Alternate title: Something wonky this way comes
I try to get away to work on my paper and the climate world explodes, pulling me back in. Strange things are happening related to the BEST data and co-authors Richard Muller and Judith Curry. Implosion might be a good word.
Popcorn futures are soaring. BEST Co-author Judith Curry drops a bombshell:
Her comments, in an exclusive interview with The Mail on Sunday, seem certain to ignite a furious academic row. She said this affair had to be compared to the notorious ‘Climategate’ scandal two years ago.
Here’s the short timeline.
1. The GWPF plots a flat 10 year graph using BEST data:
2. The Mail on Sunday runs a scathing article comparing BEST’s data plotted by GWPF and the data presented in papers. They print this comparison graph:
Note: timescales don’t match on graphs above, 200 years/10 years. A bit naughty on the part of the Sunday Mail to put them together as many readers won’t notice.
3. Dr. Judith Curry, BEST co-author, turns on Muller, in the Mail on Sunday article citing “hide the decline”:
In Prof Curry’s view, two of the papers were not ready to be published, in part because they did not properly address the arguments of climate sceptics.
As for the graph disseminated to the media, she said: ‘This is “hide the decline” stuff. Our data show the pause, just as the other sets of data do. Muller is hiding the decline.
‘To say this is the end of scepticism is misleading, as is the statement that warming hasn’t paused. It is also misleading to say, as he has, that the issue of heat islands has been settled.’
Prof Muller said she was ‘out of the loop’. He added: ‘I wasn’t even sent the press release before it was issued.’
…
But although Prof Curry is the second named author of all four papers, Prof Muller failed to consult her before deciding to put them on the internet earlier this month, when the peer review process had barely started, and to issue a detailed press release at the same time.
He also briefed selected journalists individually. ‘It is not how I would have played it,’ Prof Curry said. ‘I was informed only when I got a group email. I think they have made errors and I distance myself from what they did.
‘It would have been smart to consult me.’ She said it was unfortunate that although the Journal of Geophysical Research had allowed Prof Muller to issue the papers, the reviewers were, under the journal’s policy, forbidden from public comment.
4. Ross McKittrick unloads:
Prof McKittrick added: ‘The fact is that many of the people who are in a position to provide informed criticism of this work are currently bound by confidentiality agreements.
‘For the Berkeley team to have chosen this particular moment to launch a major international publicity blitz is a highly unethical sabotage of the peer review process.’
5. According to BEST’s own data, Los Angeles is cooling, fast:
Steve McIntyre emailed me the graph above tonight as part of a larger discussion.
But compare it to the GISS station record, and you get a whole different story:
Overlay: Combined to fit scale and time:
Here’s the GWPF article:
Best Confirms Global Temperature Standstill
Contrary to claims being made by the leader of the Best global temperature initiative their data confirms, and places on a firmer statistical basis, the global temperature standstill of the past ten years as seen by other groups.
Many people have now had some time to read the papers issued in preprint form from the Best project. My strong impression is that they are mostly poorly written, badly argued and at this stage unfit for submission to a major journal. Whilst I have made some comments about Best’s PR and data release strategy, I want to now look at some aspects of the data.
When asked by the BBC’s Today programme Professor Richard Muller, leader of the initiative, said that the global temperature standstill of the past decade was not present in their data.
“In our data, which is only on the land we see no evidence of it having slowed down. Now the evidence which shows that it has been stopped is a combination of land and ocean data. The oceans do not heat as much as the land because it absorbs more of the heat and when the data are combined with the land data then the other groups have shown that when it does seem to be leveling off. We have not seen that in the land data.”
My first though would be that it would be remarkable if it was. The global temperature standstill of the past decade is obvious in HadCrut3 data which is a combination of land and sea surface data. Best is only land data from nearly 40,000 weather stations. Professor Muller says they “really get a good coverage of the globe.” The land is expected to have a fast response to the warming of the lower atmosphere caused by greenhouse gas forcing, unlike the oceans with their high thermal capacity and their decadal timescales for heating and cooling, though not forgetting the ENSO and la Nina.
Fig 1 shows the past ten years plotted from the monthly data from Best’s archives. Click on the image to enlarge.
It is a statistically perfect straight line of zero gradient. Indeed, most of the largest variations in it can be attributed to ENSO and la Nina effects. It is impossible to reconcile this with Professor Muller’s statement. Could it really be the case that Professor Muller has not looked at the data in an appropriate way to see the last ten years clearly?
Indeed Best seems to have worked hard to obscure it. They present data covering more almost 200 years is presented with a short x-axis and a stretched y-axis to accentuate the increase. The data is then smoothed using a ten year average which is ideally suited to removing the past five years of the past decade and mix the earlier standstill years with years when there was an increase. This is an ideal formula for suppressing the past decade’s data.
When examined more objectively Best data confirms the global temperature standstill of the past decade. That the standstill should be present in land only data is remarkable. There have been standstills in land temperature before, but the significance of the past decade is that it is in the era of mankind’s postulated influence on climate through greenhouse gas forcing. Predictions made many times in the past few years suggest that warming should be the strongest and fastest in the land data.
Only a few years ago many scientists and commentators would not acknowledge the global temperature standstill of the past decade. Now that it has become unarguable there has emerged more explanations for it than can possibly be the case.
To explain the combined sea-land temperature hiatus some have suggested that the oceans are sucking up the heat, as professor Muller outlines in his radio interview. This explanation is strained in my view if the land temperature stays constant. Could we really have the very special situation whereby the oceans sequester just enough heat at just the right time to keep the land temperature flat? Aerosols, postulated by some to be coming from China, don’t provide an explanation for the land temperature hiatus either. In fact, the constant land temperature puts a strain on all of the explanations offered for why the land-sea combination hasn’t warmed in the past decade or so.
We make a big deal of the temperature going up. In my view we should make a bigger scientific deal about temperature flatlining for a decade or more in the face of rising CO2 levels. If further scrutiny of the Best dataset confirms this finding we will have new questions about the nature and balance of oceanic and land warming.
The fact that Best confirms the global temperature hiatus and shows that it is apparent in land only data is significant, and in my view its major scientific finding, so far. It is puzzling that they missed it.
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UPDATE: 10/30/2011 7AM PST Judith Curry says the “climategate” comparison was indirectly attributed to her, she gives her take on the story: http://judithcurry.com/2011/10/30/mail-on-best/
She does reiterate that: ‘I agree that the way the data is presented in the graph “hides the decline.”‘ and adds, “I thought the project was a great idea, and I still do, but it currently has a tarnish on it. Lets see what we can do about this.”
Jeff Id has written a critique of the data processing algorithms:
He writes in WUWT comments: “To be clear, I believe I have identified a specific mathematical error which will require a re-write of the CI portion of the methods paper.”
===============================================================
UPDATE2: 10/30/2011 10:20 AM PST Paul Clark of Woodfortrees completes his analysis of BEST data here. Outlier seems an appropriate description. He writes:
BEST and other land-only temperature data
I’ve now added the preliminary analysis data from the Berkeley Earth project – here is a smoothed plot of the whole dataset with overall and last 30-year trend:
BEST is a land-only dataset, so for fair comparison I’ve also added a whole bunch of other land-only data from GISS, CRU, RSS and UAH. To compare these properly I did the same alignment to a common baseline as I did with the global baselines, fetching the means within the 1981-2011 UAH baseline:
| Source | Mean |
|---|---|
| BEST | 0.60 |
| GISTEMP DTS | 0.44 |
| CRUTEM3 | 0.40 |
| RSS-land | 0.14 |
| UAH-land | 0.00 |
Using these gives us the following comparison plot, rebased to UAH with 30 year trends:
The trends from the data dump are as follows:
| Source | Trend °C/century |
|---|---|
| BEST | 2.79 |
| GISTEMP DTS | 2.06 |
| CRUTEM3 | 2.25 |
| RSS-land | 2.25 |
| UAH-land | 2.01 |
BEST still looks like an outlier here, even compared to other land-only datasets that show bigger trends than the land-ocean ones, which cluster around 1.5°C per century on a 30 year trend.
Of course they missed it. They cannot possibly afford to notice and display it.
error estimates on those plots if you please !!
Yes, yes, I know they would dwarf the “average” — that IS the point.
Dr Muller.
The sound you hear ring in your ear is the S**t hitting the fan.
Was it worth it?
This has never been about data, or science. This is all been about politics and control. AGW is Lysenkoism.
Look it up.
Muller is a Loose Cannon on Deck. There, I have said it for the umpteenth time. I am extremely pleased to read that Dr. Curry used the “hide the decline” line. Her name is on the paper with Muller. But she was not consulted and is faulting Muller for his pre-peer-review antics.
Anthony, do you honestly believe this is about the science. This has the reek of amateurish politics all over it. They do a media blitz with favorable outlets before peer review along with the purposeful intent of hamstringing the reviewers from comment.
By the time the fraud/incompetence is exposed, the damage is supposed to already be done with a false truth established in the minds of the general public. We skeptics are supposed to be behind the curve and put on the defensive. This is amateurish in that it is old school. Muller needs to crawl out from under his rock every now and then and take a look at the real world of information technology. They only damage he will succeed in doing is to his own reputation and tenure will be the only thing that keeps him his job.
I look at that temperature graph for Los Angeles and wonder how much of the portrayed 1ºC rise is do to UHI? I suspect more than 1ºC is. Puts a whole new perspective on climate-gate’s hide the decline, doesn’t it? Maybe the One Tree was right. Maybe we just have a hard time accepting what it tells us about the last 50 years?
Holly Molly.
BEST or WORST?
Or, he (they) knew they had results they didn’t like, and figured they get ahead of the game and unleash the propaganda early, hoping the truth would be obscured by the holiday season. Hey, when you’ve only got one shot, it’s best to get it off first. But they missed…..
Aw heck. The trolls were just starting to settle down, then a loose connection to the router, a bit of quiet, snow ten hours earlier than predicted here in Southern New England, and then THIS?
Ah Anthony what an exciting life you lead.
Not only a ringside seat at what promises to be a serious bout of Academic fisticuffs but one in which you have, to mix my metaphors, a dog in the fight.
Forget the work, sit back and enjoy.
Kindest Regards
Couldn’t happen to a nicer, more deserving guy.
/sarc
It’s been all about Durbin. If they could squeek the idea that the skeptics were wrong about station data until Durbin they won. After that, who would care if the graphs were proven to be junk or the articles were sunk under the weight of misinformation.
Poor Judy. Sleep with dogs, wake up with …
Now the BEST is worsening…..
Erm, on the subject of misleading graphs… that graph from the Mail could be worse I guess. They put the 10 year flat line against the whole century’s temperature. The first impression, and the one they intend, is hockey stick versus flat temps. No call for that kind of misrepresentation.
Re Los Angeles cooling rapidly: it’s not just Los Angeles, but the entire U.S. West Coast, as shown in the NCDC data (link below). One can select State/Region as California, then Climate Division as 1, then 4, and then 6 (north coast, central coast, and south coast) and look at the rapid drop in the temperatures for the past 7 to 8 years. The same is true for selecting State/Region = Oregon and Climate Division = 1. Same is true for Washington State and Climate Division = 1. The average of all the West Coast regions is approximately a decline 10-11 deg C per century.
Seems that the colder Pacific Ocean and sea level decline is also affecting the land-based temperatures. Meanwhile, CO2 continues to rise and rise and rise.
http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/temp-and-precip/time-series/index.php?parameter=tmp&month=9&year=2011&filter=12&state=4&div=1
Just when things were quieting down and you thought it was safe to turn on the fan …
My hypothesis:
1. The surface temperature has arisen due mainly to urbanization.
2. Urbanization is approaching saturation these years, in many cities globally.
An example is Tokyo: its surface temp rose by ca. 3 degC from 1880-2000, but remains nearly flat thereafter.
Curtis J. says:
October 29, 2011 at 9:13 pm
Erm, on the subject of misleading graphs… that graph from the Mail could be worse I guess. They put the 10 year flat line against the whole century’s temperature. The first impression, and the one they intend, is hockey stick versus flat temps. No call for that kind of misrepresentation.
===============================================================
Curtis, these are news people…… they obviously don’t know any better or they wouldn’t have fell for the first graph….. as I recollect it ended in 2006 or some crap. This is why I know Muller doesn’t know his head from his …… And this is why we saw some of the alarmist pan his work. They couldn’t accept it. It was even more flawed and intentionally misleading than what they usually do. It was too obvious.
BTW, about 40 hrs ago……. http://suyts.wordpress.com/2011/10/28/best-proves-that-the-earth-is-warming/ I’m not saying……. I’m just sayin….. 🙂
This makes no sense to me. Muller’s no dummy and he’s rightly, and in my view bravely, made a public stink about Mann’s decline hiding antics. That he would leave himself open to a similar charge (from one of his own co-authors yet) boggles the mind.
I will now summarize the follow up stories by the liberal media including the UK Guardian, Washington Post, NY Times, etc. concerning this little bit of criticism of the veracity of the BEST study and the methods of the scientists involved.
_____________.
There you have it.
Judy, Judy, Judy! Come to the dark side, we have cookies 🙂
Anthony get back to work and don’t read this!
Judith has nothing to be embarrassed about in a “lie down with dogs, wake up with fleas” way. She made a good-faith cooperative effort of the kind that she stands for, and she has the gutsy honesty to call the results as she sees them. It’s Muller who has some splainin to do.
And yes, it does boggle the mind. I can’t help thinking that fuddlesome forces behind the scenes are turning the science into a sitcom.
This is a side show to the actual main event, we have unusual deep early season snow in NYC and where’s Al Gore ?
I have no idea where he is but if he’s in the Big Apple this evening I’d say it’s game, set and match.
Muller is one scientist whose papers I won’t read anymore. I can’t say the same for Dr. Curry whose integrity is arching over the team of jackals that dominate this sport. I don’t envy her for the calamity now headed her way but she now has a special and unique place in climatology called the high ground.
Ryan Maue says:
October 29, 2011 at 9:39 pm
I will now summarize the follow up stories by the liberal media including the UK Guardian, Washington Post, NY Times, etc. concerning this little bit of criticism of the veracity of the BEST study and the methods of the scientists involved.
_____________.
There you have it.
========================================================
IDK, Ryan, it’s going to be hard for some of them. I don’t think Muller let them in on this little game he was playing. And, while I doubt that child writer for HuffPo (that kept deleting my profile) will back track, others may be a bit miffed. We’ll see.
I posted earlier that Dr.Curry would be wise to disassociate herself from Muller as her reputation would get spoiled if she stood with these liars. I’m glad she has come out and denounced Muller’s chicanery. It’s time that Muller gets his comeuppance and I hope that the papers get rejected in peer review.
