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:
Google have banned any bad story about Muller check on “Global Warming”
REPLY: That’s pretty cryptic, what do you mean specifically? – Anthony
One thing I am interested in seeing over the coming years: On Dr. Curry’s blog she has an analysis of the BEST data where it appears that there is a step up in temperatures after the 1998 el nino event and not the gradual rise that comes through when various smoothing and trending techniques are used. ( this article: http://judithcurry.com/2011/10/29/tropospheric-and-surface-temperatures/ )
I am very interested in seeing if we get any step downward after la nina events. I am going to guess not because actually, la nina events increase ocean heat absorption (even with cooler surface temps) due to reduced clouds. But maybe a la nina event during a weak solar cycle will have more clouds than usual, I don’t know. In any case, it will be interesting to see if we have any stepping down of temperatures that look anything like the step up we saw in 1998.
Muller admits there has been no warming for ten years. He attemps to use an 10 year average of temperature history to hide the decline. All global warming models postulate accelerating temps and sea level rise. Instead the data reveals deceleration. Last year sea levels dropped! Why doesnt Muller plot the acceleration of temps or sea level rise. This would prove quite inconveinant. NOAA blames the sea level decline on increased precipitation over land. If sea level drops then not only is mass contribution from glaciers decreasing but thermal expansion from increased ocean heat is declining. The CRU now recognizes that solar influences the Arctic vortex and the NAO and that now it has switched from thirty years of mainly positive to likely 30 years of mainly negative. Even Muller pointed out the NAO correlation. Continuing deceleration is the collaspe of the global warming hoax. I believe Muller has been under pressure from polictical forces to provide the story of skeptic turned warmist. However I believe he is leaving morsels of doubt. The enlistment of the Koch brothers was certainly a ruse. Unfortunately for Muller and his handlers the report is backfiring. While Muller postulates one degree of warming globally many parts of the US have declined almost 10 degrees in ten years. After thirty years of increasing winter snowfalls in the US and record breaking cold the last several winters the average Joe is no longer listening.
Wow! Just wow! Now the big question on all of our minds is this: Will Dr. Muller be successful in shooting himself in the other foot?
Yes, this is a popcorn moment. And we really do need Bob Costas doing a play-by-play.
Since the issue of the polar vortex and NAO has come up again I’ll repeat this post from another thread:
Just try this as to how solar changes could affect surface and tropospheric temperatures by varying the amount of solar energy taken up by the oceans.:
Envisage a warming effect in the mesosphere and stratosphere as a weak sun sends less ozone destroying chemicals down through the descending polar vortex. That is the reverse effect from standard climatology which assumes a cooling mesosphere and stratosphere when the sun is less active.
However it is only by getting a warming effect at high altitudes above the pole that one can obstruct, break up and redistribute the downward flow of the polar vortex in the way that is observed when the jets become more meridional.
If one can accept that contention then it all falls neatly into place doesn’t it ?
It also accords with Joanna Haigh’s comments about increasing ozone above 45km from 2004 to 2007 whilst the sun was becoming less active.
Once the downward flow of the polar vortex has been split up and redistributed so that the surface pressure elements are pushed equatorward for a net increase in global cloudiness and albedo then less solar energy enters the oceans and the Earth system as a whole starts to cool.
The opposite thermal effect occurs when the sun is more active.
I hink that is the answer to the entire climate conundrum.
Whatever way one tries to cut it we cannot get the observed changes in surface pressure distribution without a warmer stratosphere at a time of less active sun and a cooler stratosphere at a time of more active sun.. After all, the polar vortex did become more positive with more poleward jets during the late 20th century period of warming at a time of more active sun.
A shorter term example is the phenomenon known as a sudden stratospheric warming. It is well accepted that short term warming of the stratosphere above the poles does split up and redistribute the polar vortex in exactly the same way as is observed on a longer timescale when the jets become more meridional such as occurred in the LIA.
I think the logic is sound and the evidence incontrovertible.
The models need to be adjusted to reflect that reality and the albedo changes that accompany it. Then we will start to get some more accurate ‘projections’.
Stephen.Wilde
Copyright 31/10/2011
Tens of billions of dollars (grants from the deep pockets of governments) have been wasted in futile efforts to prove that added CO2 caused Global Warming. An unpaid engineer with a desk-top computer and using simple engineering analysis has discovered what really determined the average global temperature history since 1895. Find out the cause at http://climaterealists.com/index.php?tid=145&linkbox=true (see especially the pdfs made public on 4/10/10, and 9/24/11).
