Guest post by Maurizio Morabito
Quite an effort has been made by many people (including Dr Richard Muller) to portray the BEST pre-pre-pre-papers as some kind of death blow against climate skepticism, as if the whole debate had been a sports match with everybody pigeonholed in two opposite camps: here, the noble scientists finding out the world is warming; there, the ignoble skeptics pretending the world is not warming.
Needless to say, it’s all the usual crass, outdated lie.
How do I know? I know it from the About page at [my] blog. Why? Because that page does not contain just a text by Yours Truly, rather a large quote by Willis Eschenbach. [Who is a major essay contributor here at WUWT.]
It was simply such an appropriate, informed, short and straight argument, I knew it was going to describe pretty much all my future efforts at the blog.
Original publication place & date? The ClimateSceptics yahoo group, Mon Oct 22, 2007, 12:22pm:
I also think that increasing GHGs will warm the earth … but that is not the real question to me. The real question is, how much it will warm the earth. To date, I have not seen any “useful quantative results” regarding that question either …
Once those quantitative results are in, we can proceed to the next question — is a warmer earth better or worse on balance? The globe has warmed quite a bit since the 1600s, and in general this has been of benefit to humans. The sea level rise from the historical warming has not been a significant problem. In addition, a warmer world is predicted to be a wetter world, which overall can only be a good thing. So, will warming be a problem, or a benefit? This is a very open question, and one which will be difficult to answer as some areas will win and some will lose. To date, however, recent warming seems to be occuring outside the tropics, in the night-time, in the winter … this does not seem like a bad thing.
And at some future date when those questions are answered, we can proceed to the final question, viz:
If GHGs are determined to be a major cause of the warming (as opposed to landuse changes, or black carbon on snow, or dark colored aerosols, etc) and if we determine that the warming will be on balance a negative occurrence, is there a cost-effective way to reduce the GHGs, or are we better off putting our money into adaptation?
Until we can answer all of those questions, we should restrict ourselves to actions which will be of value whether or not there is future warming. The key is to realize that all of the problems that Al Gore is so shrill about are here now with us today — floods, heat waves, famine, rising sea levels, droughts, cold spells, and all of the apocalyptic catalog are occuring as I write this. Anything we can do to insulate the world’s population from these climate problems will be of use to everyone no matter what the future climate holds […]
You can easily find the answer to your question regarding how much warming can be expected. Check out Dr. Santer’s lecture on this Blog. He addresses this question in a rational way. He also makes the point that the models are all publically available and are presently being used by thousands of scientists around the world. You could use these also. Information on this question abounds in the literature and it has been summarized by several sources, including the the IPCC.
I think this post is right on the money, we need to adapt not destroy entire economies just because one GHG MAY be responsible for some of it. I fully believe the climate is changing, but I suspect 99% of it is natural. The climate has been changing throughout history and will continue to do so, to think we can stop it and preserve some magic stable point is naive at best.
There is some evidence, as yet uninvestigated to the best of my knowledge that the end of the ice age may have drowned some very early cities – there are some very interesting and very unnatural looking structures off the west coast of India on the continental shelf at about the right depth to have been coastal during the ice age and I believe others have been noted elsewhere. We also know that the climate when the Pueblo cities were built in the US was very different to what it is now. So the climate must have changed significantly in the past and is not set in stone as the Greens seem to think.
I look forward to the day someone actually wakes up to this and decides to find ways to adapt!
“…the BEST pre-pre-pre-papers as some kind of death blow against climate skepticism, as if the whole debate had been a sports match with everybody pigeonholed in two opposite camps: here, the noble scientists finding out the world is warming; there, the ignoble skeptics pretending the world is not warming.”
Extremely well said. Right on the money. As regards your major point, please forgive me for taking this opportunity to explain what most turns me off about climate blogs. A large percentage of people who comment treat commenting as if it were a scored sport in which the object is to prove that your result is bigger than the other person’s result. Such behavior is a clear sign of testosterone poisoning and people are supposed to outgrow that problem at some point. Muller can be excused somewhat because he is a lifelong academic and is at Berkeley. That being said, Muller’s behavior is a fine example of the effects of testosterone poisoning.
