In a shocking development that may represent a singularity, I find myself in agreement* with parts of an opinion piece posted on Real Climate today called Berkeley Earthquake Called Off. Dr. Eric Steig writes:
Anybody expecting earthshaking news from Berkeley, now that the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature group being led by Richard Muller has released its results, had to be content with a barely perceptible quiver. As far as the basic science goes, the results could not have been less surprising if the press release had said “Man Finds Sun Rises At Dawn.” This must have been something of a disappointment for anyone hoping for something else.
True. As Maurizo pointed out in World is Warming. Pope Catholic, and as Dr. Roger Peilke said in No surprise about BEST.
Other excerpts: …
But Muller’s framing of the Berkeley results is still odd. His statement, that had they found no warming trend, this would have “ruled out anthropogenic global warming”, while true in a technical sense, would not have implied that we should not worry about human drivers of climate change. And it would not have overturned over a century of firmly established radiative-transfer and thermodynamics. Nor would it have overturned the basic chemistry which led Bolin and Eriksson (reprinted here) to predict in 1959 that fossil fuel burning would cause a significant increase in CO2 — long before the results of Keeling’s famous Mauna Loa observations were in. As a physicist, Muller knows that the reason for concern about increasing CO2 comes from the basic physics and chemistry, which was elucidated long before the warming trend was actually observable.
…
Muller’s other comments do very little to shed light on climate change, and continue to consist largely of putting down the work of others. “For Richard Muller,” writes Richard Black, “this free circulation also marks a return to how science should be done,” the clear insinuation being that CRU, GISS, and NOAA had all been doing something else. Whatever that “something else” is supposed to be completely eludes us, given that these groups all along have been publishing results in the peer-reviewed literature using methods that proved easy to reproduce using easily available data (and in the GISTEMP case, complete code). In one sense, though, we do agree with Muller’s quote: nobody has stolen his private emails and spun them out of context to make his research look bad.
…
Overall, we are underwhelmed by the quality of Berkeley effort so far — with the exception of the efforts made by Robert Rohde on the dataset agglomeration and the statistical approach. And we remain greatly disappointed by Muller’s public communications (e.g. his WSJ op-ed) which appear far more focused on raising his profile than enlightening the public about the state of the science.
It will be very interesting to see what happens to these papers as they go through peer review.
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* OK now for the asterisk. Like any opinion piece not everyone will agree with all of it. I’m no exception Steig writes about the station siting issue saying:
National Academy of Sciences study already concluded that the warming seen in the surface station record was “undoubtedly real,” that Menne et al showed that highly touted station siting issues did not in fact compromise the record…
I would point out to Dr. Steig, and to Dr. Muller, that science, by its very nature, is not a static enterprise. A second paper is in the works looking at the station siting issue from a much broader perspective will be sent for peer review (and hopefully publication) in the coming weeks. In the best tradition of Forest Gump I’ll borrow one of his famous lines:
“And that’s all I have to say about that”.
This guest post is an instructive read though: Unadjusted data of long period stations in GISS show a virtually flat century scale trend
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How droll; Muller is demonstrating incompetence both as a Warmist and a Skeptic.
@ur momisugly Daniel H
BEST has made for strange bedfellows.
Bear in pig’s clothing, or pig in bear’s clothing, I can’t tell which. Maybe its manbearpig. Naaa. Baaa.
“Real Climate pans BEST and Muller”
AKA – “Remember, we go in separately and act like you don’t know me.”
Anthony
Apologies for the re-post but I can understand the ‘team’ rallying against BEST, comparing the BEST reconstruction with the Hockey Stick leaves one to conclude one or the other is fantasy, if I were Mann’s mates I wouldn’t want this graphic getting courtroom time!
1800-2010 comparison, BEST-Hockey Stick
‘Muller’s other comments do very little to shed light on climate change, and continue to consist largely of putting down the work of others. “For Richard Muller,” writes Richard Black, “this free circulation also marks a return to how science should be done,” the clear insinuation being that CRU, GISS, and NOAA had all been doing something else.’