Gary Pearse – That is exactly what I found. The influence of added atmospheric carbon dioxide is insignificant.
It’s interesting after the fact to go back and read the comments made just after BEST was first announced. kramer, for one, was extremely skeptical:
kramer says:
March 22, 2011 at 6:18 pm
“I don’t trust this BEST group (and I hope I’m wrong in this.) And I wouldn’t be surprised if [they] come out with the same results or maybe even worse warming than what Hansen shows.”
Earlier, I was a bit more hopeful:
jorgekafkazar says:
March 6, 2011 at 9:19 am
“If it’s really science, then let the chips fall where they may. However, I distrust temperature analysis as a means of determining whether the Earth as a whole is heating, cooling, or remaining the same. High temperatures can often be more an indicator of heat shedding mechanisms than of global warming. It’s the net energy flux that counts.
“The challenge we face is measuring a very tiny putative drift in a widely-ranging signal with a high degree of chaos, superimposed on an ice-age rebound trend along with multidecadal swings and random volcanic spurts of largely unknown effect. Nor will the presence of this drift, if established with any statistical certainty, prove the AGW case. Correlation is not causation, and no amount of hand-waving will make it such.”
Dr. Mole-er owes us all an apology for this debacle, plus withdrawal of the paper.
April 2010
2 weeks of volcanic ash (Eyjafjallajökull )in the N. Hemisphere.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2010_eruptions_of_Eyjafjallaj%C3%B6kull
There’s a couple of problems with the GWPF graph. It’s not 10 years (120 months), but runs from Jan 2001 to May 2010 (113 months). The time-series is already so short that interannual variability will have a big say in what the linear trend will be, but starting and ending at different times of the year could also introduce a seasonal bias. To avoid this it’s best to run time series in 12 month series, whether you start from January and end in December, or start in June and end in May and so on.
Running the data for 120 months of straight calendar years, January 200 to December 2009 (01/00 to 12/09), I got a trend of 0.26C/decade. That’s not flat at all. Looks like some more testing is needed.
Try something closer to the GWPF analysis, by running from Jun 01, 2001 to May 31, 2010, the end of BEST data. Just trying to avoid any potential seasonal bias by starting and ending at the same point in the calendar year. The result changes dramatically just by offsetting the calendar by a few months – the trend is now flat, same as GWPF.
That’s a big discrepancy for such a slight change. So what are the two problems?
Firstly, and less importantly to the two problems I see with GWPF the analysis – I remembered a comment on the April 2010 anomaly and checked it out. It is a huge swing downwards. In the UAH, RSS, GISS and HadCRU data sets April 2010 doesn’t depart much from the month before and after it. But in the BEST dataset the April 2010 anomaly (-1.035) is a value not seen for 50 years. The last time a monthly anomaly gets under -1C is 1960 in the BEST database. Now although it’s rare, a month to month temperature swing of more than 2C is unusual in the latter part of the data set (where uncertainty bars are smaller). Here, for example, is the BEST monthly plot from 1979 (picked for no other reason than that is the satellite period). You can see the anomalousness of the 04/10 spike. Extend the record further back, and you’ll see one or two others like it – but you won’t see the surface records mismatching so badly. Here, for example, is a big swing in 1959 against GISS and HadCRU land records. The BEST anomaly is the again the largest departure, but the others also depart strongly from their regular pattern. Whereas the excursion April 2010 is very slight in the other datasets (UAH and RSS included for good measure), but very extreme in BEST. I think it’s likely this value is wrong in the BEST downloadable data set (I couldn’t say why).
So, out of interest, I changed the BEST April 2010 in deference to the woodfortrees index (average of GISS/HadCRU/UAH/RSS), by averaging the month before and the month after (April anomaly = 0.9785). But I wanted to be conservative with the change, making it roughly equivalent to, but still lower than, the other record in terms of the departure from the month before and after. averaging just happened to do that, as compared to the woodfortrees index, so it seemed like a reasonable choice – just for a test. The result is a decadal trend of 0.12C, from June 2001 to May 2010. I haven’t checked, but I’m very confident this is larger than the trend (and positive) for other data sets for the same period.
I then did a regression analysis of the period which GWPF chose with the changed April anomaly, even though I think it is not a good choice. If you don’t run 12 monthly analyses, seasonal biases may distort the trend. Anyway this is what I got for Jan 2001 to May 2010, with the ‘adjusted’ April 2010 – trend is 0.13C/decade.
I’m not saying anything absolute about this adjusted anomaly, just testing ideas.
From this point I’m plotting after I write my tests down here. I’m not writing about it after the fact.