Right. Again, also, is the thing I’ve been harping about….the premise of a stable climate to begin with. The graphs all show this skyrocketing curve. Yawn. Look at the vertical axis. Now look at the vertical axis as if it starts at zero degrees Kelvin. If you include 0-300 K as the scale, you can’t even see the warming. A tiny relative change in heat. And, Yup, it’s changing. Back to the yawn. Somehow the warmists want to treat tat 0.7 K rise like it was 70. Or something. So they build a straw man, and set him on fire. See the evil “doubters” (denier has slipped from favor…?)…they don’t think delta-T exists. Well sorry, we do. And it’s a non-issue. I must say “BEST” is an unfortunate choice of acronym….
Hugh Pepper, I mean, honestly, pull your head out of….oh never mind.
Hey om!
….I live on a tropical rock, out in the middle of the ocean
of course I think warm is better….LOL
(but then, you knew that already)
Theo, not sure if you’ve seen this from Legatus on another thread.
Muller & Associates
http://www.mullerandassociates.com/index.php
Richard Muller , President and Chief Scientist
GreenGov is a service offered by Muller & Associates
Helping governments build energy strategies that are right for them
Government energy policy is increasingly confounded by the complex interplay of international treaties, fluctuating prices, declining reserves, and a rapidly growing array of technological developments. Energy policy involves economics, energy security, and climate change. For some initiatives, these issues may be addressed simultaneously. For others the potential solutions might be in direct conflict. Coal, as one example, is abundant in some countries, but it is also a strong emitter of carbon dioxide
Clean Energy – demystifying emerging technologies and avoiding costly “misinvestments
We know that in order to be effective, solutions must be sustainable.
A ‘lifelong academic’ with a warmist sideline. 🙂
Anthony Watts and Joe D’Aleo August 27th 2010 in Surface Temperature Records: Policy Driven Deception? Summary For Policy Makers point #1
“Instrumental temperature data for the pre-satellite era (1850-1980) have been so widely, systematically, and uni-directionally tampered with that it cannot be credibly asserted there has been any significant “global warming” in the 20th century”
From “A question of global temperature”
“These factors all lead to significant uncertainty and a tendency for over-estimation of century-scale temperature trends. A conclusion from all findings suggest that global data bases are seriously flawed and can no longer be trusted to assess climate trends or rankings or validate model forecasts. And, consequently, such surface data should be ignored for decision making.“
From “Adjustments not made or made badly”
“There are no adjustments in NOAA and Hadley data for urban contamination. The adjustments and non-adjustments instead increased the warmth in the recent warm cycle that ended in 2001 and/or inexplicably cooled many locations in the early record, both of which augmented the apparent trend.”
From “Case Studies in data manipulation”
“A series of case studies illustrates the scale and frequency of data manipulation. In every instance, the effect of the tampering is to make it appear as though temperature has risen faster in the instrumental record than in truth it has. This is but a sampling. By the time you read this, there probably will be many more.”
“CASE 1: THE SMOKING GUN AT DARWIN ZERO” written by the same Willis Eschenbach quoted above
“It is difficult to justify adjustment on so very large a scale. We have five different records covering Darwin from 1941 on. They all agree almost exactly. Why adjust them at all? NOAA added a huge, artificial, imaginary trend to the most recent half of the raw data. Now it looks like the IPCC diagram. Note how the magnitude of the adjustment climbs in discrete steps like a ziggurat. What’s up with that?”
In her introduction of the BEST publications Judith Curry noted:
“I think the BEST project is very important given the importance of the surface temperature data set and the problems that have been associated with the CRU and NASA data sets, not to mention their disagreement. “
The BEST project was created precisely because of the claims by skeptics of widespread manipulation and corruption of the surface temperature record. It’s entirely ridiculous to now argue those claims never really existed at all and skeptics have all along accepted the surface temperature record as reliable and robust. I find it difficult to believe that people who’ve been reading wattsupwiththat and other blogs for years and accepted the claims the surface temperature record was unreliable will accept they simply misunderstood what was being said.