A simple equation based on the physical phenomena involved, with inputs of only sunspot number and ppmv CO2, calculates the average global temperatures (agt) since 1895 with 88.4% accuracy (87.9% if CO2 is assumed to have no influence). The equation, links to the source data, an eye-opening graph of the results and how they are derived are in the pdfs at http://climaterealists.com/index.php?tid=145&linkbox=true (see especially the pdfs made public on 4/10/10, 3/10/11 and 9/24/11).
As shown in the 9/24/11 pdf, the equation accurately predicted the temperature trends for the last 20 years.
The future average global temperature trend that this equation calculates is down. The huge effective thermal capacitance of the oceans (about 30 times everything else) will cause the decline to be only about 0.13°C per decade. The decline may be as much as 0.22°C per decade if the sun goes really quiet.
This trend is corroborated by the growing separation between the rising CO2 and not-rising agt. From 2001 through September, 2011 the atmospheric CO2 increased by 23.7% of the total increase from 1800 to 2001 while the average global temperature has not increased. The 23.7% CO2 increase is the significant measurement, not the comparatively brief time period.
Without human caused global warming there can be no human caused climate change.
Wow! LA has cooled 3C since the mid-80’s. I believe it; our daughter was born in 1984 and it was the hottest year anyone could remember (the BEST LA data confirms it). Some anecdotal memories:
It was so hot in late September 1984 my wife and I drove one night from Tustin to Laguna Beach to get get relief from the hot weather. Didn’t help, it was 102F (39C) on the beach at midnight. She broke down in tears because it was as hot at the beach as it was at home. I remember people flocking to grocery stores and congregating in the frozen foods aisles to get relief from the heat outside.
Our daughter was born on Sept 23 ’84 and the climate here has been on a downhill slide since then. We have had year after year of progressively more “years without a summer”. Normally the LA area has an overcast and cool May and June locally called “June Gloom” where for weeks the sun doesn’t shine and temperatures are in the low ’60s (17C). Normally July brings an end to the cool marine overcast and brings sunny, hot days that last through October. The kind of weather Southern California is famous for.
Instead, “June Gloom” increasingly stretches into July, August and even September now. Temperatures are well below the climatic norms, -3C fits with my memories of summers gone by.
If the HADCRUT3 data is to believed, it is a world-wide phenomena and not just here in SoCal. The climate has cooled this century. It certainly has cooled a lot here in California since my now 27 year-old daughter was born.
“to have chosen this particular moment to launch a major international publicity blitz is a highly unethical sabotage of the peer review process.’
With the best informed critics gagged, “unethical”barely describes it.
Who would buy a used car from such people, let alone a used climate theory?
Judith Curry is a hero.
Must have been a large window in Mullers office for all that credibility to fly out at once, ……..
Malice or incompetence, neither is acceptable.
By the way, did anyone see Muller on Bill Shatner’s show, Weird or What?
Well, this seems to me to be an attempt on the part of Muller to “get ahead of the story”. Had the data been released without comment and coaching, the story would eventually have been “no global warming for the past decade”. To minimize that happening, you play a very well-known propaganda game.
What you do is widely disseminate information very early that says the study basically “confirms” global warming and you do that to very powerful media outlets. So everyone hears on the news at the top of the hour on the local traffic report station during their drive in to work that the BEST study “confirms” global warming. Now this comes out. It, of course, will get zero media attention or it might be buried on page 63 of a paper. It will not be broadcast on the top of the hour news broadcast during commute hour on the traffic report station. So if you ask someone six months from now what the BEST study showed, if they remember, they will say it “confirmed” global warming when in fact it did the opposite.
It looks to me like Muller knew what was in those data and consulted with someone on how to game the media to minimize the impact of it. I wonder who he consulted with as this is a fairly slick game that most academics wouldn’t know how to play. He was coached on exactly how to do this, in my opinion, and coached by someone with a lot of media savvy and connections with all the “right” people. I smell a rat.
The fact that the second lead author claims the lead author is – well – fabricating the results – tends to destroy the consensus.
Plus 0ne for Judith.
Nope. I doubt there will be any discernible sound at all in the major US media. They will be dead silent on this discovery because it is counter to their agenda.
I believe I already pointed to the site of Muller & Associates , which will make money if AGW is true and lose it if it is false, and then there is this post showing that Muller is not now and never has been a “skeptic” (titled “WaPo’s “skeptic” actually has backed global warming for 30 years”). Then there is this from the site you pointed to “The BEST project, which has been lavishly funded”.
Follow the benjamins.
I suspect Muller didn’t miss the lack of trend over the last 10 years.
I also suspect he is playing a clever game with the press. And perhaps even testing the skeptics. Not sure what games are being played, but I think it is interesting that the RC crowd is moving quickly away from him.
I think we need to sit back and wait a while longer before this plays out.
Dr. Curry has guts and integrity. I extend a grateful congratulations for her courage. She must have been embarrassed by this skullduggery to say the least.
“The oceans do not heat as much as the land because it absorbs more of the heat
Is he saying that the oceans are cooler because they “absorb” more heat (and therefore remove it)?
We are saved! We have solved global warming! Don’t mind us as we tramp through your house at all hours focusing all kinds of annoying scientifical(ish) instruments on your diughter to see exactly how she does it. Or may she doesn’t, maybe it’s you.
Heck, now we can make all the CO2 we want! Weee!
Ventner said:
You misspelled pal review.
dp says:
October 29, 2011 at 9:51 pm
Muller is one scientist whose papers I won’t read anymore. I can’t say the same for Dr. Curry whose integrity is arching over the team of jackals that dominate this sport. I don’t envy her for the calamity now headed her way but she now has a special and unique place in climatology called the high ground.
Imo, Dr. Curry is saving her self! In a good way. I was trying to tell her here way back when she first came on WUWT that she had a choice and to make this kind of choice, if she was capable of perceiving it, and for her own good, but have no idea how it actually happened. But you could see it happening! Starting her own blog and persisting was big. I do think her interaction here with Willis was very important and with Steve McIntyre going further back. High quality, straight shooters.
Now this! She was obviously already out of the fold, but Muller thought he could sucker her. Wrong!
There is nothing inappropriate about the graphs printed by the Mail
They were illustrating what BEST hid. BEST printed the 100 yr timeline graph in their paper. The Mail replicated that graph. With the second graph, the Mail is showing the inconvenient truth that is hidden by BEST’s choosing to only display the data at that scale. The Mail demonstrates that by showing the detail of the last ten years. This is no different than showing a blow-up of the post 1960 period on Mann’s graphs, to demonstrate how “Mike’s Nature Trick” worked to hide the decline by tucking a truncation behind small scale spaghetti.
Oh No, it’s worse than I thought…for Prof. Muller that is!
Andy Revkin ran a thread cheering on the BEST papers on his NYTimes Dot Earth blog. I posted notice of the Mail interview with Judith Curry and challenged him to contact her and start a separate thread based on her comments. It has not cleared moderation yet but it is very early in the morning where he lives. IIRC, he lives in a semi-rural area outside of NYC and is probably experiencing some mid-fall global warming.
Rearcher bias is alive and well.
You’ve got to love the introductory paragraph from Muller & Associates home page:
“Muller & Associates bridges knowledge gaps to demystify complex technical issues so that clients can make educated decisions. We are able to quickly cut through the “sales talk” and help our clients select the best option for their specific needs.”
( http://www.mullerandassociates.com/ )
Enough said!!!!!!!!!!!
I suggested the lag time effect of solar cycles on planetary climate what seems a lifetime ago, but I was wondering, how is that study going?
The recent early snow storms in the North East seem to be evidence of it.
Sanity at last.
Now I wonder if the world will ever hear it.
The framers of our Constitution missed an item. We have separation of Church and State, they needed to add Separation of Science and State.
Anthony you’re in good company… so to speak. [;)]
Anyone researching Mullers history will realise he suffers from hubris. This is what’s getting him into trouble.
His papers are now being attacked from within (Curry) and both sides of without (The Team and sceptics like WUWT).
I suspect The Team warned him about making data available to deniers, but Mullers hubris got the better of him. He thinks sceptics are too disorganized, too dumb to make much of the data.
This Muller saga will rival Climategate in it’s impact on the AGW debate.
Some premature BEST drooling from some apparently confused AGW parrot at the prestigious and scientific sounding “Ecological Society” site, complete with a mention of Anthony:
“Muller Confirms Climate Change
Berkeley Physicist Richard Muller and his BEST team (Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature Study) have finished their analysis of global temperature studies and have come to a startling conclusion: the Earth is warming substantially, it is largely man-made warming, and the temperature factors cited by the climate skeptics, including Anthony Watts, have at best only a marginal effect on global warming. And this is coming from a KOCH BROS. FUNDED STUDY on climate change, which was undertaken for the purpose of REFUTING the climate change thesis. Furthermore, Muller and his team found that some of the temperature data reported thus far has UNDER-reported the amount of warming that has already taken place.”
http://ecologicalsociology.blogspot.com/
Dang it! Where’s Dennis DeYoung when you need him most?
That remains to be seen. I have a feeling this will get absolutely zero notice in the US print and broadcast media. MAYBE Fox will cover it, but that would be about it.
It’s the Sun Stupid!
So Muller runs a sustainability business; fancy that.
The head of the CSIRO, the chief climate scientific body in Australia [you can start laughing now], runs a carbon capture business:
http://blogs.news.com.au/heraldsun/andrewbolt/index.php/heraldsun/comments/the_head_of_the_csiro_should_not_profit_from_green_schemes/
In other words, this information will be all over the place in the “pull” media, that is stuff like blogs where you have to explicitly go to see the information. It will get none in the “push” media, that is information that is shoved into your car and living room over the air waves that you don’t have to specifically pull to see.
Disclaimer; I speak only for myself; I am not an official spokesperson for anybody else. Here’s some background about some of the Canadian data, based on my recollections as a former employee of Environment Canada. It’s not immediately obvious from daily, let alone monthly, averages… Canadian daily max+min data was archived to the nearest whole degree Fahrenheit until the metric conversion, at which time it started being archived to the nearest 10th Celsius. I believe the conversion was around January 1st 1977. Take a look at the Climate Data Online webpage for Toronto Pearson Int’l Airport for December 1976…
http://www.climate.weatheroffice.gc.ca/climateData/dailydata_e.html?timeframe=2&StationID=5097&Month=12&Year=1976
Dec 1 Max = -2.2C => 28F
Dec 2 Max = -4.4C => 24F
Dec 3 Max = -7.2C => 19F
etc, etc.
January 1977 is at URL
http://www.climate.weatheroffice.gc.ca/climateData/dailydata_e.html?timeframe=2&StationID=5097&Month=1&Year=1977 and shows daily max+min temperatures that are not constrained to whole degrees Fahrenheit.
Canada was probably not the only country doing this. Another item of interest is that a few sites in Canada were US military bases at times. A couple of examples are Stephenville, NL and Argentia, NL, going back to WWII when Newfounland was still a British colony (it joined Canada in 1949). The bases were basically American territory, staffed by Americans, etc. This includes doing weather observations to American standards. There may have been DEW line stations during the Cold War with US observers.
Another tidbit is that there was a short, 2-part, strike of AirRadio operators in Canada in Late October and early November 1979. They did weather observations at some sites, and relayed weather observations from other sites. If you notice missing Canadian data for October/November of 1979, that’s probably why.
Doug in Seattle says:
October 29, 2011 at 10:24 pm
“I also suspect he [Muller] is playing a clever game with the press. And perhaps even testing the skeptics. Not sure what games are being played, but I think it is interesting that the RC crowd is moving quickly away from him.
I think we need to sit back and wait a while longer before this plays out.”
Ah yes. The games people play. But it looks like Muller has fumbled this so badly that maybe there’s another game. Maybe the Koch Brothers knew exactly what they were buying with Muller. Does seem to be playing out rather well for skeptics, and them. The masses may not hear anything beyond this initial media blitz but the people who matter will.
Even better, this is now a very public and high profile litmus test of the pal or peer review system, and if they are stupid enough to go pal review on this me and the Koch brothers will be cheering.
And if they do genuinely rigorous peer review, better still.
@crosspatch 11:17pm
Climategate got nary a coverage here in Australia.
Our ABC didn’t even mention the word for a full 2 weeks. No need for MSM coverage for an “impact” on the debate.
But as you say, that remains to be seen.
cohenite says:
October 29, 2011 at 11:21 pm
So Muller runs a sustainability business; fancy that.
The head of the CSIRO, the chief climate scientific body in Australia [you can start laughing now], runs a carbon capture business:
http://blogs.news.com.au/heraldsun/andrewbolt/index.php/heraldsun/comments/the_head_of_the_csiro_should_not_profit_from_green_schemes/
What’s wrong with that – it’s in the time-honoured tradition of putting your mouth where your money is !
Anthony, the two graphs are clearly labelled and the related text is making the point for the article that BEST using a longer timescale is hiding the “inconvenient truth” about there being no upward trend for the last ten years. This is actually a clear elucidation of the point the author of the article is trying to make. There was no deception involved on the part of the paper or the author of the article.
Why would anyone be surprised by any of this?
It was obvious from their clever ‘BEST’ acronym that this was a propaganda project from the start. And everything that has happened supports that.
The real mystery is why Muller walked into this and then made it worse with his celebrity tour. Maybe ‘Baa Humbug’ got it right at October 29, 2011 at 11:13 pm:
“Anyone researching Mullers history will realise he suffers from hubris. This is what’s getting him into trouble.”
I think the answer to that is based on yet another question: “How soon was Prof. Muller planning to retire from UC and go to work full time for Muller & Associates?”. So imagine what this would have done for him. Imagine he publishes this work, it “confirms” the AGW hypothesis, the big media push is made just prior to a UN climate conference. Now he goes to work full time for Muller & Associates which can be billed as having on staff a “leading” climate researcher who “confirmed” that the AGW hypothesis was valid. He would be laying the groundwork for a very profitable second career.
Once again, there is a lot of gold in the “global warming” industry and he was trying to pan some of it for himself, is what it looks like to me. But I still believe he had some world class coaching on this.
The other interesting thing about doing a 200 year approach is that it captures the recovery from the LIA and so overall makes the impression to the layman of all this warming going on. Most of it before CO2 was a major factor anyway. Also, since the COOLING going into the LIA is not in any records because the thermometer had not yet been invented, you can’t put that warming pre-1930’s in the proper context with the cooling that had gone on before.
