Guest Post by Willis Eschenbach
With altogether far too much fanfare for my taste, the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature (BEST) project has not released its preliminary results.
Or at least I can’t find them. I just wanted the month-by-month data that their hotrod new computer program spits out at the end of its run. The results they’re all hot and bothered about.
But despite releasing a massive database, 39,000 stations, along with the code in Matlab (which does me no good at all), I can’t find anywhere their freakin’ results. You know, the actual results of their work? The monthly average global temperature, the stuff that they mangled to produce things like their PR graph shown in Figure 1:
Figure 1. Purports to show that the BEST temperature record, and all the others as well, are all going “in one direction”, nowhere but up. I’m sure you remember the Climategate mantra, “hide the decline”? Keep that in mind as we proceed.
So … that will show those shifty skeptics, even BEST says it’s warming nonstop, evidence is right there before your eyes.
What’s not to like? How can you argue with that? The science is in.
Since I couldn’t get their results, I did the next best thing, and digitized their results. Even then, I was frunstrated. As far as I could tell, they never showed their actual results. The closest I found is in Figure 1 of their paper here:
Figure 2. Figure 1 of BEST’s “Decadal Variations” paper. Everybody’s going up, up, up, although you can’t really see what anyone is doing.
I blew that Figure up, and digitized it. Sixty years, 720 data points, boooring. Plus I hate it that they’ve smoothed the data, that makes it useless for statistical work. But it could have given us an idea of what’s going on in each of the records … if they hadn’t printed them atop one another in confusing colors. Enough of the spaghetti graphs already, you mad scientist persons, they show nothing! Figure 3 shows the BEST dataset along with the other datasets, this time displaced from each other so that we can actually see what’s happening:
Figure 3. The BEST land-only temperature record, compared to other surface and satellite land-only temperature records. 12 month moving average data, sadly. Note the decline.
[UPDATE: An alert reader noticed what I did not, that this is a subset of the BEST dataset that does not contain the stations used by the other groups (NOAA, etc). He points out that the full dataset is again different, in that it in fact rises more than the partial dataset. I have updated the figure and struck out some text to include that.
However, this doesn’t fix the questions. The post 1998 record from all of the BEST data is much more poorly correlated with the current records (~0.65) than prior to 1998 (~0.90). So this does not verify or validate the current groups datasets.
Hmmm … that gives a very different picture than Figure 1. Even with the bizarre 12-month moving average, the BEST record is clearly the outlier since 1998. You would think that in the modern era, the BEST would agree more closely with the other records. And indeed, from about 1975 to 1998 they were moving in something like lockstep.
But both before and after that time period, the BEST results are a clear outlier. And since 1998, BEST has been in a slow decline … funny how that didn’t show up in Figure 1. Yes, I know, a ten-year moving average shouldn’t show anything within five years from the end of the dataset. And I’m sure folks will argue that it’s just coincidence that they chose that exact smoothing length, and that it was the chance selection of colors that jumbled up the spaghetti graph so it’s unreadable … but y’know, after a while “coincidence” wears thin. I’m going with a more nuanced explanation, that it was a “deliberately unconscious choice to hide the decline”, although certainly you are welcome to stick to the story that it’s all just an unfortunate chain of events …
CONCLUSIONS:
Conclusion 1. It is extremely sneaky to send a truncated, smoothed result like Figure 1 out to the media to announce your results. That’s advocacy disguised as science. They did it to make it look like the temperature was headed for the sky and that BEST agreed. Instead, BEST actually disagrees with the other datasets by claiming that over the last decade, land temperatures are dropping, not staying stable or rising as per the other datasets. Using a graph that didn’t show that is … curious. As Gollum would say … “Oooooh, tricksy”. Including you, Judith. Figure 1 was nothing but “hide the decline” PR spin. Bad scientists, no cookies.
Conclusion 1. The correlation between the old data points used by the current groups, and the new data used only by BEST, is quite poor after 1998. This is visible in the plots of both the partial and full BEST datasets. The reasons for this are not clear, but it provides no support for the current datasets.
Conclusion 2. First point. The raw terror point, the thought that has the AGW alarmists changing their shorts, is the dreaded 2°C rise that is forecast from CO2. That is supposed to be the mythical “tipping point”. Second point. If we look at the 10-year smoothed data in Figure 1, BEST says that in the last two centuries, the temperature has risen about two degrees.
Let me note that over that two-century time period there have been:
a) No known increase in extreme weather events.
b) No known increase in catastrophes (other than from increased populations and property in vulnerable areas).
c) No major costs, deaths or damage from sea level rise. And don’t bother me with Katrina. A Category 3 hurricane took down ancient poorly maintained levees on a city below sea level. Absent that, no problem.
d) No climate-related spread of various infectious diseases.
e) No known increase in droughts or floods.
f) No loss of Tuvalu or other coral atolls.
g) Actually, none of the horrendous outcomes or biblical plagues of frogs and the like which are supposed to accompany the Thermageddon™ of a two degree temperature rise occurred over the last two centuries. To the contrary, the increased warming seems to have been a net gain for most humans, animals, and plants. Nobody likes freezing their asterisk off, after all, and the warming has mostly been in extra-tropical winter nights. That’s the theory, at least, although the BEST data should be able to tell us more.
Conclusion 3. BEST has done the world a huge service by collating and collecting all the data in one place, and deserves credit for that.
But they have done the world a huge disservice by becoming media whores, by putting out a shabby imitation of science in Figure 1, and by making a host of claims before peer review is complete.
This last one astounds me, that they’ve done it before peer review is finished. Doug Keenan and William Briggs have both raised separate and cogent arguments that the BEST analysis contains flaws. That would make me nervous, they’re kinda heavyweights, although any man can be wrong … but no, the BEST folks are making a host of claims as though their paper has already passed peer review. It’s the same publicity circus that Muller put on for Congress. And what three-ring media circus would be complete without their own brand new personalized “hide the decline” poster?
Since they have held out for extreme transparency, or at least given lip-service to the idea, I would be very interested to find out the names of the reviewers.
Because certainly, one possible explanation of their brazen trumpeting of their results before the peer review process is finished is that the fix is in. Why else the confidence that the reviewers will not find fault with their work? It is extreme hubris at a minimum, which is reputed historically to have unpleasant sequelae involving wax and feathers …
w.
PS—The world is warming. It has been for centuries. Rather than saying anything about anthropogenic global warming, all the BEST dataset does is confirms that. How that’s gotten twisted into some supposed “victory” for the AGW crowd escapes me.
FWIW there is a Matlab interpreter for R. I’ll find it for you in a day or two.
Matthew
That is the part of the problem here. While you are correct that we really haven’t seen an increase in weather related calamities, the ones we are seeing are huge. Andrew, for example. That is simply because there are more people living where these things have the potential to strike. But as for Katrina, what many people are not aware of (because the news really didn’t cover it) is that the communities East of New Orleans in Mississippi were extremely hard hit. Some towns were basically scraped off the face of the earth. Those were mostly poor black and Viet Namese communities not associated with any major metro area. I had friends that went to the area around Biloxi, Gulf Port, and Long Beach Mississippi and were there for months.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Hurricane_katrina_damage_gulfport_mississippi.jpg
There were no levees at that location, that was all wind and storm surge.
Is that the BEST they can do?
Dear Mr. Watts, if Matlab “does you no good at all” you probably are not qualified to talk about data analysis. Stand by while I download and run the code and included datasets, thereafter posting my results. I wish you the best of luck in downloading Octave (an open source version of Matlab), also known as GNU Octave and concurrently running the Berkeley code and data. If you have any questions, do not hesitate to email me for help. Your’s truly Chase Stoudt
REPLY: Here’s what I sent via email.
Steve McIntyre provides the following script in order to plot the BEST (presumably) monthly data:
download.file(“http://www.berkeleyearth.org/downloads/analysis-data.zip”,”temp.zip”,mode=”wb”)
handle=unz(“temp.zip”,”Full_Database_Average_summary.txt”)
x=scan(handle,sep=”\n”,what=””)
close(handle)
writeLines(x,”temp”)
x=read.table(“temp”,skip=19,colClasses=rep(“numeric”,5) )
names(x)=c(“year”,”anom”,”unc”,”smooth”,”sm_uncert”)
berk=ts(x[,2:5],start=x[1,1])
ts.plot(berk[,”anom”])
Would be curious to see if this is indeed the source of the monthly data.
Chase Stoudt says:
Let’s hope your MATLAB and data analysis skills are better than your reading comprehension.
Willis:
Would it be possible for you to post your digitized monthly data here? I could certainly use it, and I’m sure others could too. Thank you.
Willis:
Let me be the first to say, as a RIGHT WING NEANDERTHAL REPTILE HATED REPUBLICAN, you are completely brilliant. That’s an indirect way of saying my judgements are made on the character of the analysis, not the color of a man’s environmental religion. (I’m still confused on that, are you white, grey, black or polka-dot?)
Keep up the marvelous work. You are the BEST defense anyone could ask for. Or is it the defense against BEST?
Max
Echo observa, could have been BETTER.
Crosspatch,
The magnitude of the destruction is more a function of the growth in population in bad areas (like New Orleans), rather than the destructive power of the storm. Basically modern science has enabled people to live where they couldn’t before, and so the reasons we didn’t live there earlier – below sea level, flooding in the case of N.O. – we’re seeing more people affected. It’s not the weather – it’s our modern engineering capability, and the fact it is limited.
Chase Stoudt says:
October 22, 2011 at 6:44 pm
Dear Mr. Watts, if Matlab “does you no good at all” you probably are not qualified to talk about data analysis.
____________________________
Hate to rain on your ever so clever jab at Anthony. This article was written by Willis. Soon as you get that downloaded and working let me know, I have a copy of ” See Spot Run ” laying around from when my son was 3.
Well, maybe if the “skeptic” crowd hadn’t spent so much time talking about how poor the siting of the stations was and making all these grandiose charges of data manipulation on the part of CRU and GISS, and so forth, it would not be viewed as such a big victory. One reaps what one sows.
Robert – Let’s give the benefit of the doubt. Should Willis take Chase up on the invitation, we’ll gladly ignore the faux pas of naming the wrong author. Anthony ultimately has editorial control (and responsibility so far as his reputation is behind all posts), and although it is poor data analysis to not note who scribed a particular posting, but I don’t recall seeing Chase post here before and so I’m withholding condemnation until I see more of what Chase has to offer. (My condemnation or approval would mean little, of course, since I’m a long-time lurker and seldom post.)
Willis,
Look here. The file “Full_Database_Average_complete.txt” has the monthly global averages.
Very well said, Willis. You raised some important ethical points. I would like to remind everyone that BEST played Bait and Switch with Anthony by switching to a 60 year analysis when he wanted a 30 year analysis beginning in 1979. Only the 30 year record includes siting data so BEST chose not to address what Anthony considered most important, questions about siting.
Here it is:
P. Roebuck. matlab: MATLAB emulation package. http://CRAN.
R-project.org/package=matlab, 2008. R package version 0.8-2.
Just to clarify, the link I posted above is to the data underlying your figure 1, not your figure 2.
Joel Shore says:
October 22, 2011 at 7:05 pm
“Well, maybe if the “skeptic” crowd hadn’t spent so much time talking about how poor the siting of the stations was and making all these grandiose charges of data manipulation on the part of CRU and GISS, and so forth, it would not be viewed as such a big victory. One reaps what one sows.”
BEST chose not to address the 30 years for which siting data is available but switched to a 60 year record and did no siting analysis. If you do not address the siting issues, as BEST does not, then you cannot criticize those who have argued that there are important siting issues. Total fail for BEST and your comment.
By the way, BEST played Bait and Switch with Anthony. They might make good used car salesmen.
Mike D in AB says: October 22, 2011 at 7:06 pm
Mike, it’s like this: I’ve been doing computers for over 40 years and MATLAB doesn’t do me any good either. Somehow I don’t think command of MATLAB is the best basis for judging someone’s data analysis ability… but the ability to comprehend the written word is. Young Mr. Chase is just another drive-by.
Chase Stoudt says:
October 22, 2011 at 6:44 pm
“Dear Mr. Watts, if Matlab “does you no good at all” you probably are not qualified to talk about data analysis.”
Well, what a sweetheart you are! Here to make friends, right?
While I have not seen the actual data set with their 1.6 Billion data points from their 39,000+ observations points, I do have a calculator and am troubled by the small number of data points from each station. If their data goes back to 1940 (that seems about where they claim to have mostly eliminated their margin of error), that means there are 70 years of data, 840 months, multiplied by 39,000 stations equals 32.7 Million, with in the end means there are less than 50 temperature records for each station each month. Is that enough? I’m sure that means many stations don’t have anywhere near that many data points per month, or aren’t complete for that period.
Considering that they probably have data going back a lot further than 70 years, that again raised the question about how much those numbers actually mean. Are they just there to confuse everyone into thinking it is a massive comprehensive list?
Joel Shore says:
October 22, 2011 at 7:05 pm
Well, maybe if the “skeptic” crowd hadn’t spent so much time talking about how poor the siting of the stations was and making all these grandiose charges of data manipulation on the part of CRU and GISS, and so forth, it would not be viewed as such a big victory. One reaps what one sows.
The rate of change is important. Poor siting masks or overstates the severity of the problem. If you’re doing 55 mph in a 55 zone, you’re ok. If you’re doing 150 in the 55 zone, you’re in trouble. This skeptic is of the opinion that we’re doing 30 in a 55 zone, and that the official speed of 100 mph is way out to lunch. Those of us who disbelieve the treemometer record know that we’re recovering from the little ice age, and expect temperatures to be increasing because temperatures don’t stay static. Where I live in Calgary is often under 2 miles of ice. I’m glad to be in an inter-glacial, and will do all that I can to help us stay here, but adopting alarmism is too much for me.
There is, IMO, a subtle difference between “the world has warmed” and “the world is warming”. The latter implies facts not in evidence.
Robert E. Phelan says:
October 22, 2011 at 7:15 pm
Point taken. I’ve studied 6 computer languages over the year (but claim fluency in none of them), so I see where you’re coming from. I failed a stats course twice because I refused to buy the proprietary software that statistics department insisted I use, and instead did the homework in a spreadsheet (which was immediately rejected because it wasn’t in the “right format”. The work should stand on its own, and placing it inside a limited framework (or one not amenable to common usage) is obfuscation rather than transparency.
I expect you’re right about the drive-by, but we do often get sincere but misguided folks here and it behooves us to not drive away the few who might actually be open minded enough to learn.
Found this listed on Bishop Hill. Seems suited to the conversation.
Another review of BEST’s math, This one is more in depth.
http://wmbriggs.com/blog/?p=4530
Regarding Figure 1, I have seen this “game” played before to show there warming where there really isn’t. Let us presume that from 1990 to 2000, there is an even warming. Then let us presume that from 2000 to 2010, there is absolutely no warming (nor cooling) whatsoever. What these people do is take the average from 1990 to 2000, then from 1991 to 2001, and so on until 2000 to 2010. By this “trick”, they can prove to you that it has been warming X degrees per decade from 2000 to 2005 even though the temperature may not have gone up a hundredth of a degree from 2000 to 2005.