More back-pedaling and history re-writing by the “skeptics” .
Anthony has been on a crusade for years to show the world is NOT warming. It was really all those badly located thermometers, remember?
Now that it has been clearly shown (again) it WASN’T a siting problem, a new “skeptic” meme must be created, as we see in this post.
jazznick (@jazznick1) says:
October 22, 2011 at 12:09 pm
As I have said elsewhere, Muller is proving to the corporate types that he is a Loose Cannon on Deck, which is the kiss of death for the corporate types.
sharper00,
Your conclusion is wrong; BEST was created for public relations purposes. And given Muller’s lack of professional ethics, ‘propaganda’ would be the correct label. Muller uses fine sounding words, but as we have seen, his actions are despicable.
Is anyone in favor of formulating some Just War-like principles that those who are fighting the Climate Wars should try to adhere to?
sharper00 says:
October 22, 2011 at 12:14 pm
“The BEST project was created precisely because of the claims by skeptics of widespread manipulation and corruption of the surface temperature record. It’s entirely ridiculous to now argue those claims never really existed at all and skeptics have all along accepted the surface temperature record as reliable and robust.”
As Anthony has explained in the plainest language, BEST did not address his evidence of poor climate records. As he has also explained, BEST changed the topic from Anthony’s 30 year period starting in 1979 to a 60 year period for which there is no siting data and, thereby, changed the topic and committed the fallacy of Red Herring.
Muller argues with the Straw Man. Like all Warmists, he finds the Straw Man to be woefully informed and strangely silent in response to his insightful evidence.
From Watts’ introduction of the BEST project February 2011
“I can tell you that this project is partly a reaction and result of what we’ve learned in the surfacesations project, but mostly, this project is a reaction to many of the things we have been saying time and again, only to have NOAA and NASA ignore our concerns, or create responses designed to protect their ideas, rather than consider if their ideas were valid in the first place. I have been corresponding with Dr. Muller, invited to participate with my data, and when I am able, I will say more about it. In the meantime, you can visit the newly minted web page here. I highly recommend reading the section on methodology here. Longtime students of the surface temperature record will recognize some of the issues being addressed. I urge readers not to bombard these guys with questions. Let’s “git ‘er done” first.”
Adam R. says:
“Anthony has been on a crusade for years to show the world is NOT warming.”
Are you that ignorant? Or do you simply invent your falsehoods?
I’ve followed WUWT since its inception, and I’ve never seen Anthony Watts state that the planet is not warming. You must be confusing Anthony with the mendacious Michael Mann, who ridiculously claimed there was little temperature change until the industrial revolution. But MBH98 has been so thoroughly debunked that even the self-serving IPCC can no longer use Mann’s alarming MBH98 chart.
The planet has not warmed, since the MWP, or the Holocene Optimum. Has it warmed since the LIA? Probably. Are we glad it did? I certainly hope so! Are we responsible for said warming? No one knows.
A trifecta!
1) A strawman.
2) A non sequitur
3) A total ignorance of the subject matter.
No competent skeptic has ever argued that the average surface temperature of the Earth hasn’t been rising since the early 1600’s.
The fact that BEST used the same raw data as GISS, NOAA and CRU to confirm their findings doesn’t invalidate the siting problem.
The surface temperature rise from 1977-2003 doesn’t invalidate the flat OHC and non-GISS surface temps since 2003.
Adam R, Anthony has been on a crusade to get the best data possible before making grand pronouncements. This forum constantly demonstrates the value of questioning experiments, observations and theories. Demonstrating the surface station record was fraught with misleading data is not the same as claiming there has been no rebound from the little ice age. If you don’t care about getting the best data you don’t care about science.
The trolls are dining on Own-Foot today. The novelty has worn off long ago, of course.