It is like taking water out of the fridge and monitoring the temperature as it warms up and extrapolating a continued rise and saying that in a couple of days time the water will boil spontaneously. To the layman, the graph gives the notion that the temperatures in the 1800’s were “normal” when in fact, that was actually a very cold period for the Holocene. The whole thing is misleading.
A few weeks before Durban COP17 and we have October snow on the ground in New York and a massive academic row about hoodwinking the public, corruption of the peer review process, and dodgy scientists hiding declines again.
It doesn’t get any better. Judith Curry is stellar ….. just wish more of the big guns would come out and say “what a load of cobblers”.
God bless Judith Curry!
Steve McIntyre points out the difference between GISS and BEST. GISS does not differ in comparison to just BEST in graphs but also with HadCRUT, RSS, and UAH. These 2 videos make that easy to see:
Part 1
Part 2 (even clearer and easier to understand that Part 1)
The largest discontinuity (downward) in the LA chart and indeed in the charts for the whole West Coast USA is pretty close to 2000. Clearly that is a region that responds very quickly to any changes in air flow across the Pacific.
I have been saying in public since early 2008 that I first noticed the jetstreams becoming more meridional around 2000.
The key changes in surface pressure distribution appear to have occurred as the level of solar activity declined after the double peak of cycle 23. Those changes have continued and indeed intensified as we went into weak cycle 24.
One way or another the level of solar activity clearly induces changes in the surface pressure distribution from above. That appears to affect global cloudiness, albedo and the amount of solar energy getting into the oceans.
http://climaterealists.com/index.php?id=6645
“How The Sun Could Control Earth’s Temperature”.
Judith Curry is, in my opinion, a global hero. She is being honest to the science and not allowing herself to be swayed by the political money machine. We have an obligation to future generations not to spend their money unwisely (since we are borrowing the money for ‘green’ stuff, we are borrowing it from people who haven’t even been born yet).
I can’t find adequate words to describe what she is doing other than just “thank you”. And I will tell you what, if she came out either way, if she had said “yup, it’s warming right along with CO2” then I would have had to re-think my position on the issue. My position is (I hope) based on facts and not political hype. I hope it is based on data and not “belief”. I believe Dr. Curry’s conclusions are based on what the data say. My respect for her as a scientist is great.
She may well be responsible for saving the people of this planet untold billions of dollars in wasted resources at some point.
What does CNN’s “Road to Durban” glurge have to say about any of this? (I don’t have TV in Iraq, and surfing CNN on a slow connection is a pain in the Patoot) I’ll bet nada, zip, zero, business as usual, after all, they ARE the most trusted source of whatever it is they are trying to sell.
running a line from the start point (red) of the graph to the end point of the graph (red) clearly shows an incline, so yes i agree that
“There is nothing inappropriate about the graphs printed by the Mail”
I posted this to the bottom of the Washington Post piece proclaiming Best wonderful paper.
Over the top?
Mr. Robinson,
These words ” It is the know-nothing politicians — not scientists — who are committing an unforgivable fraud. ” have came back to haunt you. Please refer to the link below for an interview with Judith Curry. She was an Author for the paper you sited. After doing so please publish an article of the same size and scope as this one giving us all an apology. And your closing line is almost right. They are all frauds but a few who are willing to live by a moral code.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2055191/Scientists-said-climate-change-sceptics-proved-wrong-accused-hiding-truth-colleague.html
Thanks in advance for your impending correction.
Jeff
I said it months ago on this site that BEST had found temps had flatlined and did not want to show it. That was the “Delay”
I’m wondering what when on prior to the publication of the Daily Mail article. It seem unlikely that Dr Curry went public with this story without first having expressed her concerns to Muller and others on the BEST team. It’s also probable that Dr Curry understands the enormous personal risks involved in her departure from the “settled science” of the AGW script. Methinks there is more to this story and I shall be checking WUWT regularly.
This earthquake differs from the one that followed Climategate in one important respect. That “hide [the] decline” was supported, at least in part, by a successful attempt to hide the raw data. In contrast, the BEST data are out of the bag and this should ensure the failure of the shenanigans that enabled the warmist dogma to survive Climategate despite some injuries.
This might very well be GAME OVER.
“Prof Muller said she was ‘out of the loop’. He added: ‘I wasn’t even sent the press release before it was issued.’”
So who the heck is writing these press releases ?
It looks like Dr. Muller has completely blown the last BEST hope for Durban. Maybe we should send a thank you card and a nice box of chocolates 😉
A guess on why GISS diverges so much at around 1990:
This seems to correspond to the “great dying” of stations in the network. I am not expert in the GISS method for adjustments but I believe that adjustments and infilling of missing data points happens by comparison of nearby stations. If the cooler stations, those in rural and high altitude locations, are removed wholesale, that leaves fewer stations to use for these adjustments and the ones that do remain also tend to be in more urban areas. I am wondering if the removal of those stations had a great impact on the temperature calculations and adjustments with GISS.
¡¡¡Wow!!!
To think I once thought Dr Judith Curry was a “Goody Goody two shoes” !
The mistake of the century.
She looks so tranquil, and she never shouts, or makes a fuss, but, May the gods bless her, she does not settle for anything but what she sees as the truth.
¡¡¡Hip Hip Hurra for Dr Curry, an example to us all !!!
From the comments to the Mail article (a lot of which are less than objective) it seems that no one was fooled by the different time scales to the graphs.
I had to laugh at the line “…uncritically by….the BBC, Independent, Guardian, Economist…” – the four trustees and keepers of the global warming flame here in the UK.
Month of June when the sun is at its zenith and insolation is highest, and both the TSI, the radiative heat transfer and the back radiation (CO2) is at its highest is flat as a pancake:
http://www.vukcevic.talktalk.net/CETjun.htm
In contrast in December when both the insolation, the radiative heat transfer and back radiation (CO2) are at their lowest
http://www.vukcevic.talktalk.net/CET-Dec.htm
there is the highest temperature increase gradient 0.35 C/ century, 50% higher than average of 0.25 C/century.
Case for the TSI and CO2 is very suspect.
The cause of climate change (I have strong reasons to think) has to do with the ocean currents moving heat from tropics polewards and vice versa.
http://www.vukcevic.talktalk.net/CDr.htm
As for Dr. Judith Curry, perhaps this as an award for the climate scientist of the year may be appropriate.
It appears to me that Prof Muller has badly misread the situation and once this has panned out, he will have severely have prejudiced his reputation.
There are two factors that are conspiring very much against the cAGW movement and the key protagonists behind the cAGW movement are being rather slow to recognise their significance.
The first is: ‘it is the economy stupid’. The present economic crisis means that no developed nation can afford to press ahead with its plans for CO2 mitigation. Slowly governments are waking up to the economic costs of these plans and their effect on increasing costs for industry and yet worse pushing industries overseas (to India, the Far East and Latin America). Pressure on employment and unpopoular austerity measure means that governments cannot afford to go green. Statements coming out of the UK Treasury department for example show this trend towards realising the huge financial costs involved in going green and an appreciation that the economic cycle is such that the time is not right to go green. As fuel poverty bites (and fuel prices are dramatically escalating such that quarter if not a third of people are already within fuel poverty benchmarks), nore and more people will question why they are having to dig deep into their pockets to pay for all these green taxes.subsidies.
The second is: for whatever reason global temperatures in the inhabited areas of the Northern Hemisphere have not simply stalled but are beginning to decline. It appears that this decline may continue for many years to come and with it harsh winters will become ever more prevalent. It is difficult to sell a mantra of global warming (which may, if it is happening at all, be happening most at the poles, particularly the north pole) when day to day experience suggests the opposite. People will have long memories when they experience freezing winters and cannot afford to heat their homes. If this trend continues (as appears quite likely with a quietening sun and change to colder ocean phases) public opinion will tuen against the cAGW movement, and turn with a vengeance once it becomes clear how much money has been wasted in this chirade.
Given these factors, one would have thought that new comers to the climate change wars would be reluctant to take an unrealistic stand. It looks like Prof Muller has backed the wrong horse and I find this surprising.
I find not consulting a co-author to be surprising and unless one is absolutely 100% sure of the stance adopted, it is close to committing accademic suicide. Few people would wish to participate in a paper with such a person and if Prof Muller has got it wrong and if (Prof) Judith Curry has got it right (the BEST evaluation shows no warming this past decade), this is bound to do significant harm to Prof Muller’s reputation. I (like others) am pleased to see (Prof) Judith Curry take the stance that she has taken and hopefully this will elevate her reputation.
Like others, I presume that this press release has come about due to the close timing with Durban. It looks to be an own goal and this no doubt explains why some warmist sites have sought to distance/criticise the paper(s). All we need now is cooler than average Durban temperatures. Lets hope that South Africa is in for a cold and wet summer.
I remember, as I am sure we all do, the large amount of speculation as to what BEST was about when it was first announced.
Perhaps now we know.
If you watch a business program like CNBC and they interview an analyst, up front on the TV screen they announce where any possible conflicts of interest could lie, such as the analyst’s wife owning stock.
Wouldn’t that be nice in ‘climate science’. Take out the grant addicted ‘scientists’ and those who are conflicted by business interests and who do you have left?
Answer: Precisely no one.
Take out the distorted statistics, add back the inconvenient data, abandon the pal review process, use the logical deduction processes of the real sciences and what do you have left in ‘climate science’?
Answer: Not very much and certainly nothing to be worried about.
With an advance apology for a dreadful pun, clearly Dr. Curry is hot stuff! Considerable congratulations to her for intellectual honesty, and even better to see it appearing in a mass market paper like the Mail. People will notice.
I love the smell of internecine warfare in the morning. Right behind ya, Judy.
Note: timescales don’t match on graphs above, 200 years/10 years. A bit naughty on the part of the Sunday Mail to put them together as many readers won’t notice.
Agreed. However the original graph gave no indication of the present period. Was the original graph up to date at the time of publication?
One glaring error in the Mail article, though:
The paper has yet to be officially “published”. It is still in peer review. Professor Muller released copies of the original paper to the press, not the final “published” version which is still some weeks or longer to come.
This paper is still considered an unpublished paper.
One can only be totally perplexed by Professor Muller’s actions unless undue influence has been brought to bear on him by non-scientific factors e.g. Durban. I recall reading an interview he did with a Scientific Amedican jounralist earlier this year where he was trying to be objective about AGW and where he mentioned the hockey stick fraud. In the most recent edition of ScAm the only letter to the editor published in response to the interview was from one Michael Mann who launched into a very personal attack on Professor Muller. It was shameful of ScAm to publish it but not surprising given their track record in adhering to the AGW conjecture. Strange forces are at work.
So, Judge Judy is the BEST? Very good.
Oh, does the BEST data allow anyone to predict when we might get some warming in Sydney?
Seriously. This is the coldest 1st month of Spring in living memory. We should be in T-Shits and shorst, with the windows wide open, at this time of year.
I am writing this in a tackuit, socks and warm jumper with the windows colsed.
Ok, its anecdotal. But as with the apparent cooling of LA in past decades, there is no way that Sydney has gotten any warmer. No appreciably so, at any rate.
Brrrrr ….[time for bed I think ]
Folks,
More comparison of BEST and a whole load of new (to WFT) land datasets at http://www.woodfortrees.org/notes#best
Also AMO if anyone wants to replicate the ‘decadal variation’ paper.
Still not convinced a ten-year (lack of) trend really proves anything either way, personally…
Enjoy!
Paul
So now what are the peer review referees going to do? Give their blessing? Or send the paper back?
Crosspatch: 1990 – yes, I immediately thought of the great dying of thermometers as well. E.M. Smith noted this a couple of years ago.
Consider what the purposes of BEST press release was? Was it to advance the science or help the review , no neither of these benefit form a press release of such early versions of the papers , in the case of the latter the review process by design should be unaffected by any ‘press’ while ‘public review ‘ should and could have waited until these papers had been published so any corrections coming out of peer review had be done .
Did this press release advance the science , again its hard to see how all these paper actual do is report to clarify the data , they make no attempt to look at the science indeed they make it clear that cannot pass any judgment as to if current warming is down to AGW or not .
Was there a need to ‘beat’ others to the punch , although this has been suggested there is simply no evidenced that anyone else is doing this type of work , so thew answer is no.
So what was the press release for , could it be becasue in the end the team felt the pressures of other expectations ? Certainly lots of people from both sides of the debate have been pushing for this data and with IPCC events coming up , and perhaps looking to inclusion into AR5 they may have consider that releasing them now was better option they refining them and releasing latter but missing certain dates .
What ever is the case , it may well be that not for the first time a rush to publish has resulted in work whose quality is poor and that may well drown under its revisions. However in one ways its already been a success, in that it got buckets of press coverage and its already entered AGW folklore has ‘proof ‘ , and no matter what happens to the these papers they will never get that level of press and public attention again so in this realm their story is already written. So BEST may well have achieved what they wanted.
>>Steven Wilde
>>I have been saying in public since early 2008 that I first noticed the
>>jetstreams becoming more meridional around 2000.
Likewise – I have been saying the same. Take a look at these animations.
http://virga.sfsu.edu/scripts/jet_atl_archloop.html
Do a 20-day animation for Feb 2008, 2009, 2010, and 2011 and see the difference. The winter jetstreams normally run across Britain, giving us Atlantic weather. But in the last two winters they have been significantly south, giving N Europe some bitter anticyclone weather, and storms in the Med.
One of the real questions not addressed by the AGW religion, is what effects the path of the northerly jetstreams, because they are one of the biggest influences on our weather.
BTW. Can anyone build a long-term jetstream animation – says ten years worth of data? Not sure where to find the information.
.
woodfortrees (Paul Clark) says:
….Also AMO if anyone wants to replicate the ‘decadal variation’ paper.
The North Atlantic SST and hence the AM oscillations are not well understood and data sets have some ambiguities, but there are other independent data which correlate well, so in general (if not absolute temperatures) the anomalies appear to be reasonably reliable:
http://www.vukcevic.talktalk.net/NA-SST.htm
Paul Clark says [within in his link]: “Pick a time scale, any time scale!”
OK.
When the trend from 1840 [the earliest data available] is plotted, we see that the warming trend from the LIA is not accelerating. The green line shows the long term trend, which is confirmed by the past decade’s flat temperatures.
It also appears that the AMO influences shorter term fluctuations.
Judith Curry – you are a woman of integrity. Queue here for your Nobel Prize.
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UixEZMEHjVo?rel=0&w=420&h=315%5D
Finally! This is the way science should work, with equally knowledgable and well-funded experts debating each other pro and con, no holds barred. I wonder if the flow of government money has started to slacken because of the bad economy, making it more difficult for cAGW insiders to neutralize potential critics by handing out juicy grants. Come to think of it, if there are a lot of annoyed climate scientists whose grants have recently been reduced, this could easily produce one of the most illuminating debates about climate in the last several decades.