Theo Goodwin says:
They did address these issues, just not in exactly the precise way Anthony would have liked them to. In any such analysis, there will be literally hundreds of decisions that have to be made. One can always find something to criticize if one does not want to accept the results of the analysis! I would suggest you might want to practice a little bit of skepticism here.
They also have apparently released their data, so others can re-run it making various changes…but I doubt there will be any rush on the part of the critiquers to do this.
Mike D in AB says:
Well, that may be your opinion but it is certainly not the conclusion that BEST reached.
Mike D in AB
“…it behooves us to not drive away the few who might actually be open minded enough to learn…”
Do a google search on “Chase Stoudt”. The young gentleman may be sincere and is certainly misguided, but he is not here to learn. He’s reached the stage in his life where he knows everything and needs to let everyone know just how superior his intellect is.
If Willis’ suppositions hold up,
has BEST gone BUST?
Willis, you really outdid yourself this time.
The figure you plotted is not the actual Berkeley reconstruction of land temperatures. As explained in the article and in the very caption of the figure that you are showing, it is a partial reconstruction made using only data that was not used by the other records, for the specific purpose of this particular paper (analysing the effects of the AMO).
The real, full Berkeley reconstruction is plotted in Figures 5 and 8 of their first paper on their website – the one that actually describes their methods and results. Which apparently you have utterly failed to read.
As it turns out, the actual Berkeley reconstruction shows the exact opposite of what you are ranting about. Namely, the Berkeley reconstruction runs hotter than both GISS and HadCrut (but closely follows NOAA) in the last decade.
Obviously that didn’t prevent you from throwing copious accusations of dishonesty, based on nothing else than your own misunderstanding of papers that you either read casually or did not read at all.
I encourage all WUWT reader to check the papers by themselves and draw their own conclusions. Keep that in mind for the next time you see one of Willis’ rants.
What is the status of the global curve (as opposed to land only)?
“Even with the bizarre 12-month moving average, the BEST record is clearly the outlier since 1998.”
From a different post:
“Bill Illis says:
October 22, 2011 at 9:37 am
(It also looks like BEST has an error in their database for April, 2010 which should be +1.035C rather than -1.035C – it is such an outlier compared to the trend and to other datasets – that means all their moving averages have to recalculated as well).”
I compared BEST for March , April, and May for 2010 and the values were 0.859, -1.035 and 1.098.
Hadcrut3, for the same period, had 0.583, 0.571 and 0.516.
GISS, for the same period, had 1.06, 0.87 and 0.87.
While I do not expect identical results, at least the numbers should be in the ball park. I agree with Bill that the BEST April reading should probably have been +1.035. With this correction, BEST does not look quite as different, however it seems clear that BEST will not support GISS that 2010 was the hottest year on record when all numbers are in.
Shouldn’t we be more concerned with hourly data to see whether a day has heated or cooled in general – We should be measuring temperature in an analogue continuous line and then calculating the average temperate for the day based on that rather than the daily maximum and minimums. Who is to say one day is hotter than another day just because one day had a higher maximum – what if taht maximum fell rapidly in the late afternoon – compared to a lower maximum that lasts long into the night – the total heat for a day othe average heat per hour or minute should be the basis of all discussion.
I would be very interested to find out the names of the reviewers.
And more importantly: the text of the reviews.
When we began our study, we felt that skeptics had raised legitimate issues, and we didn’t know what we’d find. Our results turned out to be close to those published by prior groups. We think that means that those groups had truly been very careful in their work, despite their inability to convince some skeptics of that. They managed to avoid bias in their data selection, homogenization and other corrections.
This is from Muller’s Wall Street Journal piece, dated October 21.
The distinct impression I get from the piece is that Muller (a) has an inflated ego and (b) is simultaneously attempting to mollify the NOAA, CRU, GISS, and other Warmista groups and grab a piece of their action.
It will be most interesting to see what the actual journal publications look like.
Willis, their global average is online. I posted the following retrieval script at A and Cl Etc.
Thanx Willis, compelling read as always.
I notice after the end of the BEST data, the others drop about 0.1 to 0.3 Deg. (just eyeballing)
Assuming BEST follows that, it would mean the current BEST temperature would be the same as about the late 70s early 80s?
Joel Shore says:
October 22, 2011 at 7:31 pm
“Theo Goodwin says:
BEST chose not to address the 30 years for which siting data is available but switched to a 60 year record and did no siting analysis. If you do not address the siting issues, as BEST does not, then you cannot criticize those who have argued that there are important siting issues. Total fail for BEST and your comment.”
“They did address these issues, just not in exactly the precise way Anthony would have liked them to. In any such analysis, there will be literally hundreds of decisions that have to be made. One can always find something to criticize if one does not want to accept the results of the analysis! I would suggest you might want to practice a little bit of skepticism here.”
They did address these issues but you cannot say how? Is that your non-response? It is a non-response. Also, did they or did they not pull a Bait and Switch on Anthony? Did they or did they not switch a 60 year record for Anthony’s 30 year record with siting data? If you want to correspond with me, answer the question.
“They also have apparently released their data, so others can re-run it making various changes…but I doubt there will be any rush on the part of the critiquers to do this.”
Their data is worthless because they used a 60 year period. They owe it to Anthony to do the 30 year analysis that he expected. They also owe him a huge apology. They also owe the media and the scientific community for going to the media with non-peer-reviewed work.
What’s this? “Climate scientists” hiding a decline? Who would have thunk it?
Chase Stoudt says:
October 22, 2011 at 6:44 pm
Anthony Watts is not the author of the post, I am. And if you think being good at Matlab is a requirement for talking about data analysis, you’re a computer language snob. I speak half a dozen computer languages. I have no more interest in learning yours than you have in learning mine.
w.
John Tofflemire says:
October 22, 2011 at 6:56 pm
Indeed, that is the source of the monthly data. Many thanks.
w.
Joel Shore says:
October 22, 2011 at 7:05 pm
Thanks, Joel. If the BEST results had verified and agreed with e.g. the post 1998 GHCN/GISS/CRUTEM results, then you could crow.
Since those BEST results do not resemble the others, and are a clear outlier, I’d say that the earlier results and methods have not been verified or validated as you seem to believe.
w.
Willis:
The monthly data you are looking for is here. Don’t feel bad, other people couldn’t find it either. And they certainly didn’t put it under their data section.
http://www.berkeleyearth.org/analysis.php
Go to the bottom of the page and click on “analysis chart data”.
I’ve already plotted it. The trend since 98 is strongly positive. Oddly enough, the chart they created for the decadal analysis paper using 2000 previously unused records looks like it has a negative trend since 98. They don’t bother to explain the divergence. And I can’t find the data for that 2000 record example.
Willis, I’m puzzled why you place such weight on “peer review” as presently undertaken in climate journals. The articles will get and are getting far more effective review on the blogs than journals can provide.
In fields other than climate, circulation of working papers for comment is common practice. I wish that we’d had the opportunity to do this with our article on Steig et al.
toto says:
October 22, 2011 at 7:44 pm
Thanks, toto. I encourage readers to do the same, nice catch. You are right, I was wrong … but the point is still valid. What they are showing is the new, never before seen BEST data.
So despite my acknowledged error, the question remains. Why do the stations we’ve never seen show a different result than the stations we have seen?
w.
Willis wrote: Conclusion 1. It is extremely sneaky to send a truncated, smoothed result like Figure 1 out to the media to announce your results. That’s advocacy disguised as science. They did it to make it look like the temperature was headed for the sky and that BEST agreed. Instead, BEST actually disagrees with the other datasets by claiming that over the last decade, land temperatures are dropping, not staying stable or rising as per the other datasets. Using a graph that didn’t show that is … curious. As Gollum would say … “Oooooh, tricksy”. Including you, Judith. Figure 1 was nothing but “hide the decline” PR spin. Bad scientists, no cookies.
I disagree with that conclusion. They posted their drafts, their data, and their code. Anybody can check their work. the BEST downturn toward 2010 has been noted by others. What the BEST team might do is comment on exactly how their methodology produced that discrepancy from the other, as well as discrepancies at other years.
toto says:
October 22, 2011 at 7:44 pm
Oh shucks. I have seen that graph numerous times without reading the caption all the way through. The differences still should be commented on, I think, but the sampling is obviously the source of the difference.
0.5.) Open Matlab/Download Octave (These directions are only written for Matlab since I have work tomorrow, and will mess with the Octave directions then)
1.) Download the code/data from
http://berkeleyearth.org/our-code.php
http://berkeleyearth.org/data.php (the .mat for data in this case)
respectively
1.) Read the read me!!!!
2.) open the script temperatureStartup.m after unpacking the .zips. It is located in “/AnalysisCode/Export/Code/temperatureStartup.m” (without the quotes)
3.) add these 3 variables to the scripts like this in Matlab/Octave depending on your setup windows or mac (mac way shown)
psep = (‘/’)
temperature_software_dir = ‘/mycomputer/AnalysisCode/Export/Code’
temperature_data_dir = ‘/mycomputer/PreliminaryMatlabDataset’
temperature_scratch_dir = ‘/mycomputer/BEST/out’
4.) The BEST people forgot to include one .mfile in the .zip.
type “edit /mycomputer/BEST/temperatureGlobals”
(I’m emailing them tonight about this)
then edit the script to read
“load /BEST/Complete_Prelim_Dataset.mat”
save it and close. Whenever you run this .m, watch out it’s a lot of data and will take a long time to load.
5.) Run temperatureGlobals.m that you created(just type it into the command window no .m needed). Like mentioned above it will take awhile to load.
6.) type the command “results = BerkeleyAverage(se,sites,’quick’);”
7.) Have fun boys and girls, remember the help command is your friend. Will post all the graphs they include in the toolbox tomorrow. I need to sleep before work. And I apologize for not giving you credit to this post Eschenbach. I’m willing to learn any new computer language, the question is are you?
Anthony: Mea Culpa for my coffee joke on the other thread. I thought it was light-hearted and funny. I am capable of mean that would make the Devil blush, I guess. It is funny though.
Willis: The BEST also seems to show a much greater variability through out the data set. Of course, it’s hard to tell without the data to find the deviation. And eyeballing is tricky with all those graphs next to each other, but with some visual aiding (an index card) it looks like it is so. Pea and thimble? Does changing the amount of variation in the data increase the uncertainty in the attributions? I wouldn’t see how it could be avoided.
Well done toto!
Anyway, it looks like we can have thorough confidence in the terrestrial temperature records. And we can add the satellite records as well.
One more piece of the AGW puzzle cemented happily in place.
I noted on Saturday in an English newspaper that a social study expects ‘energy deficient’ deaths (translation: rising electricity prices due to the conversion to wind power means that pelderly pensioners cannot afford to heat their homes) will increase by 2,700/year. Let’s hope that AGW is right after all so that they may live …
I agree. I think, we should be more reserved, with the BEST data-set. Let’s see what information is obtainable, from community analysis (and peer review), before rushing to sweeping judgments. Unfortunately, media misreporting headlines, will be sure to rile skeptics into over reaction. We can self inflict injury by spurious rejection. No matter its derivation, I find the plot interesting. Let’s see how much accuracy and precision remain after washing. GK
From Willis Eschenbach on October 22, 2011 at 8:47 pm:
I recall seeing the claim here and elsewhere that they were (deliberately?) dropping the stations that showed a cooling trend, biasing the overall record to increased warming. Now the graph of the “forgotten” stations shows a cooling trend, a “slow decline”.
Amazing coincidence, no?
toto says:
October 22, 2011 at 7:44 pm
Willis, you really outdid yourself this time.
The figure you plotted is not the actual Berkeley reconstruction of land temperatures. As explained in the article and in the very caption of the figure that you are showing, it is a partial reconstruction made using only data that was not used by the other records, for the specific purpose of this particular paper (analysing the effects of the AMO).
The real, full Berkeley reconstruction is plotted in Figures 5 and 8 of their first paper on their website – the one that actually describes their methods and results. Which apparently you have utterly failed to read.
As it turns out, the actual Berkeley reconstruction shows the exact opposite of what you are ranting about. Namely, the Berkeley reconstruction runs hotter than both GISS and HadCrut (but closely follows NOAA) in the last decade.
Obviously that didn’t prevent you from throwing copious accusations of dishonesty, based on nothing else than your own misunderstanding of papers that you either read casually or did not read at all.
I encourage all WUWT reader to check the papers by themselves and draw their own conclusions. Keep that in mind for the next time you see one of Willis’ rants.
________________
Wilis Says:
Thanks, toto. I encourage readers to do the same, nice catch. You are right, I was wrong … but the point is still valid. What they are showing is the new, never before seen BEST data.
So despite my acknowledged error, the question remains. Why do the stations we’ve never seen show a different result than the stations we have seen?
_________
So, is the end result that this post was a complete waste of time And that Willis’ reputation had taken a blow, because of apparent carelessness? And for what?
If Willis, or anyone else, wants to use the sort of invective of Willis’ original post, mercilessly attacking the BEST project, they’d better get their facts straight or the credibility of this entire blog will, rightly, fall into doubt. One can only imagine the folks at Real Climate, or wherever, licking their lips over this blunder.
Bad play, guys. And over such a relative side issue.
Sure, the freaking planet has warmed fractionally over the past 150 years or so. But so what?
Attribution, causation, intepretation of future implications, is where the action is.
Not a debate over whether there has been a 0.8 Celsius increase, or something slightly less, in global temps over the past century and a half. Where does that debate even lead? That the increase has only been 0.7Celsius? So what?
As Willis has shown, it is too early draw conclusions. I am willing to wait a month or so while the auditors dig through the data. I think it might be a good idea for others to do the same.
A 1991 paper published in Northwest Science *The Effect of Observation Time and Sampling Frequency on Mean Daily Maximum, Minimum and Average Temperature* at
https://research.wsulibs.wsu.edu:8443/xmlui/handle/2376/1631
provides cautions regarding sampling and averaging of daily temperature. From the abstract: *The use of long-term temperature data for climatic, ecohydrologic and other studies must be scrutinized carefully because of the average daily differences due to time of observation (TOB). . . The significance of our findings is that studies which require historical temperature records and where only small changes in temperature are expected, such as climate change modeling, will be difficult to verify. Also, mean daily temperature will change at locations when several readings are used to compute mean daily temperature rather than computing mean daily temperature from the dialy maximum and minimum temperatures.*
Re the over-used spaghetti graph, I offer the alternative handlebar tassel graph, after the accessory seen on kids’ tricycles.
Re Willis Eschenbach October 22, 2011 at 8:34 pm reply about BEST PR crowing, *Statistics of Extremes* by E. J. Gumbel provides this quotation: *Wenn der Hahn kraeht auf dem Mist, Aendert sich’s Wetter oder belibt wie’s ist.* See Section 6.3.
kadaka (KD Knoebel) says:
October 22, 2011 at 9:49 pm
Not a debate over whether there has been a 0.8 Celsius increase, or something slightly less, in global temps over the past century and a half. Where does that debate even lead? That the increase has only been 0.7Celsius? So what?
__________________________________________
As of right now the AGW movement has no real world data to support the claim for the CO2 effect. My guess is there is an active attempt to try and disprove by any means some of the anchor effects.