To be clear here, Eric Steig is criticising Muller for something someone else said about him. An opinion reconstruction using a proxy, no less!
Its not enough to ‘believe’ you have to ‘believe’ in the right way . Mullers crime for Real Climate is failure to both show ‘right belief’ , lets see how this work out , will Muller get the message they clearly sent. And come out to show us the ‘purity of his faith’ by denouncing any doubts or will he risk the anger of the ‘Team’ and so perhaps IPCC inclusion?
Its times like this that I wish sceptical scientists were as organised and as heavily funded as the team nodders always claim!! They use this illusion of funding to attack the qualifications of those scientists who dare to speak out rather than detail any issues with the scientific results they put forward.
If only a fraction of the money that has been wasted by the “team insiders and fellow travellers” AND the IPCC lunch club, was applied with full application of the Scientific method, “before” the results were splashed all over the media, we might get a great leap forward in our knowledge of extreme weather and how our climate actually works, rather than as postulated by some academics with snouts in the trough.
Having viewed the Jason Kirkby videos on the preliminary results/indications from the Cloud experiment and witnessed what was shaping up to be groundbreaking (Cloud making/precipitation) chemical building blocks of information based on actual experiments, those results, seem to have been deliberately nobbled by the upper Government/Academic managers, and their cautionary suppression of comments by working scientists, preventing them, giving any opinion at all on the results obtained, because of the apparent controversial importance of the results of those experiments and, exactly avoid seeking any media hype, unlike the BEST (WORST) approach we have now witnessed.
It would seem to this observer, there is some “dirty work going on behind the scenes” to get certain papers and data into the current IPCC reporting echo chamber, and rule others outside (outliers) or in football parlance ruled offside!!.
I think Donna is spot on in her book, The IPCC can only be cleaned out by defunding and then make sure climate science is rigorously rechecked and openly reviewed to ensure we get only premium science from the rejigged Climate Science.
@legatus IIRC the climate scientists (aka alarmists by people in this blog) claim, that temperatures of MWP were achieved by 1970-80, and now it is warmier than in the medieval warm period.
Robin Melville says:
“Oscillation” — which is often seen in climate phenomenology — implies negative feedback, not positive.
Worryingly, ‘Oscillation’ implies positive feedback.
– the microphone/speaker ‘howl-round’ feedback is classic example of positive feedback with which most people are familiar.
I think this is all just part of the work of master manipulators. The recent papers and opinion pieces have both solidified the idea that the world is warming and got the ‘skeptics’ to vocally agree to this. Real Climate’s welcome opinion piece will be hailed through the skeptical blogs and a rare glimpse of sanity, if we are agreeing with the the rate of warming, which we will more redilly do because we are so pleased that it shows measure on the BEST results. I think the AGW movement is manipulating the skeptic community with a classic flattery con trick; also individual beleaguered skeptics will latch on to any sign of kindness and unconsciously sacrifice some of their beliefs. It is a very solid foundation for the AGW movement who now don’t have to worry about defending the temperature records and can concentrate on various ‘scientific’ reasons for this warming. Lumumba.
Venter says: October 24, 2011 at 10:24 pm
Doesn’t have to be. Anthony Watts and others here also had high hopes for BEST. They shot themselves down by their behaviour, which led on to a much closer examination of their science than would have happened otherwise. And in all this we have a miracle, the Gordian-knot-slicing paper from Michael Palmer
I have always found the “Team groupies” response of relief to station siting, a bit perplexing. If “bad” and “good” sites are giving similar results then the climate change signal must be very strong so as to survive such an obvious issue. If this is the case then the GCMs are woefully inadequate since they can barely begin to follow the undulations of this “strong” signal.
OTOH, there could be almost no signal of any kind to measure, so siting does not matter and we are just reading wonderfully aromatic, cherry picked tea leaves.