I find this very, very sad. For some years Richard Muller has been a bit of a hero for me, ever since I read his wonderful book Nemesis. This is probably the best science book I have read. It tells the fascinating story of how real science was done and actually reads a bit like a detective thriller. Ironically, it is also the story of how Muller and the Alvarez team fought against the scientific consensus of the time. In the end they won: they had discovered and effectively proven what killed the dinosaurs 65 million years ago.
How things have changed. Now I am very sad to see the depths that Muller has sunk to. There seem to be no bounds to the corruption of climate science.
Chris
The “green” bay tree.
What a difference a month makes! April 2010, to be exact, which is clearly an outlier, and has high uncertainty in the original data:
http://www.woodfortrees.org/data/best/from:2010
If you include it (and May) you get an OLS trend of 0.3K/century – almost flatlined, as reported. But if you leave it out you get about 1.4K/century, which is on the same page as the 30-year trend from the land-ocean datasets.
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/best/from:2001/mean:12/plot/best/from:2001/trend/plot/best/from:2001/to:2010.2/trend
This thread’s title should have been, What, Me Curry?!”
I hope some MSM journalist or editor will use that as his headline on this story. (No need to credit me.)
This point is one that should be used to argue against the warmist meme that contrarians have misled the public with a publicity barrage. Contrarians don’t “have the ear” of the public, so they aren’t in a position to do so. Instead, we’re at a severe disadvantage.
All with a straight face too (one presumes). Having cleaned the coffee from screen and keyboard all I can say is … wow. This is a jump from relative climate obscurity into the big league that would make an English football manager blush. I’m sure the extra climate loot flowing into Berkeley, the rewards from a grateful Berkeley board and the eternal gratitude of the IPCC and alarmists everywhere never crossed his mind.
I does demonstrate that academia is as corruptible as any other human endeavour when a large pot of free gold is dangled before it.
In the unlikely event this all back fires on the good Prof. I’m sure there is a great career in PR waiting for him, probably in banking and finance. However the eventual ‘peer review’ turns out, you really do have to admire his other abilities.
Same plot unsmoothed:
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/best/from:2001/plot/best/from:2001/trend/plot/best/from:2001/to:2010.2/trend
Note how big the April 2010 outlier is compared to the rest of the signal. This has two effects – firstly because it is a least *squares* trend it has a huge effect on the trend calculations. Secondly it squashes the rest of the graph so it looks more like a flatline.
Anyone feel like explaining this to the Daily Mail?
“I’m prepared to accept whatever result they produce, even if it proves my premise wrong”
Your acceptance continues apace.
“global temperature hiatus”
My word, you really still haven’t got this? You can’t measure ANY trend over the last ten years, the time period is TOO SHORT for any kind of statistical significance. It’s a very, very simple concept, but much, much too difficult for some people to understand. It would be remarkable if they were not capable of understanding it – more likely they just don’t want to understand it. Which is it for you, can’t understand or won’t understand?
Dr Muller’s leaked documents were obviously designed to have an impact in Durban at the upcoming meeting of the AGW faithful.
Durban is truly the right venue for this – it is a dangerous, filthy, sweaty, dump, as can be seen here:
http://www.google.co.uk/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=crime%20muggings%20durban%202010%202011&source=web&cd=6&ved=0CDwQFjAF&url=http%3A%2F%2Fdigitaljournal.com%2Farticle%2F267320&ei=KTutToGqKcOg4gT03LzaDg&usg=AFQjCNFokFk7btNn5RwgzNEBDBiSHBFpIg&cad=rja
Could it be that influential warmists pressured him to jump the gun? (Including his reviewers, maybe?)
“Judge Judy”! Wonderful!!
Just to demonstrate the outlier isn’t a WFT artefact, here is the header and last few rows of the source data:
% Monthly Annual Five-year Ten-year Twenty-year
% Year, Month, Anomaly, Unc., Anomaly, Unc., Anomaly, Unc., Anomaly, Unc., Anomaly, Unc.
…
2010 1 1.135 0.066 NaN NaN NaN NaN NaN NaN NaN NaN
2010 2 1.086 0.077 NaN NaN NaN NaN NaN NaN NaN NaN
2010 3 0.859 0.131 NaN NaN NaN NaN NaN NaN NaN NaN
2010 4 -1.035 2.763 NaN NaN NaN NaN NaN NaN NaN NaN
2010 5 1.098 2.928 NaN NaN NaN NaN NaN NaN NaN NaN
and here are the commands WFT uses to get it:
wget -N http://www.berkeleyearth.org/downloads/analysis-data.zip
unzip -o analysis-data.zip Full_Database_Average_complete.txt
All those NaN’s (not-a-number) are the smoothing means rightly cutting off N/2 samples at the edges, just as WFT does. The fourth column is the uncertainty, so April 2010 is -1.035 +/ 2.763 K anomaly. Pretty wild! I don’t know why this should be so uncertain now given it is 18 months ago, but perhaps they just haven’t updated it.
I’m now trying to work out how best to represent the uncertainty in WFT… Watch this space!
Bad Manners says: October 29, 2011 at 11:40 pm
—————————————————————————————————–
cohenite says:October 29, 2011 at 11:21 pm
So Muller runs a sustainability business; fancy that.
The head of the CSIRO, the chief climate scientific body in Australia [you can start laughing now], runs a carbon capture business:
http://blogs.news.com.au/heraldsun/andrewbolt/index.php/heraldsun/comments/the_head_of_the_csiro_should_not_profit_from_green_schemes/
————————————————————————————————————–
Bad Manners says:
What’s wrong with that – it’s in the time-honoured tradition of putting your mouth where your money is !
————————————————————————————————————
J.H. says:
The trouble is BM…… It’s not his money that they are using…..
When the BEST paper was first released, Dr. Curry noted that the order of the co-authors was listed alphabetically. She is second only because of the “C”.
I agree with others here that Durbin appears to be the target of Best’s best effort.
Hmm, the uncertainty is the 95% confidence interval, so it may be -1.035 +/- 1.38 – half either side, assuming it is symmetric (why would it be?). Any Real Statisticians want to give a view on this before I try to provide it on WFT?
From the file:
% Uncertainties represent the 95% confidence interval for statistical
% and spatial undersampling effects.
A friend suggested that seaweed is a great fertilizerm so I picked some up at the beach. Although it is green when it washes ashore, dried it is coal black. Must be a carbon sink, but I have not seen it mentioned as one.
Judging by what Prof Curry has said on her blog, my feeling is that the Mail has decided the story is in the conflict between different interpretations of the data, and they have decided to highlight the differences to the max. possible. This includes putting the most contrarian spin they can on Prof Curry’s comments. On the other hand, although Prof Curry is trying to be diplomatic about it, it is clear that she strongly disapproves of the BEST team PR strategy.
I, once again, would request that we stop calling it “BEST”.
It is the Berkeley EST pre-released, un-peer reviewed, information.
I will agree that it is one of the best examples of manipulation to hide the decline we’ve had in awhile, though.
“Note: timescales don’t match on graphs above, 200 years/10 years. A bit naughty on the part of the Sunday Mail to put them together as many readers won’t notice.”
For an MSM newspaper, the Daily Mail has presented the BEST charts quite nicely; and the captions make it very clear that the time scales are different. Perfectly good IMHO.
does rich muller have no best friends?
Hmm… Dr. Curry posted this on her blog on October 26, 2011:
My bottom line assessment is:
■a press release on this was warranted
■I applaud making the submitted papers publicly accessible at this time
■the spin on the press release and Muller’s subsequent statements have introduced unnecessary controversy into the BEST data and papers
Here: http://judithcurry.com/2011/10/26/best-pr/#more-5468
and on October 30,2011, this:
To set the record straight, some of the other sentiments attributed to me are not quite right, I will discuss these here.
“Hiding the truth” in the title is definitely misleading, I made it pretty clear that there was uncertainty in the data itself, but the bigger issues are to analyze the data and interpret it. I made it clear that this was not a straightforward and simple thing to do.
I told Rose that I was puzzled my Muller’s statements, particularly about “end of skepticism” and also “We see no evidence of global warming slowing down.”
I did not say that “the affair had to be compared to the notorious Climategate scandal two years ago,” this is indirectly attributed to me. When asked specifically about the graph that apparently uses a 10 year running mean and ends in 2006, we discussed “hide the decline,” but I honestly can’t recall if Rose or I said it first. I agree that the way the data is presented in the graph “hides the decline.” There is NO comparison of this situation to Climategate. Muller et al. have been very transparent in their methods and in making their data publicly available, which is highly commendable.
Here: http://judithcurry.com/2011/10/30/mail-on-best/#more-5526
Where she ends with:
My continued collaboration on this project will be discussed this week with Muller and Rohde. My joining this group was somewhat unusual, in that I did not know any of these people prior to being invited to join their team (although I very quickly figured out that they were highly reputable scientists). I thought the project was a great idea, and I still do, but it currently has a tarnish on it. Lets see what we can do about this.
It appears she hasn’t left the sinking ship, yet.
OK, sorry for the monologue, but it feels like there is some time pressure here!
I’ve used the uncertainty column to create an upper and lower bound series, adding and subtracting *half* the stated uncertainty, respectively. Here is the raw data:
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/best-upper/plot/best-lower/plot/best
It works out, er, best if you plot the best data itself last, so it overlays the bounds.
Here it is with both data and bounds aggressively smoothed:
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/best-upper/mean:120/plot/best-lower/mean:120/plot/best/mean:120
Although this gives a nice reducing uncertainty over time, I can’t make the size of the uncertainty fit with the decadal graph at: http://berkeleyearth.org/analysis.php
Anyone care to check my logic here?
Dr.Curry has come out with a measured pot on this issue stating what exactly she said and where she felt the reporter could have exaggerated. But she stands by the meat of her arguments.
http://judithcurry.com/2011/10/30/mail-on-best/
BEST are still contradicting themselves over UHI.
http://notalotofpeopleknowthat.wordpress.com/2011/10/23/mullers-problem-with-uhi/
Sorry, but I thought the meme was “no significant warming since 1995”. It appears now that it is necessary to change to “this century”. Ho hum.
The feral response here is, however, much easier to predict than climate…..
Judith has commented on this.
She stands by the criticism of how Muller conducted his PR and the stop in warming over the last decade. But she says the real story here is the best data set they’ve ever had, and that she disavows any of the more senstationalistic comments such as comparisons to Climategate. She says it isn’t a scandal, and stands behind the work BEST did, just that Muller has overstated it’s effects and that more effort should have been placed on skeptics arguments. S
Evidently she’s upset about the way the Daily Mail characterized her opinions.
And finally (really this time), the uncertainty in the last two values that have caused all this fuss:
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/best-upper/from:2009/plot/best-lower/from:2009/plot/best/from:2009
Dr. Curry comments: http://judithcurry.com/2011/10/30/mail-on-best/
While I appreciate Dr. Curry, I’m not ready to set her up on a pedestal. Last I knew, she still supported drastic measures to curtail the use of fossil fuels. To me, that is a cure that is far worse and more deadly than the disease.
Other than the same old, same old….
The big story for me is Dr. Curry is the second named author of all four papers……
…and Muller obviously hid what he was doing from her..he had to have done that on purpose
Blinding
Eyes
Stimulates
Temperatures
BEST
Working
Out the
Reality of
Stalled
Temperatures
WORST
Jeff D says:
October 29, 2011 at 11:11 pm
Sanity at last.
Now I wonder if the world will ever hear it.
The framers of our Constitution missed an item. We have separation of Church and State, they needed to add Separation of Science and State.
__________________________________________
That was Eisenhowers’s warning, but in this case separation of Church and State should cover it.
“We must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex.”
Dwight D. Eisenhower
Science in this case is a tool of the military-industrial complex because they are paying for it (with our tax dollars)
Judith Curry seems like the bus driver here. I’m not sure why she’s suddenly running over her team when on Oct 20th she blogged as being “honored to have been invited to participate”.
1. Who cares if the graphs, which are smoothed over 10 year averages, end in 2006?
2. co-author JC admitted that lack of ocean data was the big weakness of the BEST papers about 10 days ago.
The fact that Muller has done such a bad job in the release of these “papers”, the fact that he claimed the last 10 years have also seen warming when his own data shows they haven’t, the fact that he seems out of touch with his own data set, world-class researcher that he is supposed to be – this is why team member Judith has jumped off the BEST four-paper gravy train. She now thinks the papers weren’t ready for publication. Top marks for hindsight.
Come on Judith, get off the bus. I’ll drive. I don’t believe in climate science.
cohenite says:
October 29, 2011 at 11:21 pm
So Muller runs a sustainability business; fancy that…..
___________________________________________
Bad Manners says:
October 29, 2011 at 11:40 pm
What’s wrong with that – it’s in the time-honoured tradition of putting your mouth where your money is !
____________________________________________
It is called BIAS and is why the tobacco companies were hung out to dry. You are not going to get unbiased science out of those with a dog in the fight. In forty years in quality labs, I only had ONE company out of several not want me to falsify test results.
The Daily Mail is not noted for its accuracy
After looking at Berkeley’s Land numbers from 1979 to today versus the UAH Land numbers, Crutemp3 Land and the NCDC Land, they are quite similar each month although Berkeley clearly has a higher increase than the other 3 (as much as 60% more of an increase than the UAH lower troposphere over Land measurements for example).
http://img440.imageshack.us/img440/4898/berkeleyvsotherland.png
And here is another issue which is very interesting and important to the climate debate. Berkeley Land (and all the other Land measurements) are increasing at a much higher rate than the Global Lower Troposphere temperature trend and the Ocean SST trend. Land temperatures appear to be warming at a much faster rate than the Oceans and the Lower Troposphere.
Double in fact (UHI? or some other explanation?)
http://img100.imageshack.us/img100/4432/berkeleyuahrsshadsst2.png
There is certainly a flattening trend in all measurements over the last 10 to 13 years.
While it might be tempting to cheer Curry as the new Skeptical Hero, this BEST thing has yet to fully play out. Remember it was not so long ago Muller was the Hero for his “Hide the Decline” critique. Some cautious optimisim might be in order, i just wouldn’t go making the same mistake that was made with Muller by declaring trust in his results prior to their release.
Chris Wright says:
October 30, 2011 at 4:38 am
I find this very, very sad. For some years Richard Muller has been a bit of a hero for me, ever since I read his wonderful book Nemesis. This is probably the best science book I have read. It tells the fascinating story of how real science was done and actually reads a bit like a detective thriller. Ironically, it is also the story of how Muller and the Alvarez team fought against the scientific consensus of the time. In the end they won: they had discovered and effectively proven what killed the dinosaurs 65 million years ago.