Temperature Rise, Sea Level Rise, Arctic Ice Melt are the ones that I think you will see a concerted effort to ” Help the Skeptics not to worry because here we show you it all real “. These are the primary points that the Skeptics have given them no quarter.
The Best study is the first wave to attempt to get some wiggle room by increasing the temperature by any amount. By removing UHI effects they can now proclaim that this little bit of extra heat must be AGW. They have to try something. Time is not on their side, every year the temp, sea level, or ice doesn’t match the ” Models ” they loose credibility with the public and it becomes much easier to become a Skeptic.
Willis – thanks for your efforts, but I am left with more questions than answers.
Does your Figure 3 use the data extracted from your Figure 2?
if so, then it is “randomly chosen from 30,964 sites that were not used by the other groups”. Does this mean that these sites are unreliable and therefore should not be used, or does it mean that the other groups should have used them? Or does it mean that these sites are somehow only appropriate for “analysing the effects of the AMO” and not for calculating global temperature?
The BEST data shows a marked temperature decline from about 2000, while ‘All BEST’ and the others show increase. Could this be an artefact of the severe drop in GHCN(?) station numbers in recent years, ie. the set of stations that the analyses all use? IOW could it be that there has been a bias in the dropped stations towards those not warming (no intention implied)?
Another big difference between BEST and the others is a big spike around 1968. Any explanation?
I am very concerned by William M Briggs’ comments (http://wmbriggs.com/blog/?p=4530): “The authors did [] some checking; e.g. they remove truly odd values (all zeros, etc.), but this cleaning appears minimal. They instead modeled temperature (as above) and checked the given observation against the model. Those observations that evinced large deviations from the model were then down-weighted and the model re-run. The potential for abuse here is obvious, and is the main reason for suspicion of the term “outlier.” If the data doesn’t fit the model, throw it out! In the end, you are left with only that data that fits, which—need I say it?—does not prove your model’s validity.” and “[The authors] say, “In this case we assess the overall ‘reliability’ of the record by measuring each record’s average level of agreement with the expected field [] at the same location.” At least reliability is used with scare quotes. Once again, this has the direct effect of moving the actual observations towards the direction of the model“. Aren’t these extraordinarily unsound practices? Wouldn’t the correct approach be to analyse the data without reference to the model, and only then compare results with the model?
TIA
A peer review process might have benefitted this article judging by the amount crossed-out content.
Is toto (the other one) part of Berkeley Earth? He seems qualified enough to use his real name. Me, I’m just another dog on the internet.
BEST’s Figure 1 shows an interesting spike in the 1967-68 range. For a 2000/30964 subsample that seems large.
p.3
The BEST temp plot from 1800 to present is presented as “proof” of special warming since 1950. You could also look at this as a pretty linear temp increase all the way from 1800 if you allow for some cycle-like variations which seem to change pattern about 1910. Before that the data is not conclusive. After that it could be a warm-cool-warm supplement to that linear trend. Can BEST really rule this out?
I fail to see why people complain about the early release. over and over again I see people quote the Spenser “study” that was “published” here. You dont like the results, dig through the math. Dont understand the code, study harder or write Muller.
Personally, I’m going to wait till the papers go through review before wasting any more time on it
Neil Jordan says:
October 22, 2011 at 10:59 pm
It is somewhat difficult to verify that quote, but here is another quote, spelled correctly, including an easily verifyable source:
Source: German proverbs, http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/German_proverbs
Willis one reason that post 1998 and ALSO the early parts diverge is that there are many series that STOP before CRU common period AND many stations that start AFTER,
its kinda the point of Best. If you work with romans method as I have you’ll find this over and over again.
crosspatch says:
October 22, 2011 at 6:30 pm
“…what many people are not aware of (because the news really didn’t cover it) is that the communities East of New Orleans in Mississippi were extremely hard hit. Some towns were basically scraped off the face of the earth. ”
Sort of like 1969 eh? That one was an actual category 5. Not the overblown, after the fact tiny cat 5 swath of Andrew.
“There were no levees at that location, that was all wind and storm surge.”
and to think they had 36 years to remedy that problem after Camille.
What I’ve seen here is the author of the post who’s not able to find the data but still draws conclusions by eyeballing the (poorly digitized) wrong graph. And the whole story ends with ad hom and insults (“media whores”) to a team of respected scientists who, right or wrong they may be, did a real scientific work.
Luckly a McIntyre weights in to save the day and help download and read a simple 5 columns ascii file, which an average high school student could probably do.
Is this the best science blog or something has changed from 2008?
Is it right that the essence of trhe Berkely findings is that the rural and urban sites have been warming at a sinilar rate and so it is assumed that UHI effects are not a significant factor for determining the direction and rate of the temperature trend ?
Well, if so, how about the proposition that the incremental rate of nearby development is on average the same for both rural and urban sites ?
Wouldn’t that produce just such an outcome ?
During a period of development isn’t it just as likely that it will occur near a rural site as near an urban site ?
>>When we began our study, we felt that skeptics had raised legitimate
>>issues, and we didn’t know what we’d find.
Never trust any article or paper that starts off with trite comments like this. Seen it all too often before — we were all skeptics, but but the end of our research we were all true believers….
Yeah, we believe you.
.
Joel Shore says:
October 22, 2011 at 7:05 pm
Well, maybe if the “skeptic” crowd hadn’t spent so much time talking about how poor the siting of the stations was and making all these grandiose charges of data manipulation on the part of CRU and GISS, and so forth, it would not be viewed as such a big victory. One reaps what one sows.
I knew a man who took weather readings for the Met Office. When he got drunk he used to urinate in the rain gague!
Willis says
How that’s gotten twisted into some supposed “victory” for the AGW crowd escapes me.
———–
Well that’s pretty obvious. There have been many many claims that the world is not warming. Furthermore there has been a consistent campaign to discredit the thermometer record data sets and the scientist who collected and analyzed the data.
These attempts have been directed at the American and British datasets. Climategate, you may remember that, was promoted as a way of discrediting Phil Jones. People like Smokey are still insisting on interpreting some portions of these files as evidence of data manipulation.
Well it seems that all of the data sets are all producing the same results when analyzed by different people. So the BEST results are proof that all of those claims about data manipulation were lies.
This is why its called a victory.
Has anyone looked at the actual data that can be downloaded, the data.txt files? And I don’t mean plotted it with a program, but looked at it.
The BEST site states: “We mistakenly posted the wrong text data file (TMAX instead of TAVG). We apologize for any inconvenience or confusion this may have caused. The correct files are now in place and may be downloaded below.”
I got both versions. The first version, that was headed as Tmax has LOWER temperatures than the new version that is headed as Tavg. WTF? And the data still doesn’t make any sense. Like Chicago University Tavg in Dec 1982 of 13.3°C and Tavg in Jul and Aug 1983 of 13.1°C (Station ID 110766). Or Tmax in Feb 1984 of 3.5°C but Tavg of 7.8°C.
If they really used this data then it is no more than GIGO.
I note the continued lack of any attempt to plot error estimates on these graphics.
Whats Up With That ?
Come on – this is supposedly physical science ! Take a stab at couching your ‘math’ results in error bars please, even if it does make the crappy data look like total crap. ALL the errors that we know about. Science is suppose to describe reality. There are normally distributed data populations out there but you aren’t going to describe them the way you have been doing it.
You want to do the ‘BEST’ science ? Start collecting temp, RH and heat content with replicated random samples from a statistically valid sampling scheme with a coherent experimental design and equipment designed to test your hypotheses. There is no rush; earth will still be here and doing fine after we are shown the door.
All this thrashing around for over 20 years now and “climate scientists” still don’t get it. Start over and do it right or don’t bother. Billions and years wasted and the new data is the same CRAP as the old data, just newer. GIGO
I suggest the review process is very unlikely to leave this attribution statement unchanged:-
On the other hand, some of the long-term change in the AMO could be driven by natural variability, e.g. fluctuations in thermohaline flow. In that case the human component of global warming may be somewhat overestimated.
from
http://www.berkeleyearth.org/Resources/Berkeley_Earth_Decadal_Variations
Willis,
I’m a great fan of your work, but in this case, since you made a substantial mistake, it would be best to retract your post, cancel it, declare it null, and stop arguing about it.
Do a more profound and leisurely analysis, and if you have some meaningful and findings – post them later.
PS—The world is warming. It has been for centuries. Rather than saying anything about anthropogenic global warming, all the BEST dataset does is confirms that. How that’s gotten twisted into some supposed “victory” for the AGW crowd escapes me.
And there’s the crux of the AGW “science” right there. If it’s so clear cut how come they can’t actually tell us what part and how much of the warming carries the anthopogenic signal? Do they really believe that 100% of the warming is down to AGW? If so they aren’t anywhere near sufficiently competent to call themselves climate scientists or any other kind of scientist.
Willis, Nigel Calder has an explanation for Richard Muller’s PR blitz of the global-warming-is-real story. Calder compares Muller’s PR with Tito’s propaganda which fooled Churchill.
http://calderup.wordpress.com/2011/10/22/hoodwinked-by-berkeley-earth/
has anyone correlated the BEST 1800-2000 series to the North American tree-ring density series yet?
I understood that the 1899-1900’s tree-rings were pretty flat, yet the BEST data shows a whole bunch of swings.
Reading the comments back and forth has given me a headache! This whole thing is just a complete crock, the fact remains that we are living in a period of nice temperate weather that allows us to grow plenty of food with nice levels of CO2 to help us. The temperature is not rising exponentially as was believed by some and is within normal ranges. There are no hard facts that prove humans have anything to do with it. The predictions from their ridiculously expensive computers have not come to fruition, the sky is falling frighteners have not come about.
The trillions that have been wasted on pointless research could have been much better spent on making sure that when natural events do happen, we were ready for them.
Even if, by some miracle, it were proven tomorrow that it IS our fault there is nothing we can do about it without going back to the dark ages everywhere on the planet, and that certainly won’t happen and shouldn’t!
All that is happening is that wealth is being re-distributed but not in the way some people had wished for. As always the poor are getting poorer and the rich richer. The likes of big oil have invested heavily in renewable energy schemes, the governments adds green taxes onto everyone’s fuel bills pushing many more pensioners and low earning families into fuel poverty. Here in the UK (20% green fuel tax on top of the 5% normal tax) it has got to the point that people are having to decide whether to eat or heat! Where is this money going? Into the pockets of the landowners who rake off huge amounts of subsidies from their wind farms for very little energy in return. If it were not for these subsidies wind would be a non starter in the energy front, no-one with any business acumen would touch them with a barge pole!
Soon we will come up with a way to make cheap, clean energy, hey that’s a novel idea lets use some of the money wasted… on overgrown windmills that: create huge amounts of CO2 during manufacture, transporting and siting, you know the ones that are pointless because they have to be backed up all the time by conventional power stations which, as these power stations have to be ramped up and down constantly, create even more CO2 than letting them run at best efficiency, yes that’s right the ones that create pollution on a huge scale as they use massive amounts of minerals that have to be mined for…on funding this research instead!
But wait, that would mean those getting richer off the backs of so called green technologies would lose their latest money spinner, so that aint gonna happen anytime soon!
There is something odd going on around 1967 that shows up in the BEST chart, but not in others. Like a huge El-Nino happened, bigger than 1998. Would guess some bad data got through (like several values of 99999 were averaged into the monthlies, then averaged again?), or some other issue that should stick out like a sore thumb…
No time to look at the moment, but if anyone else is looking at it, do you see anything strange in the data? I’ll look tonight.
Sorry Don B but that’s really Godwin’s law at work. Shame on Nigel Calder, there are other and more relevant things to say about BEST, Mulle and PR.
My preliminary conclusions:
1) Yes, the fix is in, has been in all along. The “All BEST” curve is more alarmist after 1998 than the others, not showing the levelling-off shown by the others. This is “Hide the Decline”, part 2, (which has been playing all along, well before BEST) showing that academics WILL NOT ADMIT THEIR INCOMPETENCE.
2) Peer review is thoroughly broken, and complaining about their not following it “properly” means so very, very little. Put simply: peer review = consensus. Remember “don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater”? Well, like it or not Anthony, peer review is NOT the baby, any more than the consensus is. Truth is the baby, and peer review has been hiding it, encrusting it with layers of mud (false theory), for a generation at least. Most skeptics don’t seem able to understand, the whole regulatory system of science is suborned, broken. There is no law west of Dodge, and we are in the wild, wild west. THE FIX IS IN, THROUGHOUT THE SYSTEM. Only public transparency, not “back room review”, can save climate science.
What is with you people?!
Willis posted his work for open review. An error was found, he promptly agreed it was an error, and made changes to the post recognizing the error.
Compare this to what we’ve come to expect as normal in Climate Science™, where a paper slides through peer-pal review, gets published, gets torn apart and debunked on skeptic blogs, and no matter how glaring the errors, how horribly fundamentally flawed it is, neither the authors nor the publication will ever admit anything was wrong and the paper remains complete to be cited as Absolute Proof™ for many years to come.
Willis has acted honorably. Comments critiquing his work were posted without censorship, and he explicitly invites constructive criticism. If what happened here causes you to lose respect for him or you think his reputation has been harmed, that’s your problem.
If you think this post should be stricken from this blog, this mess swept under the rug, because otherwise it damages the reputation of this site, you’re deluded. The openness of this site, with the willingness to leave such “flaws” open to view, has long been a great feature of this site, arguably its best one, as such “flaws” are a natural part of an atmosphere of open and vibrant debate. I’m just going to write you off with the other cranks who think this site should stick exclusively to the science, as the global warming debate has long since departed from being merely about the science, and it’d be suicidal nonsense to cede the politics and the PR to the “other side” when those have long been their main weapons.
Deserving of special mention, we also have this from Benedetto Castelli on October 23, 2011 at 1:00 am:
As mentioned by others, the link to the analysis chart data was buried at the bottom of a page, and the file was a zip file, not a simple ascii file. The five-column file is Full_Database_Average_summary.txt. Willis specifically stated:
The requested month-by-month data is in Full_Database_Average_complete.txt. It has 12 columns. That makes two counts of spouting off about the wrong thing in the same comment, in the same sentence as well.
And where is the data for Willis’ Figure 2, the BEST Figure 1? Where is the data for those “missing” stations, especially for the randomly-selected records that went into that graph? Could you possibly hold off on your righteous indignation until that particular data is revealed?
I have a bunch of charts on the Berkeley Earth land temperatures (downloaded from the Analysis page yesterday). These are the monthly values and the moving average values using the full 39,000 site database (this is not the individual stations databses, just the monthly averages – I also corrected one clear error in one month).
