concern, not through saying that the adjustments are valid or not, but highlighting what the effect of such adjustments would be were there incorporated.
The conclusion that would be drawn would either be that it has little if any effect; it has a significant effect in explaining away the increase in the ‘global temperature index’; it eliminates the current effect; or it amplifes the current effect by in fact highlghting a bias toward changes which led to colder temperature records being erroneously recorded.
I have no clue what the outcome would be, but it is clearly in the interests of all public officials to know the outcome fo that stress test.
I find this statement a bit odd “Apparently I’m not allowed to point out errors”, I am sure that lots of people will be doing exactly that, in fact I posted a link to someone who has already done so on the first thread. At least they think it is an error?
Sun Spot says:
“Why does the “Decadel land-surface average temperature” graph stop at 2005 ??
This is almost 2012 why have they dropped 7 years of data ???”
Worried me too until I guessed that they have used the midpoint of the ten year average. This gets rid of the (awkward for them) 1998 max.
Presumably if temparatures really do decline over the next deacde they can use a twenty year average ro “hide the decline”.
You can’t call for changes in the review process just because this is a very important topic to us. The process works quite well and any “howlers” in these new papers will be exposed. It isn’t right that there should be a subjective sliding scale of review because as we all say “the proof of the pudding is in the eating”.
Our cause is just and it doesn’t need special pleading.
“Serious claims belong in a serious scientific paper”
“If you have a serious new claim to make, it should go through scientific publication and peer review before you present it to the media”
[…]
“And it is this second stage of review by your peers – after publication – that is so important in science. If there are flaws in your case, responses can be written, as letters, or even whole new papers. If there is merit in your work, then new ideas and research will be triggered. That is the real process of science.
If a scientist sidesteps their scientific peers, and chooses to take an apparently changeable, frightening and technical scientific case directly to the public, then that is a deliberate decision, and one that can’t realistically go unnoticed. The lay public might find your case superficially appealing, but they may not be fully able to judge the merits of all your technical evidence.”
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/oct/21/bad-science-publishing-claims
“Ben Goldacre”
“This week Baroness Susan Greenfield, professor of pharmacology at Oxford reportedly announced that computer games could cause dementia in children. This would be very concerning scientific information. But this comes from the opening of a new wing of an expensive boarding school, not an academic conference. Then a spokesperson told a gaming site that’s not what she means. Though they didn’t say what she does mean.
Two months ago the same professor linked internet use with rising autism diagnoses (not for the first time), then pulled back when autism charities and an Oxford professor of psychology raised concerns. Similar claims go back a long way. They seem changeable, but serious.
It’s with some trepidation that anyone writes about Professor Greenfield’s claims. When I raised concerns, she said I was like the epidemiologists who denied that smoking caused cancer. Other critics find themselves derided as sexist. When Professor Dorothy Bishop raised concerns, Professor Greenfield responded: “It’s not really for Dorothy to comment on how I run my career.”
My next thought was that if one third of the temperatures are cooling and the other two thirds are warming over only 25% of the planet surface surely the word “Global” is not in any sense of the word applicable. So why do we continue to be bombarded with this fallacious statement when everyone already knows and agrees that there are areas of increasing temperatures and areas of decreasing temperatures. Rising sea levels and falling sea levels, accumulating sea ice and receding sea ice. No one has yet to my knowledge demonstated that any supposed warming is any more than the noise in the signal. Statistical hoop jumping does not improve the historical record. When there is 60 or 90 years of satelite data you can dig up my corpse and etch “you were wrong” on to my bleached bones. Until such time as that I will continue to see projects such as Best as the interpretation of garbage using flawed computer models and confirmation bias for political purposes.
Why do I always misread the word “Our Finding” as “Our Funding” in all these PR exercises? Is it that the two words are so inextricably linked that the first cannot be written without an eye to the second.
I don’t know about you guys, but I think that their averaging approach is a huge advance over what was done in the past.
They are quite open about the fact that this is still early days in the analysis, in the paper. I didn’t read the press release. This is such an improvement over gridding by dividing the lat and longitude by 5. The temperature adjustments don’t seem outrageous to me.
What is interesting is the graph that Anthony didn’t show. Where they took the GHCN data, not Hansen’s or Jones’s and ran it back to 1800. They divided it into five subsets and graphed them, so the results are somewhat robust, and it shows that 1800 was approximately the same temp as today.
Anthony,
When you wrote
which premise did you mean? It’s being quoted in a number of places, e.g., here with a presumption that it’s quite clear what ‘my premise’ refers to, but I can’t be sure from the blog post.
Why not go all the way and run |rurality” as a factor in the regression. And test for trend!
NotTheAussiePhilM says:
October 22, 2011 at 3:24 am
I’ve seen a couple lectures by Muller on YouTube
– he seems to have a sensible approach to Global Warming
I think the reason that he lumps ‘deniers’ as ‘unscientific’ is that you have to ignore all the scientific data to ‘deny’ Global Warming – even WUWT concedes that there has been Global Warming over the last century.
Show us one of these “deniers” of global warming. Sure, you’ll find some who will show that it hasn’t warmed in the last 10 years or so, but they will also state that we have been warming since the end of the LIA.
Muller using the “denier” label is more of a hateful, mean-spirited usage than anything else, especially when he allows the listener/reader to think that most of the “skeptics” are these “deniers”. Muller loses a lot of respect and acceptance within the skeptic position by his words and now his BEST actions.
That you, or anyone, accepts this and would excuse it shows how effective he and other users of “denier” are.
Tainted Jury Science. The media eventing is deliberate and intentional. Peer review will now be irrelevant as it was intended to be, and the process is indicative of contempt for the peer review process (not that that’s necessarily a bad thing). The paper(s) will not be read, or more importantly, understood, by the very vast majority of those who will receive the [press] “news”. There is nothing about science in this – its simply about gaming the system. If the science publishing world had any integrity, the press gaming before review would disqualify the paper from publication in any journal for anyreason. But then, its never really about the science. McLuhan would be proud.