How things have changed. Now I am very sad to see the depths that Muller has sunk to. There seem to be no bounds to the corruption of climate science.
Chris
——————————————–
Chris, that was also falls. Muller claims a 62 million year wobble of the solar system within the galaxy killed the dinosaurs when the earth passed through a region full of comets. Problem is the dinosaurs went extinct 65 million years ago and we are still 12 million years away from the next peak. See the problem?
Universe 2
Muller 0
crosspatch says:
October 30, 2011 at 12:06 am
….Once again, there is a lot of gold in the “global warming” industry and he was trying to pan some of it for himself, is what it looks like to me. But I still believe he had some world class coaching on this.
_________________________________
Here is a candidate for your “World Class Coach” Stan Greenberg, Congresswoman Rosa Delauro’s hubby. His companies are privately owned so finding out who he works for is near impossible. Greenberg Carville Shrum has directed political directed Campaigns in 60 countries.
” “He was also a strategic consultant to the Climate Center of the Natural Resources Defense Council on its multi-year campaign on global warming……NGO board memberships include the American Museum of Natural History, the National Endowment for Democracy, The Africa-America Institute, the Citizens Committee for New York City, the Council on Foreign Relations, and Refugees International…….Republican pollster Frank Luntz says “Stan Greenberg scares the hell out of me. He doesn’t just have a finger on the people’s pulse; he’s got an IV injected into it.” http://ilf.ndi.org/panelists#StanleyGreenberg
“Whether you want to win your election, lead your country, increase your bottom line, or change the world, Greenberg Quinlan Rosner can help you find the answer,” GQRR states on its website http://www.gqrr.com/
Stanley Greenberg “ Greenberg’s work for private sector organizations – including major corporations, trade associations and public interest organizations – focuses on managing change and reform….Greenberg has conducted extensive research in Europe (particularly Great Britain, Germany and France), Central and South America (Argentina and Brazil), and Africa (South Africa). He specializes in research on globalization, international trade, corporate consolidation, technology and the Internet. For organizations, Greenberg has helped manage and frame a number of issues – including education, school financing, American identity, the economy, environmental regulation, international trade, managed care, biotechnology, copyrights, privacy and the Internet….
Greenberg has advised a broad range of political campaigns, including those of President Bill Clinton and Vice-President Al Gore, Senators Chris Dodd, Joe Lieberman and Jeff Bingaman; Governor Jim Florio and gubernatorial candidate, Andy Young; former Vice-President Walter Mondale; and a number of candidates for the U.S. Congress. For many years, he served as principal polling advisor to the Democratic National Committee.
“Greenberg works jointly on private sector projects with prominent Republican pollsters in the United States – including Fred Steeper (pollster to former President Bush), Bill McInturff and Linda DiVall – to bring a bi-partisan focus to public issues….” http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Stanley_Greenberg
Dr.Curry has clearly stated what was true in the interview. She also said she doesn’t know who said about this being equal to Climategate, whether she or Rose. So the topic was indeed discussed. All in all Judith has confirmed the meat of the interview and differs only in some of the interpretations. So talking about Daiy Mail’s accuracy is a strawman, especially when Dr.Curry herself has confirmed the facts.
Could the article be titled “The BEST War On Science”? The real problem is the media. They have been fighting Capitalism for many years. AGW and the Media are fighting the same war.
From http://judithcurry.com/2011/10/30/mail-on-best/#comment-129902
“To set the record straight, some of the other sentiments attributed to me are not quite right” sounds to me that Dr Curry does not think that the Daily Mail was accurate.
This isn’t about science. This is pre Durban Agenda Setting being implemented from the greenie game plan to maximize the hysteria and fear mongering opportunities of the imminent COP in South Africa.
Read the whole of what Dr.Curry said Louise and then construct a fresh strawman if possible. Your current strawman has been blown away.
Yes, she also said ““Hiding the truth” in the title is definitely misleading”
Sounds to me that she believes tha the Daily Mail used a misleading title – not the actions of a newspaper known for its accuracy.
Yes, she also said ““Hiding the truth” in the title is definitely misleading”
Having canvassed the views of a number of laypersons the term ‘hiding the truth’ is exactly what they think of it without prompting by the Daily Mail.
The whole point with BEST was to check if other temperature observation data sets
were corrupted. Just to indulge you sceptics – to us others it was obvious that the
data sets were more or less reliable, showing a real trend.
Muller checked and then lauded Phil Jones and others. That must have hurt!
And now you, Judith Curry and a lot of other tedious hard heads turn to issues,
which were not listed as BEST reserach aims at all.
So if WUWT? get’s a review copy of a draft paper, does that mean that Dr. Curry did not get draft copies of the four papers in which she is the 2nd author?
Sorry, but what little credability Dr. Curry has left (some would say she has less than zero credability), has just gone out the window in SPADES!
I think Mr Muller should have just offered you the data and let you all get on with drawing pretty pictures until the end of time. 92 million views and not one solution yet?
Why didn’t Mr Muller just publish only the numbers? … year such, such a temperature. so much CO2, next year, so much temperature, so much CO2 .. and on and on …. then it would be up to the individuals of this world to see what is truth and what isn’t
But as long as both side of the divide (including you guys) stick to graphs, charts and completely ludicrous ways of explaining things to those who don’t understand such things then nothing will ever be resolved because you are all talking to yourselves and not the ones who matter, the people of this world.
I’m only an engineer (also a computer scientist) but I sometimes wonder how many of you are real scientists and how many of you are playing games with yourselves.
Had any of you bothered to do some work on your own instead of relying on the charts and pretty pictures from others then this whole debate might have been over a long time ago.
I personally believe in Global Warming, but not in CO2 being the culprit, I see many reasons for it, here are some numbers that prove CO2 is not the culprit. And “LOOK!!!” they are only numbers, no charts, no pictures, no cartoons or other such wasted space.
http://wisdomblogsdotcom1.files.wordpress.com/2011/10/coal-consumption.jpg
(I’m still doing Oils and Gas consumption but already one can see the truth.
And no, I have no interest in any of this except that I like blogging about it and for my own engineering ideas.
Personally I would dearly love to have the temperature data between 1750 and the 1880s so I can complete my own work (for my own and very selfish purposes) but no matter what I cannot find it ( my fault, of course, I keep missing the links)
But I need proper numbers, not just “work it out as best as you can data from a pretty looking chart” stuff
Any chance of a lending hand fellows? I would really appreciate you guys looking at my numbers (just to share knowledge, nothing more) and perhaps providing me with a link to temperature measurements for the last two centuries or so.
I don’t pretend to be right like many of you, unlike many of you though I prefer to do my own studies and not rely on everybody else to tell me what is and isn’t, the link is important to me only .. so please, a link
Pretty please … with sugar on top 🙂
This is great! The last two years should be made into a movie. It’s gonna have to be made outside of the UK and Hollywood of course. Oh, and anywhere else where AGW has been forced down peoples throats. Anyone speak Chinese or Russian? Oh hell, I’ll just get more popcorn and continue reading this blog.
Brent in Calgary
Speaking of tedious hardheads, Mikael Pihlström just doesn’t understand.
There is no real argument against warming since the global LIA. That warming is mostly natural, and shows a steady trend. If CO2 was causing the warming, we would see a sharply rising spike in temperature, like Michael Mann’s debunked MBH98 chart purported to show. But that is simply not happening. That must hurt, eh, Mikael?
I think this is the right time to play Hide the Decline again;
Err…. sorry! I forgot to mention … I am looking for global averages; not temperatures for individual areas/
Thank you
Its probably more likely that Muller was forced to produce those results/graph by the AGW establishment which includes that current US government
Mikael Pihlström says:
October 30, 2011 at 7:05 am
The whole point with BEST was to check if other temperature observation data sets
were corrupted.
============================================
Then you will have no problem explaining this:
http://www.real-science.com/rewriting-ministry-truth
The Mail on Sunday is a dreadful rag, and will place anything in a context calculated to make a sensation out of a hiccup. Even when it doesn’t actually misquote its interviewees. Anything for circulation.
But I suppose it can’t be all wrong all of the time…
“The number of retracted studies in peer-reviewed scientific journals skyrocketed from 22 in 2001 to 339 last year. according to an analysis commissioned by The Wall Street Journal…..
…more than a quarter of the retractions were due to fraud rather than innocent mistakes”
Discover
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702303627104576411850666582080.html
If you notice, none of the trolls today have anything substantial or sensible to say and so are trying to diver the thread topic to irrelevant alleyways. Do not feed the trolls and just ignore them.
In the words of contemporaries from my generation: Oh snap!
Anthony,
Thanks for the link. To be clear, I believe I have identified a specific mathematical error which will require a re-write of the CI portion of the methods paper.
Smokey says:
October 30, 2011 at 7:18 am
Speaking of tedious hardheads, Mikael Pihlström just doesn’t understand.
There is no real argument against warming since the global LIA.
——–
I have to correct you. There SHOULD not be any argument. But, the argument
‘it’s not warming’ is amply documented in your own sources (e.g. WUWT blogs,
SEPP reports etc.), even quite recently, and to deny that fact is ridiculous.
The reluctance of sceptics to throw out anything from your disinformation tools set
has destroyed your credibility as an intellectual movement, an outcome I am not
too sorry about.
Donald says:
October 30, 2011 at 7:17 am
Yes, that is the problem. Charts and graphs. Wow.
Dr Curry states “I did not say that “the affair had to be compared to the notorious Climategate scandal two years ago,” ” at Climate Etc.
It seems that the Mail on Sunday has misrepresented her view yet it is the first paragraph repeated from the Mail article at the beginning of this post. Perhaps it should be noted at that point in the post that she denies having said this?
@ Donald:
Are you serious? The problem is the charts and graphs? And all you need is two-hundred years of measurement based global averages?
“stevo says:
October 30, 2011 at 5:05 am
My word, you really still haven’t got this? You can’t measure ANY trend over the last ten years, the time period is TOO SHORT for any kind of statistical significance. It’s a very, very simple concept, but much, much too difficult for some people to understand. It would be remarkable if they were not capable of understanding it – more likely they just don’t want to understand it. Which is it for you, can’t understand or won’t understand?”
From an old construction worker who has worked outside for over 45 years, I agree with your statement. I would also say that 100yrs, 200yrs, 1,000yrs or 2,000yrs are too short of time as well. I believe you need to go back to the beginning of our interglacial warm period to figure of trends.
What the last 10yrs have shown us is CO2 has had little effect if any since 2000. If that is true, then CO2 has had little or no effect from 1990 to 2000.
So there must stronger “temperature/climate” “drivers” than CO2. As soon as you Academic guys and gals start being honest with yourself and the public, the sooner guys and gals like me can prepair us for the next little ice age or ice age. Windmills and solar panels “ain’t goina get it.”
Stevo noted that 10 years was too short a time on which to base conclusions. Maybe that’s true, but it’s not too short to raise concerns among even committed proponents of CAGW (covered in a recent post here and on JC’s climate etc). What it means is that in the past 10 years something other than carbon dioxide is driving global temperature. Importantly, we do not know what that something is. Wouldn’t the reasonable conclusion be that maybe we really don’t know what has been driving temperature all along and particularly we don’t know enough about feedbacks to make any type of predictions? Unfortunately, too many people in climate science have too much time, money, prestige, pride, etc. invested in carbon dioxide-driven CAGW to be reasonable. Thankfully, there are a few like Judith Curry who do speak out.
David Falkner – Is that such a hard ask?
It seems obvious to me that without those numbers none of the charts and graphs on this site, or any other AGW/GW site for that matter, would exist, after all … what did they use to make them with? the numbers must exist somewhere. I just need them, that’s all.
I’m not asking for you to write them all, I just want the link to where such data may be found, I can do the rest of the work on my own.
———————
That statement has the perspective that I agree with.
First, BEST is a new comprehensive data set. That is important and it is completely independent of the BEST’s bizarre pre-peer review PR campaign. It appears that Muller’s daughter (manager of the BEST project) has had lead responsibility in the overselling PR program; she is not a climate scientist.
Second, BEST is a private effort which shows alternate approaches are possible to the potential for confirmation bias in governmental grant processes for climate science. The questionable PR strategy by BEST’s manager detracts from the science of the project.
Third, I see no problem with sharing the preliminary results and data before either submittal to a paper or after submittal but before pee review. That is completely open. The BEST mistake was that instead of orchestrating a circus-like PR frenzy, they simply should have posted the preliminary results and data on their website.
Finally, I find Judith Curry a credible leader who is vitally helping to open up a broad skeptical era in climate science; she exposes the myopic restriction of the last 25+ yrs from IPCC centered advocates of alarming AGW by CO2 from fossil fuel.
John
PS – David Falkner
Truth is I happen to be very good with numbers and I can fiddle any graph you give me, that is why I rely only on numbers, then I do my own models.
Here take a look at how easy I fiddle prediction (by many scientists) for 530ppm for 2050 and lowered them to 427 just by fiddling with them (without cheating)
http://wisdomblogsdotcom1.files.wordpress.com/2011/10/co2-levels.png
I only want the links
old construction worker: “What the last 10yrs have shown us is CO2 has had little effect if any since 2000.”
Incorrect conclusion. Internal variations dominate on this timescale and you cannot say anything about the effect of CO2 since 2000.
“If that is true, then CO2 has had little or no effect from 1990 to 2000.”
It is not true, and this wouldn’t even follow if it was.
Stephen Pruett: “What it means is that in the past 10 years something other than carbon dioxide is driving global temperature”
Internal variations dominate on this timescale. You can derive nothing at all about the longer term drivers of climate change.
Mikael Pihlström says:
“…the argument ‘it’s not warming’ is amply documented in your own sources…”
Amply documented?? So “amply” document your charge. In particular, I challenge you to show where I have ever said “it’s not warming.”
You live in your own fantasy world, Mikael.
Correction to an embarrassing misspelling in my comment at October 30, 2011 at 8:04 am.
I should have said, “Third, I see no problem with sharing the preliminary results and data before either submittal to a paper or after submittal but before
peepeer review.”Though ‘pee review’ is a comical thought, n’est ce pas?
John
Scientist who said climate change sceptics had been proved wrong accused of hiding truth by colleague
By David RoseI
It was hailed as the scientific study that ended the global warming debate once and for all – the research that, in the words of its director, ‘proved you should not be a sceptic, at least not any longer’.
Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2055191/Scientists-said-climate-change-sceptics-proved-wrong-accused-hiding-truth-colleague.html#ixzz1cHJpUhtW
Perhaps it is just a communication problem, acronym-wise?