The Monthly Berkeley land temperatures going from 1800 to May 2010.
http://img200.imageshack.us/img200/3230/berkeleymonthlylandanom.png
There is huge variability in this data. I am almost certain they have underestimated the uncertainty involved here (and I start to wonder how the NCDC, Crutemp and GISS can have much more stable temperatures from month to month when they are using a smaller dataset). Here is a scatter (rather than lines/columns) of the same data.
http://img35.imageshack.us/img35/8241/berkeleymonthlylandscat.png
Look how much variability there is versus just the 12 month mean. Even today it is +/- 0.6C and in the early 1800s, it was +/- 2.0C. Any rising trend has to be viewed in that light. Any kind of error or change in measurement techniques is going to produce a trend all by itself.
http://img854.imageshack.us/img854/8255/berkeleyvariancescatter.png
Let’s compare Berkeley to the NCDC and Crutemp3 (GISS doesn’t really have a published comparable value given it includes some ocean temperatures). They are pretty close, at least on a 12 month moving average basis.
http://img21.imageshack.us/img21/7583/berkeleyncdccrutemp3.png
Berkeley, however, is very different on a monthly basis and has a higher increasing trend than both Crutemp3 and NCDC. Crutemp3 first.
http://img822.imageshack.us/img822/7093/berkeleyvscrutemp3.png
Berkeley is much closer to the NCDC.
http://img28.imageshack.us/img28/4859/berkeleyvsncdc.png
Finally, some comments about the early 1800s. Darn, it must have very cold and it must have been very difficult to grow crops in regions where frost is a concern today. 1807 to 1820 was a full 2.0C lower than today. I note the year without summer, 1815, does not actually show up as a cold period in this data, other years around it are much colder.
http://img828.imageshack.us/img828/2748/berkeleymovavglandanom.png
The coldest month on record was January 1809 at -4.2C (really?) and the warmest month on record was March 1822 at +2.4C.
‘They’ do try and estimate the anthropogenic contribution at various points in time. You’ll find considerable discussion in the IPCC reports under the topic headings including the word “Attribution.”
You clearly need to get familiar with the IPCC reports or the literature, or even semi-popular blog posts that are strictly about the science (as opposed to the tribalist howling from too many participants). In short – for the first half of the 20th century, no. For the latter half, pretty much. There are caveats. Acquaint yourself.
http://www.ipcc.ch/publications_and_data/ar4/wg1/en/ch9.html
One point I have never seen brought up is what to do about a leap year. If you can be bothered collecting millions of pieces of data and then you can’t be bothered thinking about the moving average having more or less days in it seems lazy to me. In other words should always be a factor of 4 years to show any trend.
In other words proof is not needed because the evidence is right there before your eyes. I guess that would be your lying eyes.
“If you think this post should be stricken from this blog”
No, you can’t strike a post once it was published. That would be dishonest.
But Willis could add an update at the top thus:
“Update: I made a mistake, I retract this post, please don’t comment on it any more. Will publish a new post later.”
Willis, I really enjoy your posts — more than any of the authors that most here — but this is not one of your brighter moments. So many climate scientists don’t post their code. These guys do, and then you gripe about it because it’s not in the language of your choice? Give me a break.
From Jacob on October 23, 2011 at 7:52 am:
Why? The post was clearly updated, changes were made with the original text preserved. There remains important points made and questions raised that should be addressed. They do not require retraction.
LazyTeenager:
“There have been many many claims that the world is not warming.”
Actually, the claim is that the world has not warmed since 1998. BEST produced a model result that shows it warming since 1998 and one that shows it cooling since 1998. And both HadCrut3 and RSS still show no warming since 1998.
“These attempts have been directed at the American and British datasets. Climategate, you may remember that, was promoted as a way of discrediting Phil Jones.”
Actually, the discrediting of data sets mostly had to do with proxy data. None of that has changed. Michael Mann is still using data sets upside down and he is still using data sets that cannot be reproduced. And he is still hiding the fact that his proxy records cannot match the instrument records in the last 50 years.
“Well it seems that all of the data sets are all producing the same results when analyzed by different people.”
But they aren’t. Even BESTs own data sets don’t produce the same results. Their decadal variations data set shows significant cooling since 98 and their main data set shows significant warming. As to the question of warming in the twentieth century, there was never any real debate about that in any case. With regard to that issue, the debate is about attribuition. And BEST does nothing to adress that issue. Also, the BEST effort to isolate the UHI effect is a complete failure, and therefore their decision to use no UHI correction means that their results are greater in the direction of warming than they should be.
Bill: “There is huge variability in this data. I am almost certain they have underestimated the uncertainty involved here ”
Apparently they did their uncertainty estimates on smoothed data, which many think is a big problem. Also, the removal of outliers, or their weighting of them towards a modeled value is another way that they remove uncertainty. And it is another questionable technique.
Robert Willee … even the CRU break down their data on the main index page by hemisphere. RSS and UAH break down the data by Tropics, Lower 48, etc.
BEST posted one number for each year in readily available form. And they just posted the land data which makes things appear even worse.
And they used a 1950-1980 baseline which resulted in almost 1.5C wamring from the late 1970s on.
They chose DRAMA. Not science.
barry says:
October 23, 2011 at 7:40 am
You clearly need to get familiar with the IPCC reports or the literature, or even semi-popular blog posts that are strictly about the science (as opposed to the tribalist howling from too many participants). In short – for the first half of the 20th century, no. For the latter half, pretty much. There are caveats. Acquaint yourself.
People who follow this blog know that many of us have studied the IPCC reports. Personally I have studied all 800 pages of the Physics justification. As a physicist I give a D to the report. I will not repeat here my reasons as I have posted them on the blog over the years, but I can assure you that their “estimate” of CO2 guilt is entirely dependent on shaky computer models with shaky assumptions in physics and statistics and replacement of spaghetti graphs instead of errors.
i see a lot of snark and bile that somebody has to suck back up. is it entertaining? not so much.
I do wonder why BEST goes all the way back to 1800. I seems like cherry-picking as this includes the Dalton Minimum and the Mount Tambora eruption of 1815. I am surprised that the plot link posted by Bill Illis at
http://img200.imageshack.us/img200/3230/berkeleymonthlylandanom.png
shows that the coldest year was 1808 rather than 1816, which was the renowned “Year Without a Summer” Any speculation why 1808 shows colder than 1816?
Looking at the divergence between land and sea temperatures since 1980, doesn’t this argue strongly that something is influencing surface temperatures that is unlikely to be CO2, which is well mixed?
Otherwise, why the divergence after sea and land temperatures tracked together for the 100 years previous?
“How that’s gotten twisted into some supposed “victory” for the AGW crowd escapes me.”
Willis, I agree with Joel Shore and LazyTeenager here. This is not a victory for AGW per se. It’s a defeat to those who were trying to discredit the AGW theory by implying that the temperature data was tampered with and that the Earth probably wasn’t even warming. Maybe you didn’t think that way, but many of your fellow AGW critics did. There is still a large proportion of the US population (I believe of the order of 30%) who think that the Earth may not be warming. If these BEST results help to finally lay to rest the issue of whether the Earth is warming or not, i.e. if the large majority of AGW critics can all stop questioning the rise in temperature, then this will be an indirect victory for the AGW advocates. Why you may ask? Because trying to debate whether GW is man-made or not is next to impossible if the opposing side doesn’t even acknowledge the warming!
Cheers.
I am surprised that none of the analysis of temperatures looks at subtracting the trend in sea surface temperatures from the trend in land surface temperatures, to isolate that portion of the trend that is specific to land use.
REPLY: I agree, see this, Anthony
I have the world wide text files, I have the land file; but not just the sea temperature average.
Anyone know where it is?
Pretty much all sceptics accept that there has been warming since the LIA.
However many suspect that the recent warming has been exagerrated by incompetent ‘adjustments’ especially in relation to the UHI effect.
Berkely has dealt with the first point but not the second.
The suggestion that UHI effect is not significant because rural and urban sites allegedly warm at much the same rate is flawed and deeply unscientific.
The error lies in dealing with a supposed absolute value for the UHI effect such that urban sites are developed and warm up but rural sites do not, being somehow preserved in aspic.
What really matters is the incremental UHI effect over time and on average it will be much the same for rural and urban sites for two reasons:
i) When a society is developing such development will occur around both rural and urban sites simultaneously.
ii) A small change near a rural site will have a larger effect than a large change near an urban site.
So, it is not surprising that urban sites are not seen to warm faster than rural sites. That fact (if correct) tells us nothing about the UHI effect.
I would have expected the Berkeley group to have worked that out without my help.
“One more piece of the AGW puzzle cemented happily in place.”
Yet the biggest – indeed, the only – piece has yet to be supplied: that which demonstrates that it is the 6% of greenhouse gases that man generates (Planet Earth supplying the other 94%) as the cause of the warming that has occurred.
Or to put it more succinctly: demonstration of effect does not identify the culpable party.
I think your sample of stations must be carefully chosen and limited to say, 50
1) they must be well established for at least 50 years (airports are good, there is no urban build up and the CO2 emissions do nothing to temps anyway)
2) they must represent the earth 70/30 water ,
70% near coast or in or on islands in the oceans
30% on land, in land
3) you have to balance NH and SH similar to my tables here,
http://www.letterdash.com/HenryP/henrys-pool-table-on-global-warming
Stephen Wilde says:
October 23, 2011 at 1:15 am
“Is it right that the essence of trhe Berkely findings is that the rural and urban sites have been warming at a sinilar rate and so it is assumed that UHI effects are not a significant factor for determining the direction and rate of the temperature trend ?
Well, if so, how about the proposition that the incremental rate of nearby development is on average the same for both rural and urban sites ?
Wouldn’t that produce just such an outcome ?
During a period of development isn’t it just as likely that it will occur near a rural site as near an urban site ?”
Very well said. The CAGW crowd, including BEST, dare not touch these questions. Getting involved in empirical research just takes the magic out of the statistics.
steven mosher says:
October 22, 2011 at 11:44 pm
You are traveling farther down the road toward moral idiocy. BEST played Bait and Switch on Anthony. They wrongly substituted their 60 year analysis for the 30 year analysis that he expected. They produced work that did not address the empirical evidence in his station siting information from the most recent 30 year period. As regards Spencer publishing here, Spencer did not instigate a media blitz and Spencer did not violate a trust held by some other scientist. It is not enough to address the science when the scientists are knifing one another in the back.
Steve McIntyre says:
October 22, 2011 at 8:37 pm
“Willis, I’m puzzled why you place such weight on “peer review” as presently undertaken in climate journals. The articles will get and are getting far more effective review on the blogs than journals can provide.
In fields other than climate, circulation of working papers for comment is common practice. I wish that we’d had the opportunity to do this with our article on Steig et al.”
You seem unaware that you are making a proposal rather than describing peer review as it exists in academia. Journals published by industry sponsors have never followed peer review and pay for articles. But in academia peer review is solely a tool of the journal editor to be used as he/she desires. When the editor says peer review is finished then it is. An author who goes to the media before the editor says peer review is finished will not be treated kindly by that editor. Authors in academia are fully aware of these facts and that includes Muller. If the editor of the journal is not upset with Muller then I will be shocked. At best, the editor faces the difficulty of explaining why he is demanding even small changes to articles that have been pre-crowned in the media, assuming that the editor does not embrace pal-review.
Garrett @ 9:50 a.m.
“This is….a defeat to those who were trying to discredit the AGW theory by implying that the temperature data was tampered with…”
May seem so to you but notice how you tamper with the data by omitting the “Catastrophic” element. Why evidence such disinterest in accurate instrumental records? When speaking of fractions of degrees, accurate measurements would be a boon to all mankind and if, despite the lack thereof (which has been demonstrated thanks to Anthony Watts et al), it could be shown that somehow we muddled into a fairly reliable estimate….good for us. Let us do better going forward.
Be grateful for the cloud.
Henry@Stephen
Look, if I were Berkeley, I would limit my sample of stations to say, 50 , and they must be carefully chosen,
1) they must be well established for at least 50 years (airports are good, there is no urban build up and the CO2 emissions is supposedly to make things “worse” but we know that that does nothing to temps anyway)
2) they must represent the earth 70/30 water ,
70% near coast or in or on islands in the oceans
30% on land, in land
3) you have to balance NH and SH similar to my tables here,
http://www.letterdash.com/HenryP/henrys-pool-table-on-global-warming
that is what I can think of off-hand.
reason why I found a connection with vegetation are the results that came from an Argentine station, cooling rate quite dramatically@ 0.066 degrees C per annum since1974. Can only be due to de-forestation in that area.
Obviously the opposite is happening in the NH since the green movement saw everyone planting trees and gardens.
Note that the main driver of the increase in warmth is natural, between 0.03 and 0.04 degrees C /per annum (past 35 years) on maxima.
My point is that we must be looking at how much of that heat is trapped and why.
This is strange.
BEST is using a January 1950-December 1979 baseline. In Full_Database_Average_complete.txt, which is land-only, it says in the comments at the top:
For NCDC it says here that for their anomalies they are using the 20th century average, 1901-2000, which for annual on land is 8.5°C.
I took NCDC’s Annual Global Land Temperature Anomalies, threw them in a spreadsheet with BEST’s annual anomalies from Full_Database_Average_summary.txt, then added the baselines back into their respective anomalies to get the absolute temperatures.
BEST is running cooler than NCDC, consistently. From 1880 to 2009 inclusive, the overlap between the two sets, BEST averaged 1.339°C cooler than NCDC.
I know this won’t matter much for the “anomalies are what you want, only the trends matter” crowd (you know who you are). But given how much of the debate about the possible damaging effects of AGW hinge on such as permafrost warming a few more degrees from an absolute point, let alone all that ice piled up on land that is supposedly going to melt and drown many billions of people, don’t you think it’d be nice to have agreement on what the absolute temperatures actually are? An average difference of one and a third degrees matters quite a lot, I think.
Oh they’re dancing because they managed to make Anthony look silly. The great leader of the website they can’t stand managed to be wrong about something, or so they think. Of course it hasn’t dawned on them yet what they had to abandon of their own assumptions to make that happen. All that matters is Anthony pre-release said, “I’ll accept their results, good or bad,” and their early results seem to contradict him. Their whole process has been about pushing a media blitz on how warming was confirmed, and UHI was not found. Of course, forgotten in the background is the fact that these are preliminary results, their methods are not well-established, and the papers are not even peer-reviewed yet much less published.
All that matters to them is poking Anthony in the eye with half of the story, which frankly is just business as usual for these people. It should also speak very clearly to how thirsty these people are for any good news on their front.
I’m surprised that BEST didn’t ask research the UHI question more deeply–or at least ask skeptics for input. I seem to recall there have been suggestions posted here from time to time as to clues that indicate a strong UHI effect in particular cases, and for methods of teasing it apart more generally.
kadaka (KD Knoebel) says:
October 23, 2011 at 11:10 am
An average difference of one and a third degrees matters quite a lot, I think.
Too true but climate scientists take that in their stride. That is why they invented anomalies. Their GCM models do not give good absolute temperatures, have a look at an analysis by Lucia.
They may be so used to the distortion glasses of anomalies that consider a degree or so changes in absolute temperatures as part of the game they play with data ( tongue in cheek)
Dear Rich,
I need a new hockey stick for the front page of my next IPCC report. Can you help?
Yours in anticipation, Rachendra.
Dear Rachendra,
Good job you asked before I put our data out. I’ll hold off for a bit and see what I can come up with. What will be in it for me? love Rich.
Dear Rich,
If you can come up with the hockey stick just before the closing date so those nasty “D” poeple can’t get at it I promise I’ll use all your papers in the next report. Even the garbage ones. Think of all the citations you’ll get. love, Rachendra.