I have a logic problem, the hockey team and this best team are looking for a trend upward. The dying of thermometers in the backwoods, gives them a very upward trend. They then tell us that the UHI has no effect on the temperature increase in their graphs for the last hundred years, my head hurts.
Why do all the old continuos stations show no global warming? This BEST mob are telling me that the UHI makes no difference to the trend or the temperature rise as shown in their graphs, I find this logically incompatable with reasonable thought processes.
Some how I remember many people suggesting that our host cover his a#se and not trust these people. Lesson learned, and the cryptic message of a soon to be released paper is hope fully Anthony’s revenge. This may relieve the hurt in my head.
BEST / Muller will now use this as vindication of their analysis on the basis that both the skeptics and the alarmists are equally up in arms over it.
What I’d like to know is who is going to peer review it now after all the negative publicity over it. It’s a losing proposition for anybody engaged in it. And what about the journals? There won’t be anything in it for them, other than opprobrium for having let it through. Any publicity about it has already been done. Anything “groundbreaking” about the process is already known.
I think they are going to pay a high price for their fifteen minutes of fame. I just hope it was worth it.
NotTheAussiePhilM says:
October 25, 2011 at 2:15 am
“Worryingly, ‘Oscillation’ implies positive feedback.
– the microphone/speaker ‘howl-round’ feedback is classic example of positive feedback with which most people are familiar.”
The microphone/speaker feedback is indeed an example of positive feedback, but it does not involve oscillation. The ‘signal’ is pushed hard up against the end stops and stays there. That’s the problem, and that is why climate feedback CAN NOT BE POSITIVE.
Negative feedback does indeed produce an oscillation, a damped oscillation, where the rate of damping is a function of the feedback ‘strength’ (and here I can’t remember the correct word – transfer function??)
KnR (1:16 AM) has it right when he says:
“Its not enough to ‘believe’ you have to ‘believe’ in the right way . Mullers crime for Real Climate is failure to both show ‘right belief’ ”
Honestly, what did everyone expect, if BEST is starting with the same record everyone else has? The difference between the records is mostly how you adjust for changes over time, like UHI, except where land temp records have sea surface temps added in.
Why lambaste Muller and BEST, when they have suggested that apparently natural forcings such as the AMO and PDO may be responsible for around 70% of the temp increases since 1975 (see pg. 12 of the temperature paper, 2 paragraphs before acknowledgements)?
One of the things Steig and company didn’t like — it’s in the thread above — is that BEST suggests that thermohaline circulation, an apparent natural forcing, can influence the land temperature record. BEST speculated that perhaps the AMO might be driven by the thermohaline circulation. THIS observation is what makes BEST a threat to the IPCC, to Real Climate, to Hansen and Mann and Pachauri, and why they criticize it.
Yes, we need more research, but why are so many people on this thread killing what looks like a golden goose that you have been given?
Without going into too many details…
1. The feedback “strength” is simply called gain. It is less than unity for all bounded-input, bounded-output stable systems, necessarily so for any passive system such as the earth and its climate. Climate scientists tend to use this terminology (feedback) a little bit differently, however, though the same prinicple still applies.
2. The transfer function is a relationship between an input and output of a system. This can be decomposed down to any “path” between any input and any output, even within the system itself. E.g., the feedback path has its own transfer function from the output that is getting fed back to the input.
Mark
Gotta love the logic, or lack thereof, in the statement that, paraphrased, says “even if it’s not happening that’s no excuse not to do something about it!”
Perhaps overheard at the water cooler-
Jim- “Gav, this is a travesty. That jester Muller’s grandstanding has usurped my helpful media.”
Gav- “Yeah, I gave the Fenton crew a couple of new postings to cycle through at RC.”
Jim- ” Kev and I are flying to New Zealand next week. I already have some interviews set up to steer the media lights back on me.”
Gav- “Are you going to bring up the rate of sea level rise doubling every decade again? They really fell for that.”