Alternately, they might have named the project: Berkeley Adjusted Data…
😉
stevo says:
October 30, 2011 at 5:05 am
My word, you really still haven’t got this? You can’t measure ANY trend over the last ten years, the time period is TOO SHORT for any kind of statistical significance….
_____________________________________________
THE TREND IS A CYCLE. It is not a line. Nature hates lines and that is one of the major CAGW fallacies. They take SELECTED data do a line fit and IGNORE the curves. This means that their “projections” had straight off the chart when the true projection should be an oscillation.
The “trend” has flattened because it has hit the top of the curve in the oscillation. If you are looking at multiple oscillations then the ten years are part of a CURVE and not a straight line.
This is from a NASA report (California Institute of Technology): http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/features.cfm?feature=1319
“…The researchers found some clear links between the sun’s activity and climate variations. The Nile water levels and aurora records had two somewhat regularly occurring variations in common – one with a period of about 88 years and the second with a period of about 200 years.
….Alexander Ruzmaikin and Joan Feynman of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif., together with Dr. Yuk Yung of the California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, Calif., have analyzed Egyptian records of annual Nile water levels collected between 622 and 1470 A.D. at Rawdah Island in Cairo. These records were then compared to another well-documented human record from the same time period: observations of the number of auroras reported per decade in the Northern Hemisphere. Auroras are bright glows in the night sky that happen when mass is rapidly ejected from the sun’s corona, or following solar flares. They are an excellent means of tracking variations in the sun’s activity.
Feynman said that while ancient Nile and auroral records are generally “spotty,” that was not the case for the particular 850-year period they studied…..
So what causes these cyclical links between solar variability and the Nile? The authors suggest that variations in the sun’s ultraviolet energy cause adjustments in a climate pattern called the Northern Annular Mode, which affects climate in the atmosphere of the Northern Hemisphere during the winter. At sea level, this mode becomes the North Atlantic Oscillation, a large-scale seesaw in atmospheric mass that affects how air circulates over the Atlantic Ocean. During periods of high solar activity, the North Atlantic Oscillation’s influence extends to the Indian Ocean. These adjustments may affect the distribution of air temperatures, which subsequently influence air circulation and rainfall at the Nile River’s sources in eastern equatorial Africa. When solar activity is high, conditions are drier, and when it is low, conditions are wetter.
Study findings were recently published in the Journal of Geophysical Research. “
So if you want to get snarky we should look at time periods of over 400 Years!
Sixty years is way too short, it does not even cover two complete ~ 70 yr ocean oscillations!!!
“This is nowhere near what the climate models were predicting,’ Prof Curry said. ‘Whatever it is that’s going on here, it doesn’t look like it’s being dominated by CO2.”
She stands by this point, which is the whole crux of the issue. No reasonable researcher claims there has been no warming, and the media blitz Muller set off used a giant strawman in claiming they had.
Alex Heyworth says:
October 30, 2011 at 5:23 am
Judging by what Prof Curry has said on her blog, my feeling is that the Mail has decided the story is in the conflict between different interpretations of the data, and they have decided to highlight the differences to the max. possible. This includes putting the most contrarian spin they can on Prof Curry’s comments. On the other hand, although Prof Curry is trying to be diplomatic about it, it is clear that she strongly disapproves of the BEST team PR strategy.
_________________________________________
Of course the NEWS is the cat & dog fight between Muller and Curry. Now if only we can get the major news media to publish it.
This sort of thing kills the “Consensus” myth.
Crosspatch wrote: “I have a feeling this will get absolutely zero notice in the US print and broadcast media.”
Maybe, but I wouldn’t bet on it. This was clearly an attempt to sucker that same media, and they bit hard on the bait. This could be one of those times when payback is due. And, unlike the hockey stick, this one is easy to explain. Presenting a graph using 10-year averaging to obscure the last 10 years of data can be explained to a sixth grader…the average reading age most news stories are presented at, I believe. In other words, even the reporters who were suckered can understand this scam. Indeed, this could be the final nail in the AGW coffin, especially since both sides will soon be solidly on record stating that the BEST data is the best land temperature record available. (Granted, the AGW crowd might be considering how to retract their initial praise of the data…)
Truly a boon to the popcorn industry, as Anthony indicated at the outset.
Donald says:
October 30, 2011 at 8:03 am
I’m not asking for you to write them all, I just want the link to where such data may be found, I can do the rest of the work on my own.
You can get that data by doing the work on your own, also. What would you consider a reliable thermometer?
stevo will never understand. All he does is cherry-pick. Here is a wide range of time scales:
http://img856.imageshack.us/img856/2403/dailyuahtempsmar92010.png
http://icecap.us/images/uploads/8YearTemps.jpg
http://oi52.tinypic.com/2agnous.jpg
http://notrickszone.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/08/Bastardi-HadCrut15-years.gif
http://butnowyouknow.files.wordpress.com/2009/07/globa-mean-temp.gif?w=469&h=427
http://justdata.files.wordpress.com/2009/12/continuitybysectors1900-2009.jpg
http://www.climate4you.com/images/HadCRUT3%20GlobalMonthlyTempSince1958%20AndCO2.gif
http://www.drroyspencer.com/library/pics/2000-years-of-global-temperature.jpg
From two years to 2,000 years — and no evidence that CO2 has any significant effect.
I always poo-poo the word conspiracy, because I do not believe in them. But in this case I am not sure what word I should substitute? stupidity? dim?
Stevo,
You are guilty of behving as a true-believer of CAGW, you simply throw out data that does not fit your belief while selectively embracing those bits that support your meme. Cherry-picking of data is the single biggest scientific problem in the whole sorry sad CAGW saga and scam. Correlation does NOT imply causation!!! However, when climate models say it should be getting warming and it ISN’T it tells us that said climate models are most definitely WRONG.
“Hide the decline” is a very bad choice of words. In fact BEST shows temperatures increasing in the last ten years.
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/best/from/plot/best/last:1200/trend/plot/best/last:120/trend
It looks like Richard Muller is familiar with the data, while Judith Curry, despite being the second author on the BEST papers, hasn’t actually looked at these numbers.
As for David Whitehouse, who plotted the BEST figures without a trend, but nevertheless felt able to state “the past ten years… is a statistically perfect straight line of zero gradient”, I’d say he’s the one guilty of “hiding the incline”!
You guys = The Black Knight
[ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dhRUe-gz690 ]
>>Louise
>>“To set the record straight, some of the other sentiments attributed
>>to me are not quite right” sounds to me that Dr Curry does not think
>>that the Daily Mail was accurate.
More like, she said more than she planned to say, and is backtracking slightly. Its easy to get carried away with the conversation, when a reporter is leading you on (to get a good story).
.
David Falkner – Listen mate, please don’t treat me like a moron, You know damned well I wasn’t alive in 1750 or 1800 or even 1900 and therefore I wasn’t there to take the measurements; so how about stopping this self importance stuff you keep trying to show.
I came on the site to ask if you guys could offer me a link to the global average temperature for 1750 to 1880 or thereabouts; if you have no wish to share it then don’t; just go and annoy someone else with your own self aggrandizing comments.
I don’t give a rat’s tail about your little quips, keep them in your pockets.
Hopefully someone else would like to act like a proper scientist and share some data, I shall return tomorrow and have a look.
Thank you one and all anyway.
Dan Pangburn says:
October 29, 2011 at 10:08 pm
“A simple equation based on the physical phenomena involved, with inputs of only sunspot number and ppmv CO2, calculates the average global temperatures (agt) since 1895 with 88.4% accuracy (87.9% if CO2 is assumed to have no influence).”
Dan, I’m not sure how in-depth your statistics capabilities are but I’m afraid that what you show is that CO2 has ostensibly no effect. You might get a better R^2 by adding sunspot activity to the inverse of copper constant-dollar prices, or fashion’s height-of-skirt-hem above the ground statistics over that time period.
I hate to be such a cynic but follow the money… or rather, where did the money go? If Muller were to reveal his BEST study showed a ceasing of global warming UC Berkeley can kiss the federal government grant teat good bye.
Tom P says:
October 30, 2011 at 8:48 am
“Hide the decline” is a very bad choice of words. In fact BEST shows temperatures increasing in the last ten years.
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/best/from/plot/best/last:1200/trend/plot/best/last:120/trend
It looks like Richard Muller is familiar with the data, while Judith Curry, despite being the second author on the BEST papers, hasn’t actually looked at these numbers.
As for David Whitehouse, who plotted the BEST figures without a trend, but nevertheless felt able to state “the past ten years… is a statistically perfect straight line of zero gradient”, I’d say he’s the one guilty of “hiding the incline”!
—————————————————————————-
Tom P – you are full of crap.
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/best/last:120
If you honestly believe there is a trend in the last 10 years of BEST data, then congratulations – you are a climate scientist.
Smokey – what a succession of bizarre graphs, where most are either too short a record, or from too few stations to be useful. The ones that are long records from non-cherry picked data show the global warming clearly, even when you put them on truly ridiculous y-axes. Here is a graph that blows your beliefs out of the water:
http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_KfE5s-4q1s4/ScLVic4P0hI/AAAAAAAAAB0/IWBy3fClff8/s1600/fig4.jpg
Jeremy: I do not throw out any data. What made you think that I did?
Donald: I started where you are and created WoodForTrees.org to do exactly the same kind of thing. You might find it does what you want anyway, or you can get any of the data from the ‘data’ link at the bottom of the graph pages.
Also see the Credits page for where I got all the data from if you want to do it yourself. I’m afraid none of it goes back to 1750, though.
If you’re a software guy you can also fetch and build the analyse tool (C++) which imports the data and does the (fairly basic) analysis steps. All the website does is pipe the output of analyse through gnuplot.
Best of luck
Paul
I always poo-poo the word conspiracy, because I do not believe in them. But in this case I am not sure what word I should substitute? stupidity? dim?
Why do bank robbers rob banks? Why do politicians seek office? Where greed and lust for power exist no conspiracy is necessary.
woodfortrees (Paul Clark) says:
October 30, 2011 at 4:54 am
Same plot unsmoothed:
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/best/from:2001/plot/best/from:2001/trend/plot/best/from:2001/to:2010.2/trend
Note how big the April 2010 outlier is compared to the rest of the signal. This has two effects – firstly because it is a least *squares* trend it has a huge effect on the trend calculations. Secondly it squashes the rest of the graph so it looks more like a flatline.
Anyone feel like explaining this to the Daily Mail?
=======================================================================
Paul, this thing has run and taken a life of its own. I know that April signal bothers you, but that’s the game we all play. It takes bumps and spikes in both directions and both sides jump up and down when things like this occurs. The bigger picture is that Dr. Muller and his media blitz didn’t bother to fill the reporters in on all of this when he declared the debate to be over.
To all of those here that are interested, you should pay WFT a visit and see his new land comparisons. They are fuel for several lines of new discussion…….. UHI verified? Oceans notably cooling? So much…… And I just don’t have time today….. 🙁
Donald;
I’m just skimmed and noticed your repeated requests for data, though I missed the original question as to what specific data you want. Try and google “KNMI Climate Explorer” and also “Woodfortrees” and you will find an abundance of data that you can cut up anyway you want.
Professor Muller realized that his results belied the AGW orthodoxy, so without consulting with his more principled ethical coauthors he has fired his spin on things to even less principled members of the media who were keen to pick up his slanted results and spin with them – regardless of peer review.
This is a clever way to win a battle but may end up with Muller losing the war. It can quite easily be shown as it has in this post, that Muller is either an incredibly inept statistician or is deliberately trying to obscure the results of his research. The rush to press ahead of peer review would support the latter assessment. The public will start saying that if this is the BEST that AGW can do then it is obviously a scam put up by people with questionable ethics. Let us hope that all of science does not get tarnished by the actions of these committed climate ‘scientists’
Thank You Paul Clark, I got the link (WoodForTrees.org)
Good to know some of you are willing to share data on this site and not waste time with stupid little quips, I shall look there tomorrow for a look (it’s 3:00 am here) and leave you a thank you comment there as well.
Good night, mate.
I think it would be an interesting idea to revisit the “divergence problem” that tree rings examined by the AGW scientists reveal. These trees may have been right, even if they were cherry-picked to show the rising temps. The divergence would appear to be a “problem” only if you want them to show you rising temps.
From her own blog this morning, Judith Curry said:
“In David Rose’s article, the direct quotes attributed to me are correct.”
Anything else is what’s known in the trade as editorialising, and any scientist who wants to be in the public eye has to get used to that. It would be extremely naive to give an interview to any kind of journalist and not expect the spin of the media proprietor to be put on it. I’m just surprised that the Mail is being so gung-ho against AGW ~ I’d not noticed it before.
The truth, both sides of this debate have an agenda. Governments have invested far too much in AGW to see it fail now. Climate scientists will not get funding unless their work is in support of the AGW theory. Oil companies are the only ones rich enough to be capable of funding the sort of research it will take to bring down AGW once and for all, despite this handy own goal by Muller and Co.
So with both sides having an agenda, all we can do is look at the raw data and make our own decisions. My own is that once AGW has been debunked, which it will be in another few years or so, they will be casting around for something else to make us feel guilty about. Probably some boffin will come up with definitive proof that global warming is caused by farting, and then the appropriate tax will be brought in, we will all have to be plugged up with sustainable corks and baked beans shares will take a nosedive. I’ve written something along these lines in Is Man-Made Global Warming the New Original Sin? http://ishtarsgate.wordpress.com/2011/10/29/saturns-return-and-the-prodigal-son/ That’s the link if you’d like to check it out.
Oil Companies are on side with AGW because oil rationing by price improves their profitability They just share the gains with governments.
Paul Clark, there are two big outliers in the last 10 years.
+1.5C in late 2006 and -1.5C in 2010. (In relation to HADCRUT).
They kind of cancel each other out.
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/best/from:2001.75/plot/best/from:2001.75/trend/plot/hadcrut3vgl/from:2001.75/plot/hadcrut3vgl/from:2001.75/trend
Thank you too davidmhoffer, much appreciated ,,,, now I really must get to bed 🙂
good night all
DaveR says:
October 30, 2011 at 6:51 am
Could the article be titled “The BEST War On Science”? The real problem is the media. They have been fighting Capitalism for many years. AGW and the Media are fighting the same war.
____________________________
What is hysterical is WHO owns the media.
1917 – J.P. Morgan Interests Buy 25 of America’s Leading Newspapers and Insert Editors
U.S. Congressional Record February 9, 1917, page 2947 http://www.mindfully.org/Reform/Morgan-Buys-Newspapers9feb17.htm
1977 – The Church Senate Committee hearings, CIA operatives controlling US corporate media, Operation Mockingbird.