Dear Rachendra,
Thanks mate, I think I can do it by just using the land temps not the global average. None of those dumb journos will notice. I’ll bang in a few interviews with “Global warming confirmed” in them and hide the statements about “we have’nt looked at the relevance to CO2” right at the bottom somewhere where the “D’s” can’t find it. Love and kisses Rich
PS Can I have a signed copy of your latest “romance” book.
[img]http://oi55.tinypic.com/25rgm5d.jpg[/img]
Comparing BEST to CET, BEST looks too cold in the past, too warm in cold 80ties. Oh and the recent decline is not there.
@ Disko Troop, 11:42 am:
lol
From anna v on October 23, 2011 at 11:39 am:
404 Not Found error. Site problem? Old link, article moved? Lucia flipped out after losing the battle with Lord Monckton, gave herself completely over to the Dark Side, and did a SkepSci rework of her site?
The more I think about it, with the annual global temperatures running around only 7 to 8°C, that one and a third degrees is quite a large difference. Someone should consider it significant enough to deserve consideration.
BTW, how’s it going over in Greece? You have that rainwater-fed cistern good for watering the garden, so possibly you won’t be starving or dying of thirst anytime soon. But the news from there is troubling, much talk of cutting pensions and other benefits. How’s life treating a particle physicist these days?
I’ve got as far as section 3 New Averaging Model of the Berkeley Averaging paper and I fail to understand how they can introduce such a sensible global definition of temperature and then decide to work only on land temperature measurements for which there is no logic that says the conditions 2 can reasonably be assumed for that subset. Hence what they are measuring for land is something other than their definition of temperature.
So how one can then derive a useful calculation for land warming other than the spatially corrected average of land weatherstations defeats me. What am I not understanding? As an example there might be a 60 year cycle that gradually increases the flow of warmer air and cloud from the oceans into the land space and so create a growing temperature of both Tmax and Tmin whilst causing a lowering of sea heat content. After all I gather some sea heat is missing. Sure the measured land temperature would rise but how does that help determine if there is real anthropogenic global warming?
The world may be warming, however it isn’t locally. I crossed over Hwy 88 in order to catch a jet from SFO to the tropics. In that crossing I noticed a lot of new ice fields probably left over from last years snow. These fields will become multi-year ice after this winter season which soon to arrive. The terrain I was gawking at was in the 8500 – 11,000 elevation. Probably down South where the moutains are higher there is even more leftover snow. The ice is back! What do I care if the whole earth warms a few tenths per some reanalysis of the data. Fiddlesticks! The ice doesn’t lie.
Theo
“You are traveling farther down the road toward moral idiocy. BEST played Bait and Switch on Anthony. They wrongly substituted their 60 year analysis for the 30 year analysis that he expected. They produced work that did not address the empirical evidence in his station siting information from the most recent 30 year period. As regards Spencer publishing here, Spencer did not instigate a media blitz and Spencer did not violate a trust held by some other scientist. It is not enough to address the science when the scientists are knifing one another in the back.”
1. Anthony, I believe, gave them a copy of his data, prior to his publication.
“There seems a bit of a rush here, as BEST hasn’t completed all of their promised data techniques that would be able to remove the different kinds of data biases we’ve noted. That was the promise, that is why I signed on (to share my data and collaborate with them). Yet somehow, much of that has been thrown out the window, and they are presenting some results today without the full set of techniques applied. ”
He was upset last time because they had not applied the scalle to the data
From what he wrote it looks like he shared data in advance of his publication
Then of course he published his data for anybody to use in any way they want.
Now, he seems to be upset because they did not do the analysis the way he
wants it done. Its not his paper. Its not his data. he published the data collected
by volunteers. One reason I push for open code and open data is to GET RID
of this notion that people OWN DATA, especially data that is paid for with my dollars
and data that is collected by volunteers, with the expressed INTENT of making it open
that data is no longer Anthony’s data. It is in the commons and can be used or mis used
as people see fit. On argument I had to deal with is climate scientists making the stupid
argument that they didnt want to release data to amatures. Now, I see people here
arguing along the same lines. That some how Anthony has control over data that he
has released per his promise. The right way to handle this is to let Muller make his mistakes if you think it is a mistake. Then take his code, change the period and guess what you will find?
Siting doesnt matter to Tave. Your uncertainty will increase but the mean will not change.
The world will STILL be warming and GHGs will still be a part of the cause.
Next, I raise spencer not to draw a point about PR. I raise Spencer to illustrate that you and others do not, as McIntyre points out, have a CONSISTENT philosophy when it comes to Peer review.
When its a paper you dont like, you say peer review is broken and you clamor for blog review.
When it is a paper you dont like that hasent been peer reviewed, you clamor for peer review.
Have a consistent philosophy and you will have no problems.
1. papers need to go through a peer review
2. that peer review need to be transparent
3. The data and code need to be published to enable blog review.
That is a consistent philosophy.
Also on the PR front, Dont make me point to all the PR stunts that skeptics have pulled in advance of publication. Focus on the science.
Let me run this by you all. Let us assume that temperature is water and Tmin and Tmax are high an low tide. We can measure the heights of the boats in the harbor with a radar stallite.
The signature of global heating, would be more water, so on average, the low tidal level.and high tidal level will boot rise.
It is also possible that the boats have been altered in time, some lightened and others ballasted. In this case, some bots would have an increase in height and others lower.
The BEST study tells us that 67% of stations show an increasing trend in heating, the rest cooling.
If there were a systemic increase in heating, or increase in water in the ocean, all thermometers will rise, just like all boats.
An heterogeneous change in the sign of heating, where one third go one way and two thirds another, tells us we have changing boats.
Nowhere have the CAGWer’s indicated that the ‘climate sensitivity’ would be inhomogeneous. on a local scale.
Can anyone give me an explanation as to how a well mixed gas, like CO2, with the ability to adsorb and re-radiate radiation to Earth, does not have a uniform, latitudinal, effect?.
Can anyone supply a reason for a 2:1 distribution of increasing/decreasing temperature, in the same continent, that is a uniform property of the atmosphere; rather than disparate changes in the micro-environment of the locations?
shows the latest version is 0.8.9
Additionally, the latest documentation is here
Arg: documentation at http://cran.r-project.org/doc/contrib/Hiebeler-matlabR.pdf
Garrett says:
October 23, 2011 at 9:50 am
Claims of victory by either faction where the paper has not even been peer reviewed and published are grossly premature. Let’s talk about victory after a few years of digestion by the scientific and blogging communities.
Steven Mosher writes:
“That some how Anthony has control over data that he has released per his promise.”
Let me try a different approach. Anthony should not have become involved with Muller and BEST. He should have known that they would use his participation for their benefit and care nothing for his interests. That is exactly what happened. Anthony is too trusting. His trust was violated. I believe that he has learned from this. Given what you say, I take it that you believe that no one has anything to learn from this.
“The right way to handle this is to let Muller make his mistakes if you think it is a mistake. Then take his code, change the period and guess what you will find?”
What Anthony expected and what every sceptic craves is for some Warmista to show some interest in empirical matters. Muller and BEST have demonstrated in spades that they have no interest in empirical matters. The warning “Lies, Damn Lies, and Statistics” must be amended to include “Blindness to the Empirical.”
“Siting doesnt matter to Tave.”
Nor to you. You have demonstrated on this website that you can take any aberrant weather station reading and incorporate it smoothly into the statistical weave of climate alarmism. In my opinion, all you did is show that your statistical methods give you powerful tools for hiding the pea. Notice that no Warmista is willing to discuss these matters. If you don’t believe that, just check with those who continue to defend the Hockey Stick. What is really important is that you demonstrate that you have no respect for the empirical. I am sure that you cannot give an example of an aberrant station reading that cannot be incorporated into the climate alarmism meme.
“Your uncertainty will increase but the mean will not change. The world will STILL be warming and GHGs will still be a part of the cause.”
Why is an increase in the uncertainty unimportant to BEST? Once the bars are wide enough, even the great unwashed will see that there is no evidence for alarmism that is not swamped by the error bars.
Muller and BEST did not claim that the world is STILL warming; rather, they claimed that scepticism is proved wrong. Can you not see that difference?
As regards Spencer, are you really saying that what Spencer did on this website was totally parallel to what Muller and BEST did? Please explain. I will describe the differences that you leave out.
Joel Shore says: October 22, 2011 at 7:05 pm
…Well, maybe if the “skeptic” crowd hadn’t spent so much time talking about how poor the siting of the stations was and making all these grandiose charges of data manipulation on the part of CRU and GISS, and so forth, it would not be viewed as such a big victory. One reaps what one sows.
As usual you miss the point.
Firstly we are not at all convinced that BEST has shown the station siting issues to be answered. Here are the relevant papers
(1) Berkeley Earth Temperature Averaging Process, describing their new method for station combination, homogenization, and spatial interpolation.
(2) Influence of Urban Heating on the Global Temperature Land Average, analyzing the impact of urbanization on global temperature trends. They find that rural station are actually warming faster ( by 0.02°C ± 0.02 per decade) than urban areas.
Paper (2) makes one suspect that many/most BEST “rural stations” are NOT truly rural and UHI-free but are, as Spencer and Ilarionov have shown, the stations subject to the highest UHI rate of warming. This, in turn, will totally distort the “homogenization” data of Paper (1).
The only way out is to find (a) totally uncontaminated stations, HOWEVER FEW; (b) to apply properly-verified UHI corrections to select stations with metadata of immediate instrument siting, siting changes, and neighbourhood changes. Today this looks damn near impossible. BEST have certainly not dealt with this, have not even mentioned it when they should. Perhaps the comparison of land and sea temperatures (Lansner, and above) is the way through this one.
Secondly, the UHI distortions DO matter, because they are likely to be the factor obscuring any post-1980 sun/temperature correlation (sun/temp. corr. would disprove CO2 AGW). Certainly land and sea temperature anomalies diverge from about the same time the solar/temp correlation fails.
DocMartyn says:
October 23, 2011 at 1:59 pm
Brilliant post! However, it points toward the empirical. Therefore, no Warmista will finish reading it.
Theo Godwin, thanks for your posts.
Willis, thanks for following Scientific Method (with allowable human errors openly, promptly, fully and courteously corrected, as per real Scientific Method)
Harry Dale Huffman says: October 23, 2011 at 6:34 am
Peer review is thoroughly broken… THROUGHOUT THE SYSTEM. Only public transparency, not “back room review”, can save climate science.
The joy of blogs is the capacity of crowd-sourced review to regain the “Renaissance Man” holistic balance of good scientific knowledge AND clarity – when moderated for fairness courtesy and relevance, as generally happens here.
I would curious to know what would happen to BEST’s result if only the most reliable, least badly sited stations were used.
“DocMartyn says:
October 23, 2011 at 1:59 pm
Can anyone supply a reason for a 2:1 distribution of increasing/decreasing temperature, in the same continent……”
Whatever the cause, it has to be some local changing characteristics to get contrasting trends. It would be interesting to understand the characteristics of the positioning of the stations with contrasting trends. Gradual urbanisation (UHI) / decreasing aerosols will support a positive trend. Increasing aerosols, changing land use could cause a negative trend. But changes that last for 60 years would be rarer eg UHI would have a longer effective influence as say growth of population then central heating/aircon/traffic whereas land use change would be quicker and not an ongoing trend. Does the Berkeley study analyse the 33/66 split in any detail? I haven’t got there then.
Given there is this disparity and given that temperatures would be corrected for UHI is it reasonable to assume the correct adjustment has been made, as I assume they are not talking about raw data trends. The statement that UHI has little influence on overall trend is not necessariy applicable to the affect on individual stations. eg if 10% of stations were not adjusted down adequately to account for individual UHI the 33/66 could become 43/56. If the data were raw then only 66% positive trend would surprise me as removal of UHI would make a significant change in the split as I read that 27% sites have UHI as part of their trend.
Otherwise I have no idea how to answer your question.
Garrett says:
“Willis, I agree with Joel Shore and LazyTeenager here. This is not a victory for AGW per se. It’s a defeat to those who were trying to discredit the AGW theory by implying that the temperature data was tampered with and that the Earth probably wasn’t even warming. Maybe you didn’t think that way, but many of your fellow AGW critics did. There is still a large proportion of the US population (I believe of the order of 30%) who think that the Earth may not be warming. If these BEST results help to finally lay to rest the issue of whether the Earth is warming or not, i.e. if the large majority of AGW critics can all stop questioning the rise in temperature, then this will be an indirect victory for the AGW advocates. Why you may ask? Because trying to debate whether GW is man-made or not is next to impossible if the opposing side doesn’t even acknowledge the warming!”
• • •
Deconstruction follows:
1. Temperature data was tampered with, and such tampering continues, as this article by Willis clearly shows.
2. AGW is not a “theory”, it is an hypothesis with no verifiable, testable evidence supporting it. There may well be some minor warming due to the increase in CO2, but empirical evidence is lacking. That said, on balance the rise in CO2 has been harmless and beneficial.
3. Very few skeptics state that there has been “no” warming. If you can find such a statement, link to it, or cut and paste it along with the article title and the time and date it was posted.
4. The global warming we have experienced is extremely minor. The planet has warmed from 288K to 288.8K over a century and a half. Natural temperature fluctuations have routinely been many times that, and have occured over much shorter time scales.
5. Only computer models show AGW. Those models are programmed by people who stand to financially benefit by alarming the public. There is no empirical [real world] evidence of any global harm due to the rise in CO2. But there is ample evidence that more CO2 is very beneficial to the biosphere, and has caused increased agricultural production. Citations on request.
The entire “carbon” scare is based on a repeatedly falsified conjecture. Skeptics are simply asking for testable, empirical evidence, per the scientific method, showing that CO2 causes global harm. So far, no one has been able to produce any such evidence. What does that tell you?
anna v @ here
The point is, too many armchair critics post in ignorance, adding heat rather than light. If one is going to criticise the IPCC or BEST whatever, one should at least read the material, as you have. Painfully ignorant commentary is no help to the skeptical viewpoint, and the best antidote is to have skeptics step in immediately and rectify simple misconceptions, rather than leaving it to others. Silence is tacit approval given to any garbage that agitates in the right direction, which results in a loss of credibility. The free-for-all criticism is nicely democratic, but ultimately incoherent.
I would dearly love to see a poll or any effort where the skeptical movement firms up around a set of non-contradictory views. .. actually, I’ll post on that in the new open thread.
So, BEST find even more warming than GISS? That it’s even worse than we thought? What a surprise.
Just like another confidence trick of the general populace, when the EU set up a working group to look at how to streamline the EU and return powers to a more local level, which then came up with the Lisbon Treaty and ever-more central unaccountable control.
It’s the same old same old.
Smokey says:
October 23, 2011 at 4:15 pm
————————————————
Smokey my old friend I hesitate to correct you but AGW is not a hypothesis.
Rather it is chain of suppositions of the if this then that kind leading to some assertion, in this case that mankind is warming the globe.
Physics is at it’s heart the science of measurement and a hypothesis can be tested either by experiment or observation only provided that it is possible to measure to an appropriate degree of precision the results thereof.
It is true AGW is much titivated with calculation most of which can neither be verified nor would have any meaning even if they could be. To this is added observation to spurious levels of precision and so on and so forth.