Adam R. says:
“Anthony has been on a crusade for years to show the world is NOT warming.”
I won’t speak for Anthony but my interpretation is that the Surfacestations project was created to show just how poor the the temperature data actually is and to draw any conclusions from that data is probably not a good idea.
But as a skeptic, I have no problem believing the earth has warmed since the end of the LIA and I can’t imagine that my position is different from most skeptics.
My previous comment seems to have gotten swallowed completely, the site wasn’t loading very well when I posted it so here it is again:
When Anthony Watts first introduced the BEST project in February 2011 he said:
“Good news travels fast. I’m a bit surprised to see this get some early coverage, as the project isn’t ready yet. However since it has been announced by press, I can tell you that this project is partly a reaction and result of what we’ve learned in the surfacesations project, but mostly, this project is a reaction to many of the things we have been saying time and again, only to have NOAA and NASA ignore our concerns, or create responses designed to protect their ideas, rather than consider if their ideas were valid in the first place.”
Adam R. says:
October 22, 2011 at 12:52 pm
More back-pedaling and history re-writing by the “skeptics” .
Anthony has been on a crusade for years to show the world is NOT warming. It was really all those badly located thermometers, remember?
Now that it has been clearly shown (again) it WASN’T a siting problem, a new “skeptic” meme must be created, as we see in this post.
====================================================
Oh my……. the alarmists are out today. I’m sure there will be more.
You guys are making leaps on top of leaps. First of all, none of that BEST garbage has been accepted by any science.
Secondly, if it is, we’ll know it was from pal review instead of any objective view. How do I know this? Kriging or no, you can’t just invent temps! BEST clearly has. See here…… http://suyts.wordpress.com/2011/10/21/is-that-the-best-they-can-do/ They interpolated and extrapolated across entire continents.
Thirdly, there’s a huge difference between pointing out errors in the temp record and stating that the earth hadn’t warmed. Most of us accept that just because you can’t prove something, doesn’t mean it isn’t happening. Read up on some science concepts to try and understand that thought which, apparently is a bit complex for the average warmista.
Lastly, skeptics come in all shapes and sizes. There isn’t one person or blog that speaks for the skeptic camp in its entirety. In fact, skeptics disagree on a great many things. We abhor the echo chambers that are so prevalent on alarmist blogs. Something about we prefer to do our thinking for ourselves.
If you don’t understand what I’ve stated, just ask. If you disagree with what I’ve stated, then you haven’t been paying attention and should reserve your comments until such time you can get up to speed.
Adam R. is playing a broken record.
At this advanced and progressing juncture of climate discussions there is no excuse for his foolishness.
I do wonder about Muller… maybe he’s a mixed bag like Trenberth, part brilliant, genuine scientist, genuinely wants to get things right… and part washed up by the gravy train, the corruption that he cannot yet believe exists RIGHT THROUGH THE WHOLE OF CLIMATE SCIENCE…
Uh oh. I know what it could be. See here. Stanley Milgram wanted to understand why so many apparently rational, kind, normal people got taken in by the unmentionable Austrian lance corporal. Did they really have twisted morality or were they just blindly obeying orders from “authority”?
Milgram’s extraordinary experiments showed that people could be made to do the most awful things to “outsiders”, and put aside all their personal qualms, if they believed they were being commanded to do so by an ostensibly benevolent “authority”. The group of people most likely to behave like this were people that in normal life wanted to please others. Eccentrics and rebels had far better inbuilt brakes to, and recognition of, cruel behaviour per se.
Put that in the marxist Berkeley environment. The False Flag syndrome emerges: Ally, Neutralize, Destroy.
Ally “We are fellow skeptics like you! Watts’ concern is important!!”
Neutralize “Our results show that Watts’ work, though a salutory check, is actually nothing to worry about!”
Destroy “MEDIA MEDIA MEDIA!!! Even skeptics now see that warming has happened, records are trustworthy, and UHI is nothing to worry about!”
Maybe.