Pulitzer Prize reporter Carl Bernstein’s Report: http://www.carlbernstein.com/magazine_cia_and_media.php
2010 – JP Morgan: Our next big media player?: http://www.newsandtech.com/dougs_page/article_f3a45be0-4717-11df-aace-001cc4c03286.html
JP Morgan controls 54 U.S. daily newspapers,and owns 31 television stations.
It is fun to trace WHO is actually in control of our news. For example MSNBC…
Comcast Corporation (Nasdaq: CMCSA; CMCSK) and General Electric (NYSE: GE) yesterday closed their transaction to create a joint venture…
The new company is 51 percent owned by Comcast, 49 percent owned by GE,…
J.P. Morgan was lead financial advisor to GE with Goldman Sachs and Citi acting as co-advisors….
http://blog.comcast.com/2011/01/comcast-and-ge-complete-transaction-to-form-nbcuniversal-llc.html
Then there is GE Chairman and CEO Jeff Immelt: Obama announced that Immelt will chair the President’s Council on Jobs and Competitiveness.
In Immelt’s own words:
[Question:] “What’s the significance of 200 American CEOs landing on Indian soil, exploring the big Indian market once again?
[Immelt:] …I am a globalist. So I am a big believer that basically it is a win-win game of global trade. “ http://articles.economictimes.indiatimes.com/2010-11-15/news/27612907_1_jeffrey-immelt-ge-indian-market
Unbiased reporting????
James Sexton says:
October 30, 2011 at 9:11 am
woodfortrees (Paul Clark) says:
October 30, 2011 at 4:54 am
Same plot unsmoothed:
————————————————————-
James, I thought you were retired. You should have lot’s of time 😉
BTW I downloaded the last 10 years of BEST data and applied a linear trend in Excel. The equation is:
0.0172x – 33.56 with an R^2 of 0.0171.
Apparently, when Christ was born, the average temperature of the world was 33 degrees below zero. WUWT? In climate science, an R-squared of 0.0171 is “statistically significant”.
Sorry! Wrong link!
Is Man-Made Warming The New Original Sin? Link is here: http://ishtarsgate.wordpress.com/2011/10/14/is-man-made-global-warming-the-new-original-sin/
It appears as though the discussion of BEST and Richard Muller’s work on WUWT and elsewhere has stung Seth Borenstein and the Associated Press into action. It will be interesting to see how many fallacies can be identified in Borenstein’s AP article by the community-at-large?
Paul has an excellent write up on woodfortrees…….
….BEST doesn’t even match the data they say they are using
http://www.woodfortrees.org/notes#best
woodfortrees (Paul Clark) says:
October 30, 2011 at 9:10 am
Donald: I started where you are and created WoodForTrees.org to do exactly the same kind of thing. You might find it does what you want anyway, or you can get any of the data from the ‘data’ link at the bottom of the graph pages.
—————————————————————————————
Donald,
The woodfortrees.org data goes back to 1800 for the BEST preliminary. If Paul Clark started WoodForTrees.org then thank-you Paul. I have two wood stoves 😉 and I appreciate your site.
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/best/from:1600
Steve From Rockwood: Tom P – you are full of crap.
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/best/last:120
If you honestly believe there is a trend in the last 10 years of BEST data, then congratulations – you are a climate scientist.
OLS produces a positive trend line over the last 10 years, despite an enormous negative outlier. If you eyeball it the data look flat, and the variance is great, nevertheless the trend is positive.
This episode shows again that if you talk to the press the resultant story will misquote you and the headline will be extravagant and totally unreliable.
James Sexton says:
October 30, 2011 at 9:11 am
….. UHI verified? Oceans notably cooling? So much…… And I just don’t have time today….http://suyts.wordpress.com/2011/10/30/new-plots-from-wood-for-trees/
================================================
You think……….
They’ve verified UHI…while temps are going up on only 30% of the planet…and temps are crashing on 70%
Then blame ENSO, ocean temps, hiding the heat in the water, etc etc as the excuse……
http://suyts.wordpress.com/2011/10/30/new-plots-from-wood-for-trees/
I remember when BEST was being proposed or first talked about. I remember the hopes many here put into them coming up with a close to unbiased report on the truth about Earth temperatures. I said back then, although I cannot find the story I wrote it in, that BEST would be just like all the other institutional climate organizations and power would gravitate to those with an agenda and come out as biased as every other study.
Urban heat island significantly under “corrected” for, check.
Old temperatures “corrected” downwards, check.
Recent temperatures “corrected” upwards, check.
Science by press release, check.
Pretty much eery single aspect of BEST has proven to be for the propagandizing of global warming. Suckering the skeptic blogs into supporting and adding reputation to themselves. I understand that you cannot stop them from being biased, particularly if you are not involved, This was never about creating a more reliable and honest temperature record, it was about increasing the credibility of the global warming mantra. I am certainly disappointed that I was right. BESTer luck next time in getting a heavily funded group of people together to actually tell the truth, and not the “truth” that gets the more funding…
Latitude says:
October 30, 2011 at 7:30 am
“The number of retracted studies in peer-reviewed scientific journals skyrocketed from 22 in 2001 to 339 last year. according to an analysis commissioned by The Wall Street Journal…..
…more than a quarter of the retractions were due to fraud rather than innocent mistakes”
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702303627104576411850666582080.html
__________________________________________________
You can add to that from an attorney’s blog site:
Drug testing firm faked documents, says FDA
“……A significant number of falsified records were uncovered in the investigation. According to the FDA, in at least 1,900 studies conducted between April 2005 and June 2009 the laboratory technicians named as conducting the studies were not actually present at the time of the study. The FDA believes that Cetero may have “fixed” those studies in order to get the results that support the drug companies’ agendas.
The concerns raised by the investigation are so substantial that the FDA has actually told drug manufacturers that they may need to confirm results of any studies completed by Cetero between April 2005 and June 2010. Depending on the “true” results of these drug studies, some drugs may be found to be defective and have to be removed from the market…..”
Now doesn’t that give you the warm fuzzies about honor and integrity and science????
Professor Curry is not to be trifled with. Just the data please.No need for unproven dicta and keep your politics at home.
Hmm, this is a somewhat different result that the one that I got when I plotted the data. I started my plot at the beginning of 1998 and I plotted all the remaining data that I had. The data that I downloaded originally only went through May of 2010. The value that I have for March is 0.859. The GWPF chart looks like it has roughly a -1.0 for the same month. The trend that I have for the entire period is 0.228. That was a bigger trend than any of the other instrument records. And it was right in line with the IPCC prediction. So now I will have to go back and check their data again to see what changed. Off hand, however, it strikes me that a data point that is about 1.75 C cooler than the surrounding data is most likely an error. I hate to say that, because I would much rather that the March data point in the GWPF study be true. But I rather doubt it.
Let me say also, that from the time that Judith put the BEST information on her site, she did nothing to defend the BEST results. I put dozens of posts up at her site making the case that the BEST UHI study was completely incapable of isolating or determining the magnitude of any UHI effect. The study was mis-designed from the beginning. From her comment above, it sounds like she agrees.
Donald
There is no such thing as a ‘global’ average for the period 1750 to 1880.
Giss started recording from 1880 and Hadley cru from 1850.
It is often said that Central England Temperature (CET) maintained by the UK Met office is a good proxy for Northern hemispheric temperatures and also for global ones.
This is the preferred Met office CET measurement back to 1772
http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/hadobs/hadcet/
However, the record goes all the way back to 1650 and this is one of the graphs of it I use.
http://c3headlines.typepad.com/.a/6a010536b58035970c0120a7c87805970b-pi
If you want to graph it yourself the data is on the Met office site. I am currently working on my own reconstruction to take CET back to 1550.
This is my site where I keep individual historic temperature records-there are also lots of articles on it.
http://climatereason.com/LittleIceAgeThermometers/
If you are looking for more specific information please email me at tonyATclimatereasonDOt com and I will try to help
tonyb
I should have guessed that the Mail overstated Curry’s views. Now that I’ve read Curry’s new post at her blog, it all “boggles the mind” somewhat less, though it still deserves a “wow!”.
She didn’t and doesn’t liken the current matter to Climategate, and she thinks that it is some tarnish but not a scandal. For my lack of due skepticism about a newspaper report, I’ll eat humble pie (the fallibilism-rewarding kind: toasted bagel sandwich of scrambled egg, melted cheese, grilled bacon, ham, sausage). Judith says that Muller’s graph does “hide the decline” but she affirms commendable transparency about methods and data by Muller et al at the BEST project. I’d guess that, to the Mail reporter David Rose, “hide the decline” and “Climategate” were interchangeable classifications. I still think that the original “hide the decline” was some serious “tarnish,” really a permanent dent in one’s trust, but indeed Climategate was major-league, an outright scandal.
She also says that the quoted statements directly attributed to her by the Mail are accurately quoted. Now, those quotes include: “To say this is the end of scepticism is misleading, as is the statement that warming hasn’t paused. It is also misleading to say, as he has, that the issue of heat islands has been settled.”.She thinks that the preliminary results were oversold and adds that her most important statement in the Mail was “‘To say that there is detracts from the credibility of the data, which is very unfortunate” (following on her previous quoted statement “There is no scientific basis for saying that warming hasn’t stopped,”), and that the point should have been the superior quality of BEST data – “the best we currently have available for land surface temperatures,” she says at her blog.
Muller still has some splainin to do. If he’s really that much more familiar with the BEST data than Curry is, then it’s a second helping of humble pie for me, with an added dash of habanero sauce. Okay, make that three dashes. Yum!
Note on getting BEST’s data: Motl has links.
Julian Williams in Wales says:
October 30, 2011 at 8:46 am
“I always poo-poo the word conspiracy, because I do not believe in them. But in this case I am not sure what word I should substitute? ”
Yes, that is an interesting dilemma. If an organisation has an objective paragraph saying something like ” We will look for all proof that the warming lately is due to burning fossil fuels”…..and if that organisation is trying to get governments all over the world to sign a paper in Copenhagen which in effect turns over the control over power-consumption in all those countries to the said organisation….
And then some people say; Look what they are doing! They are trying to take over the control over these countries!
Are they pin-pointing a conspiracy? I dont know…..
If someone else is at work hiding data, keeping others out of the loop, selecting lead authors from groups like the WWF or Greenpeace….putting a strangely high weight on models, looking the other way when it comes to real life data….pal review…..going on like this for years, and finally summing all this up in a big climate-bible, and then saying; Look, we need to control the power consumption in all countries NOW.
And we need a police force with near anti-terrorist powers to upheld our new LAW.
Is it a conspiracy?
And if you discover that they intend to use secret communication channels, and that all government organisations should be allowed to LIE when asked for information……
Is it a conspiracy?
I dont know….maybe it is just government at work?
Donald says:
October 30, 2011 at 8:07 am
PS – David Falkner
Truth is I happen to be very good with numbers and I can fiddle any graph you give me, that is why I rely only on numbers, then I do my own models.
Here take a look at how easy I fiddle prediction (by many scientists) for 530ppm for 2050 and lowered them to 427 just by fiddling with them (without cheating)
http://wisdomblogsdotcom1.files.wordpress.com/2011/10/co2-levels.png
I only want the links
____________________________________________-
Donald, there in lies one of the major concerns of Skeptics! The data was NOT available.
ICO Orders UEA to Produce CRUTEM Station Data
Breaking news: Today probably marks the closing chapter of the longstanding FOI request for CRUTEM station data. The UK Information Commissioner (ICO) has rendered a decision (see here) on Jonathan Jones’ appeal of the UEA’s refusal to provide Prof J. Jones with the CRUTEM station data that they had previously provided to Georgia Tech. The decision that can only be characterized as a total thrashing of the University of East Anglia.
Professor Jonathan Jones of Oxford University (like me, an alumnus of Corpus Christi, Oxford), is a Bishop Hill and CA reader and was one of several CA readers who requested the CRUTEM version sent to Georgia Tech earlier that year….
[J.] Jones’ request for CRUTEM data, like mine, was refused by UEA. Like me, [J.] Jones appealed the refusal at UEA (the first stage). On Oct 23, 2009, UEA rejected his appeal. (My appeal was rejected about 3 weeks later on the very eve of Climategate.) While I didn’t pursue the appeal to the ICO, Prof [J] Jones did appeal and the present decision is the result of this appeal. I was unaware that this appeal was pending and the decision came as a surprise to me. Since the story started at CA, Andrew Montford and Prof [J] Jones decided that news of the decision should also be broken here…..” Climate Audit by Steve McIntyre: http://climateaudit.org/2011/06/27/ico-orders-uea-to-produce-crutem-station-data/
Steve McIntyre/Climate Audit is the one you should make your request to.
Stevo,
Stop your trolling.
you state “Jeremy: I do not throw out any data. What made you think that I did?”
Above you dismiss the recent lack of warming over the past decade as statistically insignificant – this is clearly “throwing out data” which does not fit your meme. Stop wasting everyone’s time with your puerile trolls and pretense – you know exactly what you are doing and pretending otherwise is behaving like a troll.
woodfortrees (Paul Clark) says:
October 30, 2011 at 9:10 am
Can you answer a couple of questions for me.
Is the data that you analyzed Actual Max Min Daily values or the TAve values supplied by BEST?
Did you see the TMax data that they originally posted?
Are you aware that there appears to be other errors (apart form April) in the data, like higher averages in Dec/jan than in June/July etc?
@richard Verney
“Lets hope that South Africa is in for a cold and wet summer.”
++++
Southern Africa, the summer rainfall region of it, is at the wet end of its 19 year drought cycle so it is going to be very wet and probably cooler than ‘normal’ for the COP17 meeting in Durban, though that is perfectly normal for the wet end of the drought cycle. This is the peak year, with rainfall going to decline from now until 2021. The next peak wet will be in 2030. It is a very good year to plant long season, high yielding maize at +45k plants/ha.
There is a caveat from history which is that any year could be a spuriously hot or dry one, but generally the rainfall plot shows a perfect sinewave and appears to be related to lunar position.
Cape Town and the area immediately around it (the winter rainlfall region) has a 10 year drought cycle and is also a sinewave which can be shown by plotting the 400 years of rainfall data on a 10 year time series.
HADCET – 1926 – 2nd warmest summer ever.
BEST – +6C rise from 1809 to 1922 – http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/best/from:1809/to:1823
Isn’t boring NOW better?
I’ve always got the impression from Muller that he’s a duplicitious publicity hound so I’m not too surprised with his handling of the announcement of the results. I do feel sorry for Dr. Curry though. He obviously didn’t consult her about much while being happy to add her (still) good name under his.