This is not hard science rather whole idea of AGW belongs to the realm of metaphysics, literally beyond or after physics, one discipline of which specialises in trying to consider whether any useful meaning can be got from such chains or pyramids of unsupported supposition.
So please do not dignify AGW with the title of hypothesis, which gives it an air of scientific authority and respectability which it entirely lacks.
Kindest Regards
a jones,
You’re correct, AGW is a conjecture because it is not testable.
Lucy Skywalker says:
Spencer and Christy’s UAH satellite data set show about 1.5X as much warming over land as over the oceans since its inception in 1979 : http://vortex.nsstc.uah.edu/data/msu/t2lt/uahncdc.lt Is that affected by UHI too?
a jones says:
October 23, 2011 at 5:37 pm
“Rather it is chain of suppositions of the if this then that kind leading to some assertion, in this case that mankind is warming the globe.”
Actually, it is a collection of hunches. They are very good hunches but they do not amount to science.
Smokey says:
It tells me that organizations such as the National Academy of Sciences are much, much better able to judge and weigh scientific evidence than ideologues on the web.
Lucy Skywalker says:
October 23, 2011 at 3:12 pm
“Theo Godwin, thanks for your posts.”
Lucy, thanks for the high-five. I am always pleased to see your contributions.
It is Goodwin, not Godwin. If it were Godwin, I would change it to Godwinson and claim to be heir to King Harold who lost the Battle of Hastings in 1066.
Richard Muller has been a true believer in CAGW since the early 1980s. He resigned from the Sierra Club over it. He is no converted sceptic. Although this has no direct bearing on the BEST analysis we are now less likely to believe what Muller says without greater scrutiny. If he has told a porky about his position in the debate, what else of what he says is suspect?
See http://blogs.dailymail.com/donsurber/archives/44855
The AMO is topping out and already causing a flat line in mean global ocean temp in the presence of declining PDO. The doomsday science, get rich quick crowd is running out of time to deep six the developed world with nightmare policy fail.
Joel Heinrich says:
October 23, 2011 at 2:35 am
Has anyone looked at the actual data that can be downloaded, the data.txt files? And I don’t mean plotted it with a program, but looked at it.
The BEST site states: “We mistakenly posted the wrong text data file (TMAX instead of TAVG). We apologize for any inconvenience or confusion this may have caused. The correct files are now in place and may be downloaded below.”
I got both versions. The first version, that was headed as Tmax has LOWER temperatures than the new version that is headed as Tavg. WTF? And the data still doesn’t make any sense. Like Chicago University Tavg in Dec 1982 of 13.3°C and Tavg in Jul and Aug 1983 of 13.1°C (Station ID 110766). Or Tmax in Feb 1984 of 3.5°C but Tavg of 7.8°C.
If they really used this data then it is no more than GIGO.
_______________________________________________________________________
I’m flabbergasted, you mean up is now down …. surely that can’t be.
“c) No major costs, deaths or damage from sea level rise. And don’t bother me with Katrina. A Category 3 hurricane took down ancient poorly maintained levees on a city below sea level. Absent that, no problem.”
I’m getting sick of hearing about Katrina. Katrina passed right over me in Florida before it went up and hit New Orleans….and at the same strength. We were up and running again inside 48hours with little problems and no looting or whining…. but then we prepare and get on with our lives and don’t wait for the FEMA handouts.
PS—The world is warming. It has been for centuries. Rather than saying anything about anthropogenic global warming, all the BEST dataset does is confirms that. How that’s gotten twisted into some supposed “victory” for the AGW crowd escapes me.
************************************************************************************************************
I think some skeptics heads are exploding because the BEST results re-confirm what most people already know. That the NASA, NOAA and HADCrut temperature reconstructions are robust and scientifically credible. And BEST was conducted by scientists who were sympathetic to skeptics, and indeed had the support of prominent skeptics.
Didn’t skeptics spend years claiming that the temperature reconstructions had been faked, fabricated, or manipulated to show a significant warming trend??? I’m sure if you did a cursory search on this blog, or other skeptic blogs, you would find that to be the case.
peter stone says:
October 23, 2011 at 8:28 pm
“Didn’t skeptics spend years claiming that the temperature reconstructions had been faked, fabricated, or manipulated to show a significant warming trend???”
You ask the right question. Anthony Watts had collected 30 years of metadata about weather stations and that data strongly suggests that the stations are unreliable. Anthony made this data available to Muller and BEST with the expectation that they were going to address the quality of the stations. They played Bait and Switch on him, violating his trust. They did not use his 30 year data but switched to a 60 year period. Thus, they chose not to address the question of station quality and that question remains as hot as it has been for years. If we wait for Warmista to do that empirical work, the question will remain hot forever.
Why is it that Warmista will do anything to avoid addressing empirical questions, including insulting people like Anthony? Can you explain the fierce fear of the empirical manifested by all Warmista?
kadaka (KD Knoebel) says:
October 23, 2011 at 12:59 pm
“From anna v on October 23, 2011 at 11:39 am:
Too true but climate scientists take that in their stride. That is why they invented anomalies. Their GCM models do not give good absolute temperatures, have a look at an analysis by Lucia.”
404 Not Found error. Site problem? Old link, article moved? Lucia flipped out after losing the battle with Lord Monckton, gave herself completely over to the Dark Side, and did a SkepSci rework of her site?
Mea maxima culpa, though I cannot see what is wrong with the link above. Here explicitly:
http://rankexploits.com/musings/2009/fact-6a-model-simulations-dont-match-average-surface-temperature-of-the-earth
Even though the link with greasemonkey and the explicit http/ are the same, the link in the previous post does not work . I hope the explicit works.
Lucia is a real lukewarmer.
I’m not sure whether to take the choice of the too-clever pseudonym “Chase Stoudt” as wishful-martyr thinking or self-fulfilling prophecy. Perhaps both? I suppose it might be his actual given name, but that would make his parents semantic child-molesters.
[REPLY: That is his real name. Do a Google search. it will be most enlightening. By the way, at WUWT we do give credit to those who use real names. -REP]
Perhaps BEST should have employed Peter..
@joel Shore, land-based CRUTEM is still twice as steep as MSU over land:
http://blog.sme.sk/blog/560/252537/uhi_glob.jpg
Joel Shore says: October 23, 2011 at 6:08 pm
Juraj V. says: October 23, 2011 at 11:39 pm
Joel
Maybe Juraj has your answer. I don’t know. And I’m not going to research this right now, just keep it filed at the back of my mind. There are already enough other factors to make me keep my suspicions (that should also make you keep yours), and since UAH is from 1979, the start of the most recent global warming episode, the difference could be nothing more than the normal sea/land differential – sea both warms less and cools less.
I’d like to know (a) what the land/sea differentials are doing now (b) how UAH satellite data is calibrated ie is its calibration free of possible UHI distortions?
Joel
How do you explain all these humungously clear UHI effects – whose size far exceeds that implied by BEST?
From anna v on October 23, 2011 at 9:48 pm:
First link has a single little space between “average-” and “surface”. Barely found it when comparing them, noticed a length change and moved the cursor through the URL to locate the gap. Very easy to miss.
Thanks for the link.
Indeed. A hypothesis, properly formed, carries with it explicit falsifiable claims, and possible methods for testing them.
Nary a one in AGW.
Barely even decent speculation; more like WAGs.
Signals analysts seem to have problems with detecting CO2’s potency:
http://judithcurry.com/2011/10/18/does-the-aliasing-beast-feed-the-uncertainty-monster/#comment-124179
And a subset of stations, with unbroken and unfiddled records, is even more discordant in this latest WUWT guest posting.
Even the weakest versions of AGW seem to be wide open to doubt below the waterline.
@Smokey
Re: your comment on Oct 23, 4:15 pm
1. This article does not clearly show tampering. However did you get that opinion? The BEST results are clearly in line with the those from the other research groups, with only a small deviation in the last decade.
2. AGW is a theory. You obviously don’t know what a theory is. There is both testabe and empirical evidence. Go read a book and learn about CO2 isotopes and oceanic acidfication, amongst many other things.
3. A recent Pew survey found that roughly 30% of Americans believe there is no solid evidence that the Earth is warming. That’s quite a large number of skeptics, though maybe not mainstream ones. Though maybe you’ve heard of Christopher Monckton? I’ll let you do the Googling.
4. Well, according to Willis’ interpretation of the BEST analysis, the Earth has warmed by 2 degrees over the last century and a half (though if you’re scientific about it and take all the other groups’ research into account, then it’s probably been a bit less). Natural temperature fluctuations of that magnitude have not happened over similar or shorter timescales.
5. Of course only computer models show AGW, how else would you show it? Science is about creating models and verifying that the results of those models fit reality. Current GW can only be accounted for in those models by including the rise in greenhouse gases (anthropogenic or otherwise). And of course CO2 is beneficial to plants, but that’s a strawman argument. CO2 is no use to plants if there’s a drought.
And for the last time, there is emperical evidence of the harm caused by GW: sea level rise, ice sheet melting and increased ocean acidification can all be attributed to a rise in temperatures caused by a rise in greenhouse gases. Per the scientific method.
Cheers.
BEST is all a distraction. They replicate the same results from the same data and say the same thing. It is nothing but a simply ploy to re-create the same thing as if it was actually news that the Earth warmed up. Good for them. Let them have their moment of glory.
There is real news though. A fully coherent explanation that ties everything together to explain why the Earth’s climate is behaving the way that it is. The past 150 years are certainly warming, but it is a weak warming that is already fading. What caused it was simple. What will end it is even simpler.
The one thing that warmists and most skeptics have in common is that they want the Earth to stay the same way. That will not happen. If the warmists are right, then the Earth will warm up. However… If they are wrong, then the Northern Hemisphere cooling that started 4,000 years ago will continue on towards the next ice age.
http://www.lulu.com/content/e-book/the-inconvenient-skeptic-the-comprehensive-guide-to-the-earths-climate/11231084
Garrett Curley (@ga2re2t) says:
And for the last time, there is emperical evidence of the harm caused by GW: sea level rise, ice sheet melting and increased ocean acidification can all be attributed to a rise in temperatures caused by a rise in greenhouse gases. Per the scientific method.
The rise is minimal, the ice sheets are recovering, and acidification is a public relations term to scare people, the see to become acid one would have to pour hydrochloric acid in the whole of it. It just becomes a bit less alkaline and there is no clear evidence that the fauna and flora of the sea cannot adapt to a slight less alkalinity.
For your information, the scientific method is not about empiricism, that is philosophy. The scientific method checks predictions against experiments. If predictions are wrong, the theory is either scrapped or modified.
You just demonstrated that you do not know what the scientific method is. It is not programs with tens of parameters fitted and fiddled to fit past data and used as an oracle. There are seven experimental falsifications of the IPCC “projections” , call them prophecies, where the CO2 has been parametrized in the models to be the culprit .
1) Temperatures are in stasis the past ten years while CO2 is merrily rising
2) There is no footprint of a temperature rise in the troposphere that IPCC GCMs predict
3)There is no positive feedback to be seen experimentally
4)The specific humidity is decreasing instead of increasing as the IPCC GCM predic
5)The missing energy is not hiding in the oceans
6) The IPCC GCMs cannot reproduce absolute temperatures! only anomalies
7)Hydrological projections of the IPCC models have been shown to be no better than random throws .
A hypothesis is thrown out when even one of its predictions is destroyed by experiment. That is the scientific method, of which you know the mantra sounds but not the content. And as for the temperatures in previous ages of the earth, have a look at this compilation and be humbled.
Joel Shore,
You’re changing the subject, as usual. Provide irrefutible evidence of global harm due specifically to increased CO2. Make sure it’s testable evidence per the scientific method. That’s my challenge to you.
Garrett Curley,
Re-read the article and comments. BEST produces contradictory results, one showing warming, one showing cooling. Which one was tampered with? They’re simply cherry-picking like GISS does.
Next, you opine: “You obviously don’t know what a theory is.” FYI, AGW is not a “theory”. A theory is a hypothesis with at least one nontrivial validating datum, something that AGW lacks. AGW is simply a conjecture. Learn the difference. You’ll sound a lot less foolish if you do.
Next, do a WUWT archive search on the debunked “ocean acidification” nonsense. You really aren’t up to speed on that non-issue.
Next, poll results mean nothing in science. Plenty of scientific illiterates believe that “carbon” is bad, too. So what? And some folks still believe in the catastrophic runaway global warming nonsense. That doesn’t make them right.
Next, you opine that “Natural temperature fluctuations of that magnitude have not happened over similar or shorter timescales.” That is a preposterous statement. You are clearly ignorant of this entire subject. I’ve posted dozens of charts showing abrupt, drastic changes in temperature. Here is just one of them. More available on request.
Next, you opine: “Of course only computer models show AGW, how else would you show it?” We can agree on that. If there was testable, empirical evidence of AGW, that would demonstrate its validity. But there is no such evidence. Thus, computer models are the impotent fallback position of climate alarmists.
Finally, you opine: “And for the last time, there is emperical evidence of the harm caused by GW: sea level rise, ice sheet melting and increased ocean acidification can all be attributed to a rise in temperatures caused by a rise in greenhouse gases. Per the scientific method.”
Produce your putative ’empirical evidence per the scientific method.’ You will be the first in scientific history to be able to do that, and on track for the Nobel Prize. The fact is that sea level rise is not accelerating, it is moderating. And Arctic ice is declining – but Antarctic ice is increasing. And ocean pH is not measurably changing.
My advice to you is to wean yourself off propaganda blogs like Skeptical Pseudo-Science and RealClimatePropaganda, and get the real facts here. The first good move you’ve made is clicking on WUWT.
Cheers
@Brian H.
Well, the hypothesis was that CO2 accelerates the effects by other changes. It was originally proposed to explain the temperature changes in the past, after all. The hypothesis postulated for example, that a change in temperature would change CO2 levels, which would then change tempertaure etc. In order to verify this hypothesis, a lot was done to check what were the CO2 levels in the past and hey — the hypothesis was confirmed (warning: we do not have precise data for Co2 and temperature, but for those period for which we have them, the hypothesis is confirmed).
Then the hypothesis was that if the CO2 in the past worked as accelarator (some other things changes temperature, which changes CO2 levels, which then changes temperature), then maybe forcing CO2 levels would do exactly the same. This hypothesis was I think in 60’s and ’70s, while the significant rise in temperature due to CO2 appeared two decades later, confirming the hypothesis.
And if the AGW theory is wrong, then we again back to nothing in explain why the Earth temperatures changed in the past (e.g. why when Sun was colder, the temperatures on Earth sometimes were similar or higher to modern temperatures…). This would demand new answers for the problems which with AGW are think to be solved, and moreover it would pose a whole new set of problems. I’d say, if you expect scientist to abandon hypothesis which neatly explains huge chunk of facts, just because some inconsistencies here and there, you now nothing about how most scientists think.
frusto says:
“…the hypothesis is confirmed…”
That is a baseless and incorrect opinion. A hypothesis must be testable. AGW is not testable, therefore it is a conjecture. Calling AGW a “theory” displays scientific illiteracy. See here.
Please will someone explain to me why the satellite temperature data of thelast 20 years does not reflect a similar trend as the ground stations.