Jim- “Mehh. My 1988 prediction was not far enough in the future. People are starting to ask me why I haven’t moved my offices to higher ground. I think its time I resurrect my dead-certain Venus world caused by exploding methane clathrates of doom.”
Gav- “Good. With all the first class international travel and sixteen dollar muffins, the budget is a few mill short. A couple of apocalyptic scenarios should scare up the needed funds. Cheers.”
As BEST ramped up, Muller posed with the opinion that skeptics were right, the scientists were incompetent or dishonest — UHI or data shenanigans really could explain away the warming, and his team of outsiders would set things right. It turns out that his assumptions all were mistaken — the skeptics were wrong, hundreds of scientists had been doing a fine job all along, and neither UHI or data shenanigans were anywhere to be seen in the temperature records. It really is warming, just as NOAA, NASA and HadCRU (and UAH and RSS, and the Arctic sea ice, glaciers and so forth) had said all along. And more than that, as he’s still learning, it’s tought for outsiders to jump into a highly competitive discipline where they have no competence, and do top quality new work.
Perhaps it’s surprising, and honorable, that Muller has presented a finding that was opposite to his starting assumptions. But it’s not surprising that neither skeptics nor other scientists are much impressed with the his journey.
John given BEST says the world is warming and that broadly the figures were right , why the Realclimate hit piece when you think they would be happy. Simply Muller and BEST did not come out in full and blind support of AGW . They showed faith but not ‘correct faith ‘ which for the Team means full support for their views and all that means.
Its an oddity of religion that ‘heretics’ are always given a harder time than unbelievers for their seen to be a bigger threat to the ‘purity’ and therefore the validity of the faith .
Its to be seen if Muller gets the message and shows us he is after all a ‘true believer’ or if he will stick to his guns and risk the ‘Teams’ displeasure further. And that has little to do with any peer review process has we are now firmly in the land of PR and spinning.
KnR writes,
“why the Realclimate hit piece when you think they would be happy.”
If you think that then you don’t get Realclimate. They and others (including Tamino) are criticizing aspects of the BEST AMO paper because it’s not good science; the analysis is weak. Probably the peer review process will flag the same problems, and they’ll get corrected to make a stronger paper by the time it eventually gets published.
Realclimate notes also the irony of Muller admitting that he’s surprised by his own results. If he had done his homework, he would not be.
From the Washington Post article, http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/the-scientific-finding-that-settles-the-climate-change-debate/2011/03/01/gIQAd6QfDM_story.html?wprss=rss_opinions,
“It is true that Muller made no attempt to ascertain “how much of the warming is due to humans.” Still, the Berkeley group’s work should help lead all but the dimmest policymakers to the overwhelmingly probable answer.”
In other words, they have no factual data link to Anthropogenic Carbon Dioxide having an effect on global warming/climate change/climate chaos or any new straw-dog they introduce to compensate for their lack of objectivity.
Scandal? What scandal? “Muller’s figures also conform with the estimates of those British and American researchers whose catty e-mails were the basis for the alleged “Climategate” scandal, which was never a scandal in the first place.”
A new scientific method of proving a theory, not by fact, but by the overwhelmingly probable. Sounds somewhat like consensus.
I am still waiting for the factual data link connecting Anthropogenic and/or Natural Carbon Dioxide to global warming – the original theory – or to any of the straw-dogs, which the Almor Goretry acolytes present in their efforts to prove something, whatever that something may be.
I think one of the reasons RealClimate is upset at BEST is that BEST shows the early 19th century was cooler than tree rings show. When the Little Ice Age rears its head in this fashion, it throws off the nice, neat narrative RealClimate and the IPCC folks have been selling because natural climate variation is much greater than they previously believed. Also, it shows a second Divergence Problem in the early 19th century. It is hard to support the claim the divergence in the late 20th century is due to anthropogenic effects when we have evidence of a divergence in the early 19th century.
BEST may not have done great work in regards to UHI effects and station siting issues, but the surface temp series in the early 19th century throws a wrench into the works. We will have to see if that portion of their work holds up under scrutiny.