Pointman
Donald says: [David, woodfortrees, . . .]
October 30, 2011 at 8:52 am
“ . . a link to the global average temperature for 1750 to 1880?”
I have to say that your request and the exchanges with others has me baffled. Over the past several years, on WUWT and other sites, numerous postings and discussions have worked on this topic.
Folks have questioned the existence of something called a “global average temperature.” Lack of and changing number of reporting stations, both land and water, is cited as a problem. Glass thermometers physically change as they age. They break and are replaced with nothing to show how the old and the new compare. Locations (and elevations) of stations change. Stations once rural become surrounded by urban development.
Folks have tried many times to make some sense of these records of temperature – equating the result with climate. That equivalence has also been questioned. The current kerfulle shows, again, that the problems with the temperature record will not be resolved.
I’ve read 3+ years of these postings. Search this and related sites for postings – many giving links to the data sets. Try Climate Audit (CA) also. After about 100 hours of reading you may find your answer but I doubt it. Be prepared to NOT find a link to a “global average temperature” (past or present) that will satisfy you.
Perhaps more problematic is that such information, if found, will not answer the question about whether or not human induced CO2 contributions will bring about catastrophic environmental problems.
————– One interesting series:
http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/hadobs/hadcet/
Bruce,
The difference between the 2006 (positive) and 2010 (negative) spikes is:
1) 2010 is much bigger
2) 2010 is flagged as uncertain in the data
3) 2006 matches other datasets, 2010 doesn’t
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/best/from:2006/plot/best-upper/from:2006/plot/best-lower/from:2006/plot/crutem3vgl/from:2006
It’s clearly an outlier caused by incomplete data and we really didn’t ought to be including it in trends
Well, I found my own problem. The difference was not in March. My March number of 0.859 was correct. The problem was April. When I used MS Word to cut the anomaly column out of their download, I ended up cutting off the minus sign for April. I wasn’t clued in because the value without the minus sign fit perfectly with the months around it.
The 2010 values look like this.
1.135
1.086
0.859
-1.035
1.098
This still leaves me wondering about the April value. It’s actually 2C cooler that the other months around it. Anyone want to place a bet about that value being changed in the future?
“stevo says:
October 30, 2011 at 8:10 am
old construction worker: “What the last 10yrs have shown us is CO2 has had little effect if any since 2000.”
Interesting. As I remember, the “hypothesis” or “theory” goes something like this: the more CO2 in the atmosphere the warmer the our World will become. and to prove the point computer generated climate model were developed to show “CO2 drives the Climate” Over the last ten years, the level of CO2 has increased, has it not? Over the same time period the “world temperature” has either been flat or has decline, has it not? So, we are told is “aerosols” are masking the effect of CO2 on “world temperature”. Therefore “aerosols” must have a stronger influence on our “temperature/climate” than CO2 over the last ten years. If “aerosol” has a stronger effect than CO2 from 2000 to 2011, then “aerosol” must have played bigger part than CO2 in our “temperature/ climate” from 1990 to 2000. If not why not? The next thing you know scientist will be tell us that clouds and cloud formation has a stronger effect on “temperature/ climate” than both “aerosol” and “CO2” combined which “I feel” would be closer to the “truth” after having worked outside in our “temperature/climate” for over the last 45 years. So, stop talking out of both sides of your mouth.
Smokey says:
October 30, 2011 at 8:44 am
stevo will never understand. All he does is cherry-pick. Here is a wide range of time scales:
_________________________
Stevo understands perfectly well but it clashes with “THE MESSAGE”
The message is:
1. Watts is a liar.
2. Skeptics are liars.
Those two messages are needed to advance the “Agenda” Money and power for the few and abject poverty and suffering for the rest of us. Stevo is hoping he is in the first group but history shows the intellectuals get stomped after the revolution.
Attacks on Intelligentsia
Chinas Massacre in Tiananmen Square
Pol Pot and the Killing Fields of Cambodia needs no link.
A.C.Osborne: I’m just using the analysis data from http://berkeleyearth.org/analysis.php
Well,
People wanted more data. ha. There are a few points that everyone is missing.
1. RomanM and JeffId also created a method a while ago. That method also showed more warming in recent years.
2. Why does more data show more warming?
The was a huge amount of misunderstanding around the great dying of thermometers. Without actually looking at data people concluded that there was some sort of conspiracy to remove stations that were cooler– that is stations at more extreme latitudes and stations at higher altitude. In looking through datasets you will find that some datasets have series that start 10 years ago. This is data that will be dropped from CRU. It tends to be data that warms. With the improved methods ( Romans and BEST) you now get to use that data. You now get to see that with more data and better methods you show more warming.
If BEST were cooler, nobody here would call it an outlier.
When JeffId and Roman showed warmer.. nobody here called it an outlier.
gotta love selective skepticism.
REPLY: Tsk Mosh, be sure to attribute appropriately. Note that “outlier” was Paul Clark’s description, and he’s hardly a skeptic, nor selective, since he makes all the data available- Anthony
@stevo
I thought you would be hanging around grasping at straws and here you are. How is it going with your attempts to label Anthony a liar because he says the contents of the BEST pre-release is a crock? Even Muller’s co-author thinks it is a crock! Ha ha ha ha! Woo-hoo this is Prime Time entertainment.
The Mail and Guardian is caught in a blatant lie attempting to present the real decline in temperatures as a rise. How Monbiotian. Remember Monbiot? He is the one who made several videos (at public BBC expense) ‘showing’ that the rapidly melting glaciers in the Himalayas would lead to the drying up of the Mekong River.
And now the CRUTEM data has been ordered released – we will get to see even greater perfidy than before committed by the UEA (if that is possible). These days I am beginning to think anything is!
Septic Matthew says:
October 30, 2011 at 9:37 am
Steve From Rockwood: Tom P – you are full of crap.
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/best/last:120
If you honestly believe there is a trend in the last 10 years of BEST data, then congratulations – you are a climate scientist.
OLS produces a positive trend line over the last 10 years, despite an enormous negative outlier. If you eyeball it the data look flat, and the variance is great, nevertheless the trend is positive.
—————————————————–
Matthew – there is no trend in the data. Note the use of the words “statistically significant”. The equation to the line is y = +0.0172x – 33.56 with an R-squared of 0.017 (which means no trend). The year over year variation exceeds +/- 0.5 degrees. The slope is 1/50th of the variation.
If you extrapolate the BEST data to the end of 2010 using a 0.0 temperature anomaly the trend line changes to y = -0.0051x + 11.042 with an amazingly high R-squared of 0.0014.
But you are right Matthew, the trend is statistically insignificantly positive.
Hadley Central England Temperatures (HadCET) versus Berkeley going back to 1659.
HadCet would have formed a large fraction of the Berkeley data in the early 1800s but it is more variable than the whole Berkeley dataset.
12 month moving average first – some of the HadCet temperatures in 1730 for example would be just as high as today – HadCet has really fallen in the last few years – I see a lot of cycles in this data which puts the 1980s increase into perspective.
http://img820.imageshack.us/img820/500/berkeleyvshadcet12mon.png
Now the monthly anomalies which shows just how much the climate can change from month to month – one can see the highest highs and the lowest lows are not much different over time. The 1690s in England were very cold. Other periods were just as warm as today.
http://img405.imageshack.us/img405/7411/berkeleyvshadcetmonthly.png
Jeremy – you’re the one who wants to ignore the vast majority of the climate record. What I know better than you do is how to understand the data. If it’s not statistically significant, don’t draw conclusions from it. Now I do look forward to your explanation of why statistical significance doesn’t actually matter.
old construction worker: “Over the same time period the “world temperature” has either been flat or has decline, has it not?”
I told you before, “Internal variations dominate on this timescale and you cannot say anything about the effect of CO2 since 2000.” What don’t you understand? Over the last ten years, the global warming trend is indistinguishable from zero. It’s indistinguishable from +0.2C per decade. It’s indistinguishable from -0.2C per decade. This is because ten years is TOO SHORT A TIME from which to determine the trend in global temperatures. Only a fool would attempt to draw a conclusion from the last ten years. Don’t be that fool.
[Anthony, Didn’t understand your comment to Steven until I saw the update#2 – thanks!]
I’ve used ‘outlier’ twice recently, once for the April 2010 sample and once for the BEST 30 year trend. I’m pretty confident of the first; the second might be begging the question as Steven suggests; maybe I’ll tone it down. But as far as I can make out BEST has a much higher trend (2.79K/century) over the last 30-odd years than the rest of the land-based datasets, which are themselves considerably higher (2.0-2.25K/century) than the land-ocean ones (1-4-1.6K/century).
But maybe BEST is right? Who knows, I’m just the messenger (and I would really appreciate it if someone could check my process here!)
Paul Clark: “2006 matches other datasets, 2010 doesn’t”
HADCRUT for 2006 shows about .15C off the trendline. BEST shows +1.0 off the trendline.
I would hardly call a 7x difference “matches”.
Julian Williams in Wales says:
October 30, 2011 at 8:46 am
I always poo-poo the word conspiracy, because I do not believe in them. But in this case I am not sure what word I should substitute? stupidity? dim?
The correct word is “Global Governance” and it is no conspiracy.
World Trade Organization Director-General Pascal Lamy: http://www.theglobaljournal.net/article/view/56/
Global Governance 2025: at a critical juncture (by US & EU Intelligence Agencies): http://www.acus.org/event/global-governance-2025-critical-juncture
The UN’s role in Global Governance: http://www.unhistory.org/briefing/15GlobalGov.pdf
An Article on the history: From Carroll Quigley to the UN Millennium Summit
The fact it is now “Out of the Closet” scares the heck out of me.
If you look at the World Trade Organization, ISO (International Standard Organization) look at the United Nations FAO and OIE “Guides to Good Agricultural Practices” and look at “Harmonization” it will shock you at how far along world government is. Input by citizens not required the plan is to get around that by using NGOs with nonvoting membership as “representing “the interests of the people”
USA Food and Drug Admin on “Harmonization”: http://www.fda.gov/InternationalPrograms/HarmonizationInitiatives/default.htm
FAO GAPs:
http://www.fao.org/prods/gap/ [has links]
OIE:
http://www.oie.int/fileadmin/Home/eng/Food_Safety/docs/pdf/GGFP.pdf
http://www.oie.int/doc/ged/D7201.PDF%5DGood Dairy Farming Practice.pdf
Mosher: “In looking through datasets you will find that some datasets have series that start 10 years ago. This is data that will be dropped from CRU. It tends to be data that warms.”
Why would new stations that were dropped show more warming than old stations that were kept?
What Roman and Jeff did was for their own benefit. No one here knows if their results are meaningless or not meaningless. No one here knows, for example, what they did about UHI.
http://www.eike-klima-energie.eu/uploads/media/How_natural.pdf
This paper was sent to Judy and needs to be read by everybody.
How Natural is the Recent Centennial
Warming? An Analysis of 2249 Surface
Temperature Records
Electronic version of an article published in International Journal of Modern Physics
C, Vol. 22, No. 10, doi:10.1142/S0129183111016798 (2011), copyright World Scienti c
Aethelred says:
October 30, 2011 at 9:10 am
I always poo-poo the word conspiracy, because I do not believe in them. But in this case I am not sure what word I should substitute? stupidity? dim?
Why do bank robbers rob banks? Why do politicians seek office? Where greed and lust for power exist no conspiracy is necessary.
_______________________________________
AMEN!
And when you own billions and are bored silly the idea of World Power sounds like an interesting new chess game to you and your billionaire buddies.
Ordinary humans are not even considered as “Human” by the “Chess Players”
http://www.alternet.org/investigations/147414/how_goldman_sachs_caused_a_%27silent_mass_murder,%27_gambling_on_starvation_in_the_developing_world/?page=entire
I can never understand why anyone balks at the idea there may be some out there who lust after the power of a world government after Alexander the Great, Genghis Khan, Napolian, Hitler…..
All I see is that they have gotten a lot more subtle.
With the BEST April data point updated I get a trend since 2001 of 0.036 C per decade. But if I look at the trend since 1998, it is 0.156 C per decade. When I compare that April 2010 data point from BEST to the data for HadCrut3 it looks like this:
BEST
March 0.859
April -1.035
May 1.098
HadCrut3
March 0.583
April 0.571
May 0.516
UAH and RSS also show no drastic drop in April. Either the BEST April data point shows an error in the BEST code or it shows an error in recording of the results. I should note that the BEST land data has about three times the variation that the other souces of global data have.
My suggestion is that we don’t get into a feeding frenzy about the GWPF chart, because we may well pay for it later.
The Sunday Mail also had a good story on shale gas versus wind power:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/home/moslive/article-2053686/UK-shale-gas-Coal-industry-tatters-gas-running-alternative.html
Now factor in Anthony’s work and what is the result?
Dr. Ball saw through the BS even before Curry’s admission
http://drtimball.com/2011/the-best-is-the-worst-global-temperature-measures-redux-not/
REPLY: And still he can’t put up a blogroll, even though wordpress provides an easy to use tool for that. – Anthony
“Yesterday Prof Muller insisted that neither his claims that there has not been a standstill, nor the graph, were misleading because the project had made its raw data available on its website, enabling others to draw their own graphs.”
Muller has adopted a form of logic unique to the climate science industry. It is maybe a kind of post-normal scientific standard. Arguments and assertions are by definition not “misleading” if the data behind them is otherwise available.
I have heard this form of argument many times before. It is a defense mechanism for climate scientists who know they are being misleading.
I would like to see these scientific frauds picked apart by lawyers in a law suit.
Gail Combs says:
October 30, 2011 at 6:09 am
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Here’s more from Eisenhower, the liberals never seem to mention:
“In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the militaryindustrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.
We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted. Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together.
Akin to, and largely responsible for the sweeping changes in our industrial-military posture, has been the technological revolution during recent decades.
In this revolution, research has become central; it also becomes more formalized, complex, and costly. A steadily increasing share is conducted for, by, or at the direction of, the Federal government.
Today, the solitary inventor, tinkering in his shop, has been overshadowed by task forces of scientists in laboratories and testing fields. In the same fashion, the free university, historically the fountainhead of free ideas and scientific discovery, has experienced a revolution in the conduct of research. Partly because of the huge costs involved, a government contract becomes virtually a substitute for intellectual curiosity. For every old blackboard there are now hundreds of new electronic computers.
The prospect of domination of the nation’s scholars by Federal employment, project allocations, and the power of money is ever present
and is gravely to be regarded.
Yet, in holding scientific research and discovery in respect, as we should, we must also be alert to the equal and opposite danger that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientifictechnological elite.”