Was hoping to post a link to this on the BBC site under yet another AGW-biased piece of nonsense by Richard Black. Unfortunately, as seems to always happen now, the comments section closes pretty quickly. This is fine for the knee-jerk, short attention span type but useless for amyone who likes to read the full articles cited and do a bit of their own research. In his article on the BEST PR, Mr Black could obviously not contain his glee reading it, as he did, as the final proof of man-made global warming. Risible jounalism at its worst and for which I have no choice but to pay.
That’s hard to reconcile with Watts’ past statements. In a document he prepared for a think tank, Watts had written, “Instrumental temperature data for the pre-satellite era (1850-1980) have been so widely, systematically, and unidirectionally tampered with that it cannot be credibly asserted there has been any significant ‘global warming’ in the 20th century.”
REPLY: We got it the other times you’ve posted this comment on other threads. Come back in a few months after our newest paper is published and comment then, until then enough of the thread bombing – Anthony
fair enough, I posted it twice because the first time I posted in the wrong article (i read this one before), and I couldn’t figure out a way to delete it
Berkeley’s Land temperatures have twice as much increase since 1979 versus the Lower Troposphere satellite temperatures and the Ocean temperatures.
http://img189.imageshack.us/img189/4432/berkeleyuahrsshadsst2.png
In the climate models, the Lower Troposphere, at the level UAH and RSS measure at, is supposed to warming by up to 1.27 times more than the surface temperatures. But it seems to be warming at about 50% of the Land temperatures and about 80% of the weighted average Land/Ocean temperatures.
It is also noteworthy that the Lower Troposphere is very consistent month to month with the Ocean temperatures while Berkeley’s Land temperatures are extremely variable and are mostly inconsistent with the other metrics.
Juraj V says:
That is not twice as large a slope…more like 1.5 X as large from my eyeballing of the data. (Note that it is the two upper plots that we are comparing…I have no clue what the lowest plot is.) It is also not clear which data set is used for the MSU data…My guess would be the one (probably UAH) that shows the lower slope
Lucy Skywalker says:
Lucy,
You link to something that isn’t now and probably never will be peer-reviewed. There are a thousand things that could be wrong with it, including too few stations to get a trend with very much significance.
It is not being skeptical to believe any bit of nonsense that you can find on the web that happens to support your preferred point-of-view.
Robert says: “That’s hard to reconcile with Watts’ past statements. In a document he prepared for a think tank, Watts had written, “Instrumental temperature data for the pre-satellite era (1850-1980) have been so widely, systematically, and unidirectionally tampered with that it cannot be credibly asserted there has been any significant ‘global warming’ in the 20th century.””
There is a world of difference between “it cannot be credibly asserted that there has been” and “there hasn’t been”.
Having said that, the next thought is irrelevant, but I’ll mention it anyway: The words “global warming” are in quotes. Maybe (I haven’t checked) that’s because different people use the words “global warming” to mean different things – ie. some use it to mean “man-made global warming”. Just thinking aloud; as I said, it’s irrelevant, only the first statement counts.
Doug in Seattle says:
October 22, 2011 at 10:31 pm
As Willis has shown, it is too early draw conclusions. I am willing to wait a month or so while the auditors dig through the data. I think it might be a good idea for others to do the same.
_________________________________
Sorry Doug but that is not an option. It is why Muller delayed release until now and then did the MEDIA BLITZ instead of waiting for peer review.
“The 2011 United Nations Climate Change Conference will be held in Durban, South Africa, from 28 November to 9 December 2011.”
BEST is a carefully calculated piece of propaganda meant to make it look like the skeptics, lead by Anthony, now agree with CAGW because Anthony agrees with the BEST study (That used HIS data) and the BEST study shows the original data sets are fine.
A nice bit of sleight of hand involving half truths and misleading statements.
LazyTeenager says:
October 23, 2011 at 2:10 am
Willis says
How that’s gotten twisted into some supposed “victory” for the AGW crowd escapes me.
———–
Well that’s pretty obvious…..
Well it seems that all of the data sets are all producing the same results when analyzed by different people. So the BEST results are proof that all of those claims about data manipulation were lies.
This is why its called a victory.
______________________________________
ERRRRrrrr Not really.
Take a look at the OTHER analysis. Puts a real kink in the pussy cat’s tail.
It is reported here (contains link to original) http://joannenova.com.au/2011/10/messages-from-the-global-raw-rural-data-warnings-gotchas-and-tree-ring-divergence-explained/#comment-625436
Joel Shore says: October 24, 2011 at 12:48 pm
Lucy, You link to something that isn’t now and probably never will be peer-reviewed. There are a thousand things that could be wrong with it, including too few stations to get a trend with very much significance. It is not being skeptical to believe any bit of nonsense that you can find on the web that happens to support your preferred point-of-view.
I can see you need to look in the mirror. But given your record of not noticing, I doubt you will. You appeal to authority and ignore evidence. As I admit with immense sadness, most professional climate scientists, and heads of scientific bodies, do right now.
I prefer the way of Scientific Method. Almost always, a great thesis starts with noticing something small that doesn’t fit and then gathering evidence, statistically significant evidence such as this thread shows. And clearly you have not looked at half my page, including Illarionov’s work, that meets such criteria.
@smokey
The paper you quoted is flawed.
OK, so we have this:
1) The postulate, that the warming and cooling in past was dictated by changes in CO2 levels. This would be validated by finding that CO2 levels would change accordingly with temperature levels. This was validated- when we have enough data, CO2 levels changes as the scientist expected it would. It could be easily falsified by finding that temperature rose, while CO2 behaved differently (The sceptics here usually post the graphs with period, for which we know temperature, and for which we do not know CO2 levels). Contrary to what paper claims.
2) The postulate: that adding CO2 more to atmosphere would act on its own provoking temperature changes. This was postulated in times, when there was little of CO2 changes and little temperature change — then when CO2 levels rose, the temperatures rose too. It seems it is constantly confirmed.
Of course, climate is not affected just by CO2 levels, as knows anyone who read at least one summary of AGW.
@smokey ad my 1) Just for clarification — the postulate is that first we had in the past some other event causing start of temperature rise, and THEN it caused CO2 level changes, which in turn magnified the effects of the original cause.
frusto says:
“The paper you quoted is flawed… when CO2 levels rose, the temperatures rose too. It seems it is constantly confirmed.”
Do you get your provably wrong talking points from alarmist blogs? The fact is that rises in CO2 always follow rises in temperature:
http://www.brighton73.freeserve.co.uk/gw/paleo/400000yearslarge.gif
Now run along back to Skeptical Pseudo-Science, you need some new talking points. That one has been thoroughly debunked: effect cannot precede cause. On all time scales, CO2 is a function of temperature, not vice-versa.
Lucy Skywalker says:
October 25, 2011 at 1:29 am
Joel Shore says: October 24, 2011 at 12:48 pm
Lucy, You link to something that isn’t now and probably never will be peer-reviewed. There are a thousand things that could be wrong with it, including too few stations to get a trend with very much significance. It is not being skeptical to believe any bit of nonsense that you can find on the web that happens to support your preferred point-of-view.
I can see you need to look in the mirror. But given your record of not noticing, I doubt you will. You appeal to authority and ignore evidence. As I admit with immense sadness, most professional climate scientists, and heads of scientific bodies, do right now.
I prefer the way of Scientific Method. Almost always, a great thesis starts with noticing something small that doesn’t fit and then gathering evidence, statistically significant evidence such as this thread shows. And clearly you have not looked at half my page, including Illarionov’s work, that meets such criteria.””
Lucy, thank you for all your hard work in putting together a synopsis of the history and science of CAGW. Your work is filled with references to peer reviewed research, and simple logic, as well as pointing out huge problems with the post normal sicence of CAGW. I had not really looked at it until recently. I recommend anyone use it for personal study and reference to anybody who is not indoctrinated in the CAGW cult. Lucy has done the work for you.
@Smokey
“That one has been thoroughly debunked: effect cannot precede cause. On all time scales, CO2 is a function of temperature, not vice-versa.”
I’m sorry but that is completely retarded. It’s basic physics. CO2 traps heat. End of story. Anybody with a glass tank, thermometer, and light can prove that.
REPLY: LOL! Have a look at that exact experiment you describe: http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/10/18/replicating-al-gores-climate-101-video-experiment-shows-that-his-high-school-physics-could-never-work-as-advertised/
^the experiment is deeply flawed.
lol even read his “update” at the end of the post, which most are unlikely to read:
“I should make it clear that I’m not doubting that CO2 has a positive radiative heating effect in our atmosphere, due to LWIR re-radiation, that is well established by science. What I am saying is that Mr. Gore’s Climate Reality Project did a poor job of demonstrating an experiment, so poor in fact that they had to fabricate portions of the presentation, and that the experiment itself (if they actually did it, we can’t tell) would show a completely different physical mechanism than what actually occurs in our atmosphere.”
If you want to know what a good CO2 experiment is like, check out this link:
http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=1&sqi=2&ved=0CCIQFjAA&url=http%3A%2F%2Fciteseerx.ist.psu.edu%2Fviewdoc%2Fdownload%3Fdoi%3D10.1.1.117.2153%26rep%3Drep1%26type%3Dpdf&ei=nimuTpnMJ8OciQK9-ZSXCw&usg=AFQjCNHgeMEf_j5Utxoq1gdsTFdc-lki7A&sig2=pbI1QKWr0IhHXGjwmTLi2Q
(It’s a PDF file)
REPLY: So with no replication and no proof on his part, you’ll believe Gore? – Anthony
Robert Bertrino,
The flawed ‘good experiment’ you linked to has its preconceived conclusions all ready to be validated. Sorry, but that agendized experiment has nothing to do with the scientific method. And the conclusions are to laugh at; overt propaganda directed at impressionable students.
CO2 is harmless and beneficial. More is better. Falsify that, if you think you can.
“I should make it clear that I’m not doubting that CO2 has a positive radiative heating effect in our atmosphere, due to LWIR re-radiation, that is well established by science. What I am saying is that Mr. Gore’s Climate Reality Project did a poor job of demonstrating an experiment, so poor in fact that they had to fabricate portions of the presentation, and that the experiment itself (if they actually did it, we can’t tell) would show a completely different physical mechanism than what actually occurs in our atmosphere.”
really must I quote what Watts himself said in his own articles again?
Robert Bertrino,
Nice dodge. Falsification fail. OTOH, the quote you posted is accurate and factual.
“That one has been thoroughly debunked: effect cannot precede cause. On all time scales, CO2 is a function of temperature, not vice-versa.”
Nice dodge on your side smokey, care to explain how the above quote and what Watts said can both be “accurate and factual”. And btw, the experiment i linked to was not meant to be the be all and end all of CO2 experiments, it was just an easy experiment that anybody (you) could do. If you actually read it for example, you’ll notice that having a lid on the container actually ruins the experiment.
Robert Bertrino,
Anthony’s quote was accurate and factual. The fact that you can’t understand that is not Anthony’s fault or mine. And if you want to do your own experiment like Anthony did, no one is stopping you. But I suspect all you’re doing is emitting your unsupported personal opinion.
“I’m not doubting that CO2 has a positive radiative heating effect in our atmosphere”
” effect cannot precede cause. On all time scales, CO2 is a function of temperature, not vice-versa.”
View these side by side. How can CO2 have a positive heating effect but at the same time be a function of temperature? It’s totally contradictory.
REPLY: You have no idea what you are talking about and frankly I’m too tired to explain it to you. But look it up yourself and report back – A
Robert Bertino – “How can CO2 have a positive heating effect but at the same time be a function of temperature? It’s totally contradictory.”
That looks like an attempt to use logic. But let’s see if that logic stands up:
1. ‘Things’ other than CO2 drive temperature. We are agreed on this, because the temperature rise precedes the CO2 rise.
2. Temperature drives CO2. I am sure we are agreed on this too (a warming ocean releases CO2 and vice versa).
3. CO2 has a modest effect on temperature, but is outweighed by ‘things’. This must be the bit that is disputed.
If 3 is correct then, overall, it is the case that “CO2 is a function of temperature, not vice-versa”.
Now, 3 must be correct, because:-
if 3 is wrong and CO2 outweighs ‘things’ on at least some time scale, then the world can never return from a warm period to a cool one over that time scale. Thus ice ages become impossible, for example, if the time scale is a long one. The LIA becomes impossible if the time scale is around the century level. The post WWII cooling becomes impossible if the time scale is decadal. The cooling of the last few years becomes impossible if the time scale is really short. So we have now pretty much established the “all time scales” part too. It doesn’t look like your “totally contradictory” statement is logically sound.
nice cut and run smokey 😉
btw Mike, as soon as I heard the words “time scale” and “decadal”, I knew there was some CLIMATEGATE stuff going on.
Here’s something from wikipedia:
“General circulation models and basic physical considerations predict that in the tropics the temperature of the troposphere should increase more rapidly than the temperature of the surface. A 2006 report to the U.S. Climate Change Science Program noted that models and observations agreed on this amplification for monthly and interannual time scales but not for decadal time scales in most observed data sets. Improved measurement and analysis techniques have reconciled this discrepancy: corrected buoy and satellite surface temperatures are slightly cooler and corrected satellite and radiosonde measurements of the tropical troposphere are slightly warmer.[108] Satellite temperature measurements show that tropospheric temperatures are increasing with “rates similar to those of the surface temperature”, leading the IPCC to conclude that this discrepancy is reconciled.”
And I don’t think you fully understand what is happening with number 2.
Warming of ocean waters takes place at the surface in the sunlight, so a little bit of the CO2 is released at first from the water. However, the water isn’t as cool as it once was, so when it reaches high latitudes, it takes up less CO2 than normal and it does not sink as deeply. Because of this disruption in the ocean currents, the deep cold water doesn’t participate as much in vertical circulation and tends to stagnate. Life on the sea floor (and organic matter falling from above) produces more CO2 through cellular respiration, but since oxygen is no longer being delivered as adequately, we have anaerobic respiration where nitrate is used by bacteria as a source of oxygen instead. During this process, nitrous oxide and molecular nitrogen are made. What happens in the end: because the oceans have warmed and currents have slowed down, we have effectively created a vast ocean reservoir rich in CO2 but poor in nutrients. When this water returns to the surface, it will now bring CO2 back into the atmosphere, unable to recapture it through photosynthesis, due to a lack of nutrients.
^This process contributes to the “pulsed” nature of CO2 rise during de-glacialation, as we have seen in the ice cores. Additionally, we can easily see how this cycle would result in a positive feedback loop in regards to rising average temperatures.
I’ve taken classes in both Marine Science and Environmental Science. At one point I wanted to be an Environmental Engineer, that was before I realized what most of them do… They figure out ways for corporations to get around regulations and write favorable environmental impact statements.
Now I’m studying to be an aerospace engineer, because the way I see it, the world is pretty much screwed (might as well figure out a way to get off it). By the time we’re done bickering and getting fat on oil it will already be too late. The world is already changing.
On a side note:
You realize that this whole fiasco completely parallels what happened with the Tobacco industry right? All sorts of “skeptics” emerged during those times.
Robert Bertino – What on Earth has CLIMATEGATE got to do with it?
You give a very convincing-sounding explanation of the ocean-CO2 process. But if “this cycle would result in a positive feedback loop in regards to rising average temperatures” then how come the temperatures stopped rising? And not just once, but repeatedly. The answer is (has to be) : the effect of CO2 is too weak to count for much, other factors outweigh it.
You misunderstand scepticism. Sceptics want evidence. Nullius in verba and all that. Sometimes the evidence is there -> Pass. Sometimes the evidence is lacking -> Fail. CAGW so far is a Fail because there’s no evidence. Tobacco is totally irrelevant, absurdly irrelevant, we’re talking about CO2 and climate.
Mike Jonas says:
“…the effect of CO2 is too weak to count for much, other factors outweigh it.”
Empirical evidence shows that statement to be absolutely true. Robert Bertino is a young puppy who has been spoon-fed the alarmist poppycock about “carbon”, and he actually believes it.
Robert is far from being up to speed on the subject. Reading up on the WUWT archives and forgetting about finding his authority in one-sided alarmist Wikipedia articles would be an excelent start. But it’s more likely that Robert’s CAGW-induced haze will prevent him from accepting the verifiable fact that CO2 is harmless and beneficial. Robert has been on the receiving end of misinformation for too long, and now he is a hopeless True Believer.
When I said climategate stuff going on, I meant exactly that. You were trying to strawman global warming, but even that “fact” you talked about has since been disproven and reconciled. You very conveniently ignored that first half of my post.
“You gave a very convincing-sounding explanation…”
Good, but you don’t believe any of it do you? I’m part of the massive global warming conspiracy on an even bigger scale than chemical contrails and 9/11!
And btw, If you read my post fully, you would notice that I talked about carbon’s “pulsed nature”.
And about skepticism, let me forward you this interesting link (which you’ll undoubtedly disregard, probably because its from the union of concerned scientists, and they’re obviously in on the conspiracy): http://www.ucsusa.org/news/press_release/ExxonMobil-GlobalWarming-tobacco.html
This have everything to do with the tobacco industry. Just liked what happened before, corporations are spending millions trying to confuse the public and create doubt when there isn’t any. Have you ever once tried to see who funds skeptics, “clean coal” initiatives, and etc?
And your last post smokey is on the level of a 12 year old, revealing you for the troll you actually are. Have you ever stopped to think that maybe the sources YOU get information form are one-sided?
And cut this “True Believer” and church of global warming crap. My mind functions completely differently from yours. So don’t even try to make comparisons.
Why can’t we just get together and work on solutions for cleaning up the environment? Is caring for the earth (our home) really all that bad? Maybe if we stopped bickering for a moment we could do some real good.
People like you smokey make me lose faith in humanity.
Robert Bertino,
I never said that you gave a convincing explanation of anything. Most of your talking points are baseless hand waving, like “…you would notice that I talked about carbon’s ‘pulsed nature’.” [“Carbon”?? As in CO2, a trace gas? FYI: carbon is an element.] And changing the subject to the foolish “tobacco” ad-hom doesn’t fly here. It’s just a desperate red herring argument, intended to change the subject through random distraction. [Do a search of your hero Al Gore + tobacco].
I do agree with you when you write, “My mind functions completely differently from yours.” And from most everyone else here, it appears. Cognitive dissonance is a common affliction among the true believer crowd. Orwell called it “doublethink”. Skeptics are generally immune from CD because all we’re saying in effect is: prove it. Show us, using the scientific method, that “carbon” is harming the planet.
Or you can respond by calling me a 12-year old troll again. Doesn’t bother me a bit, because it shows that you have no testable evidence showing that the rise in CO2 is harming the planet, and it shows you can’t admit that you have no such evidence. But don’t feel bad; no one else has produced any evidence of global harm, either. Thus, CO2 is harmless. I don’t think I have to add ‘QED’. There just is no global damage due to CO2. None.
My testable, falsifiable hypothesis:
At current and projected levels, the global rise in CO2 is harmless and beneficial.
Feel free to try and falsify that hypothesis, using verifiable real world, testable, empirical evidence; no computer models accepted; this isn’t Skeptical Pseudo-Science, or RealClimatePropaganda.
Robert Bertino – Wow! We’re a loong way off topic now.
No I didn’t respond to the first part of your “CLIMATEGATE” comment. It says “General circulation models and basic physical considerations predict that in the tropics the temperature of the troposphere should increase more rapidly than the temperature of the surface. … Satellite temperature measurements show that tropospheric temperatures are increasing with “rates similar to those of the surface temperature”, leading the IPCC to conclude that this discrepancy is reconciled.”
I’ll reply now:- That’s obvious self-serving BS. Suddenly, and very conveniently, “more rapidly” turns into “similar to”.
Climategate? Strawman global warming? BS. I’ve been referring to real things like empirical evidence that CO2 is less powerful than it’s claimed to be.
“I’m part of the massive global warming conspiracy on an even bigger scale than chemical contrails and 9/11!“. BS. I don’t think you are part of any conspiracy. I don’t think that any conspiracy has been established – malpractice yes, conspiracy unproven. Never ascribe to conspiracy that which can be explained by incompetence.
Re your link to Exxon-Mobil funding: We’ve got a lot of corruption in the system, for example the large number of WWFers in the IPCC. That’s why we have to work on evidence and evidence only not on conspiracy theories, politics, etc.
“Why can’t we just get together and work on solutions for cleaning up the environment? Is caring for the earth (our home) really all that bad? Maybe if we stopped bickering for a moment we could do some real good.“. i’m with you 100% on that.
I’ll reply more in depth a little later, I’m heading of to the chem lab right now. One thing though smokey. You have obviously never seen a typo in your life. If you read my post, you would see that the whole time I was talking about CARBON DIOXIDE (which I stated like twenty times). Just because one time in the whole post i omitted dioxide by accident, doesn’t mean I don’t know what an element or a molecule is.
You claim that I’m using “random distraction.” I can’t see a better example than what you just did. In case you didn’t know, its called the “strawman argument”: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Straw_man
BRB sometime later lol
RB says:
“Just because one time in the whole post i omitted dioxide by accident, doesn’t mean I don’t know what an element or a molecule is.”
Actually, CO2 is a compound.
Good luck passing your chem lab.☺
That last comment… Is there a smiley for jaw-dropped?
You should delete it, quite frankly its embarrassing.
You must have went straight to wikipedia and read the first line.
Molecule:
“the smallest physical unit of an element or compound, consisting of one or more like atoms in an element and two or more different atoms in a compound.”
A carbon dioxide molecule is part of a carbon dioxide compound.
YOU must have NEVER gone to chem lab! 🙂
(Reply: The comment you are responding to is: “Actually, CO2 is a compound.” That is factual. -mod)
in addition;
“The carbon dioxide molecule (O=C=O) contains two double bonds and has a linear shape”
“Carbon dioxide is a molecule with the molecular formula CO2.”
RB,
OK junior, let’s get back on topic: try to defend Muller & daughter’s self-serving gaming of the system for their own personal financial benefit. Try hard to make their PR circus look professional – after all, you too crave being part of that dog and pony show, no? Admit it: feeding at the taxpayer trough is easier than making an honest living.
And I note that you’re still avoiding my CO2 hypothesis like Dracula avoids the dawn.☺☺☺
I’m not letting you slither out of that last comment so easily smokey 🙂 That was one of the most ignorant comments I’ve ever heard, especially from someone who is wanting to challenge human-caused global warming, which is 100% connected to chemistry.
Knowing the definition of a molecule is an extremely basic thing. If you don’t know that, how can claim to know anything else with certainty? How can you know whether something is “accurate and factual” when you struggle with the basic tenets of chemistry? How can you say “forgetting about finding his authority in one-sided alarmist Wikipedia articles would be an excelent start” when you obviously bolted straight to Wikipedia to find the definition of CO2 (which says the word “compound” in the first line, which you totally didn’t understand the context of). How can you say ANYTHING definitive about global warming when you don’t know this?? How can you stand up to 98% of climate scientists that have years of experience and me (who has taken many, many chemistry and environmental science classes) when you probably have never taken (or probably never passed) a real science class in your life?
You keep on claiming I’m using “random distraction” and “baseless hand waving”, don’t you see that this is exactly what you are doing? The real discussion ended a long time ago. Now you’ve been desperately trying to strawman me, out of all things, on a singular typo. Don’t tell me to get back on topic, because you change it whenever it suits you. It’s the basic tactic of a troll. Change the topic, if you lose, change to something else. Never admit defeat, always deflect.
Personally, if reasonable climate skeptics exist (which I have a hard time believing, but that’s beside from the point) then I feel extremely embarrassed for them, as they’re relying on representatives like you, who obviously have no idea what they are doing.
What’s worse is, there are millions of you. People who have no experience in science, can’t even understand basic chemistry, all plaguing the internet with “theories” they copy and pasted from some right-wing site…
And don’t tell me that just because you “forgot” what a molecule is doesn’t mean anything. Its the basic building block of chemistry. It’s like not knowing your ABCs. And what’s worse, is that you tried to speak with authority:
“Actually, CO2 is a compound.
Good luck passing your chem lab.☺”
You people keep saying that my facts have been spoon-fed to me and that I just get all my information from liberal conspiracy sites like wikipedia. WELL WHAT THE HECK IS THIS SMOKEY?!?
Good luck passing life 🙂
You disgust me.
Robert,
It is amusing how easy it is to push your buttons. I suspect you’re a twenty-something who thinks he’s got the world and human nature all figured out. After hair-splitting over ‘element’ and ‘compound’, your truly lunatic opinion is that there may not really be any reasonable climate skeptics, and you further assume that scientific skeptics “have no experience in science, can’t even understand basic chemistry, all plaguing the internet with ‘theories’ they copy and pasted from some right-wing site.” And you accuse me of posting like a 12-year old? Pure projection there.
Cognitive dissonance clouds your world view. May I deconstruct your assumptions? Thank you:
First, per my handy online dictionary, a compound and a molecule are the same thing [caveat: when different elements are involved]:
compound 1
|ˈkämˌpound | 1. a substance formed from two or more elements chemically united in fixed proportions : a compound of hydrogen and oxygen. CO2 is both a molecule and a compound. Carbon is an element.
Next, I am in complete agreement with this [pdf version with slides]. The only quibble I might have is that I would give ≈+0.2°, -0.5° error bars to the suggested 1.2°C warming from 2xCO2. Either way, CO2 is no problem. I think most reasonable scientific skeptics and lukewarmers would agree with Matt Ridley’s speech. And there is no doubt that scientific skeptics far outnumber the climate alarmist crowd – not that ‘consensus’ means anything in science. Just pointing out a verifiable fact. Documentation on request.
Next, I suspect that you misunderstand the difference between a theory, a hypothesis and a conjecture. AGW is a conjecture, because it is not testable per the scientific method. It may be true [I happen to think there is some minor warming from increased CO2]. But AGW is still a conjecture. As for catastrophic AGW – CAGW – don’t be silly.
Next, your impotent claim that comments about this article topic have ended fails. Muller is a conniving, self-serving, nepotistic reprobate devoid of any professional ethics. But since he is on your side of the fence, you would much rather steer the discussion away from him and his taxpayer scams. Ain’t gonna happen. Muller is as disreputable as Hansen, Mann, and the rest of their ilk. They’re peddling AGW alarmism for money, status, political power, and endless jaunts to holiday venues in an age of easy video teleconferencing. Instead of your vague insinuations about “tobacco”, or nitpicking about “carbon”, let’s discuss the enormous payola going into the pockets of climate alarmists, and compare that with the relative pittance skeptical scientists receive. Documentation on request.
Finally, you say: “…smokey is on the level of a 12 year old, revealing you for the troll you actually are. Have you ever stopped to think that maybe the sources YOU get information form are one-sided?” FYI, this is the internet’s “Best Science” site, largely because there is no censorship. We get sources from all points of view. If I submitted your post above to tamino, or Skeptical Pseudo-Science, or RealClimatePropaganda, changing only words like “right wing” to “left wing”, and linking to charts like this, my post would be censored out of existence [or in the case of SPS, ghost edited to make it say something completely different]. Since you obviously came here from blogs that spoon-feed their readers with one-sided globaloney propaganda, all you are doing is regurgitating their talking points. As Anthony told you: “You have no idea what you are talking about and frankly I’m too tired to explain it to you. But look it up yourself and report back.”
My sincere recommendation: Read WUWT for a few months. Study the archives. Cognitive dissonance is tough to overcome, but it’s always possible that the scales will fall from your eyes, and you’ll realize that you’re being fed nonsense from Algore and his tribe; CO2 is harmless and beneficial. Deal with that simple fact, and the whole “carbon” demonization industry will start to look mighty corrupt.
You’re trying really hard to deflect the fact that you don’t understand basic chemistry, as is evident by the fact that you spoke with authority when you said:
“Actually, CO2 is a compound.
Good luck passing your chem lab.☺”
If you don’t know what a molecule is, how can you truly speak with authority about global warming?
I refuse to change the topic until you directly answer this question. You’ve backed yourself into a corner, and no amount of distractions will suffice.
^and you’re quote:
“compound 1
|ˈkämˌpound | 1. a substance formed from two or more elements chemically united in fixed proportions : a compound of hydrogen and oxygen. CO2 is both a molecule and a compound. Carbon is an element.”
This reveals you have a serious misunderstanding about the nature of molecules and compounds. You said before that CO2 wasn’t a molecule. That’s that. No amount of slithering will change what you said.
^and I know you’re trying to strawman me 🙂 Just answer the question smokey.
RB,
Your silly question is no different than, “Are you still beating your wife?” I posted a definition of a molecule for you. Argue with the dictionary if you disagree. Ask me a legitimate question, referring to something I wrote by cutting and pasting my exact words, and you will get a definitive answer.
And you wrote two more posts now, responding to what I wrote by using ad hominem insults, while avoiding all the points raised. So I see I’m still pushing your buttons. But of course, they’re your buttons, and it’s fun and amusing to push them. I wonder how many more times I can get you to say ‘slithering’?☺
I note that you have repeatedly avoided my challenge to you to try and falsify my hypothesis:
At current and projected levels, the global rise in CO2 is harmless and beneficial.
Ball’s in your court, junior. Make sure your response is testable and replicable per the scientific method, which requires total transparency. Let’s see that putative global ‘harm’ from CO2. Give it your best shot.
I know you like to push buttons, that’s what trolls do (by definition).
LOL I’m not letting you out of that. I refusing to be baited. You don’t even understand the definition you posted.
I’ll repeat what you said again:
“Actually, CO2 is a compound.
Good luck passing your chem lab.☺”
When I was talking about CO2 as a molecule. You said CO2 wasn’t a molecule, and chastised me for not knowing my chemistry. There is no getting around that.
^A compound is at least two different elements. A molecule is just two or more atoms. All compounds are molecules but not all molecules are compounds, for example: H2, Cl2, O2, etc. It’s not wrong to call CO2 a compound, but its definitely wrong to say it isn’t a molecule.
^and yes, I will ignore your other points until you no longer deflect this
and how can you make a hypothesis about climate change when you don’t even know what a molecule is??
(Reply: No one is listening any more. -mod)