I’ll try a regression comparison for a full 20 years (1981 – 2000) and then 30 years (again from 1981) to the last data point in BEST’s temperature time series, leaving the weird April anomaly as it is. If the trends are higher in BEST’s data than compared to the other records, even with the April excursion, that should end doubt that BEST is warmer than the other data sets in the naughties. A longer time series will dampen the effect of noise and reveal more of the signal.
For 20 years, June 1991 to May 2010, the result is that BEST trend higher. This leaves little doubt in my mind that Willis Eschenbach was right when he said BEST temp record ends higher than the other data sets in the last decade (even though the actual ten year trend for the last 120 months in that data set is flat – depending on which exact months you use – the result is NOT statistically significant for any ten year period).
It’s not really necessary to plot the 30 year trend at this point, but I’ll do it to complete my queries. Not unexpectedly, the BEST trend is greater than the other data sets over 30 years.
This is the result even with the weird, highly negative 2010 April BEST anomaly left as is.
One more test to do after I type this sentence – compare BEST’s time temp trend from June 1981 to May 2000, and then from June 1981 to May 2010.
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/best/from:1981.42/plot/best/from:1981.42/to:2000.33/trend/plot/best/from:1981.42/trend
Boom – no slowdown in global temperature trends. The reason you can’t see both trend lines is that they are lying on top of each other (just off-set one of them by 0.1 to see).
A caveat is warranted here. Though the 30-year and 20-year trends are statistically significant, the difference between them is NOT (the difference being only 10 years, which is not statistically significant by itself). The most I could say is that it SEEMS that climate warming hasn’t slowed (or sped up) in the last decade according to the BEST data.
To sum up, I think GWPF erred in two ways in their analysis. First, they didn’t analyse in 12-month packets, leaving open the potential for seasonal bias. Secondly and more erroneously, they only analysed 10 years, which gives you the trend for that ten years, and not how that decade compares to the ones previous. When you run the data for 20 or 30 years (or more) it becomes obvious that BEST has a higher naughties period than the other data sets, as their products show. As we know climate is measured over more than a single decade (this is a statistical reality, not an ideological choice), Willis is right to say that BEST runs higher in the last decade than the other data sets, and Muller is not incorrect to say the BEST data show no slowdown in global temps. The 2000s are much warmer than the 1990s and 1980s. GWPF err by running a trend analysis for ten years in isolation to the previous ten years.
I also think that the April 2010 anomaly is an unreal value in BEST’s downloadable data set, and may not reflect the data they worked with in their time series. If not, that is regrettable but not a hanging offence as their data is currently preliminary, and labelled as such. However, this has no significant impact on what I think the real problems are with GWPF’s analysis.
No kidding…Muller stank from miles away.
I do not know whether Muller has lost the plot.
This is nothing more than a temperature data set and in itself it tells us nothing (completely nada) as to the cause of any temperature variation from year to year, and/or cause underpinning any trend in rising temperature.
How this temperature set in itself can be said to prove manmade global warming beggars belief, such assertion is beyond rediculous.
Perhaps BEST should have overlayed CO2 levels as from 1800 to see what apparent correlation there is between levels of CO2 and temperature. Had they done that, it would have showed little correlation. Correlation does not establish causation but lack of correlation is a serious problem to any theory based upon a link between X and Y where as a matter of basic physics an increase in X must result in an increase in Y.
It only hurts when I laugh ….
Richard Verney
This is CET with CO2 overlaid.
http://c3headlines.typepad.com/.a/6a010536b58035970c0120a7c87805970b-pi
tonyb
EFS_Junior: I currently derive best-upper and best-lower as (value +/- uncertainty/2), but you think it should be just +/- uncertainty. I’m a bit surprised at this because I’m having a hard enough time matching the BEST graph as it is! Can you point me at why you came to that conclusion?
Nick Stokes: Thanks for the pointer to the April 2010 undersampling – that is as I thought, and it means any trend calculation that includes it is bogus.
Zeke: I’m using CRUTEM3VGL and GISS dTs – but Gavin Schmidt has just mailed me to point out that the latter is not land-only, it’s land data extrapolated over land-ocean. I’ll reclassify it. Can you explain your concerns more?
So its a battle between stevo, with the nice easy explanation, and the rest, with complexity coming out of their…..
Ten years isn’t long enough to say anything – so there is no reason to believe that recent warming has changed – no really, there isn’t. It may have changed, but there is no evidence to show that it has.
Sensible people will wait until they say, “Its stopped warming”. Or at least they should….
“Anna Lemma says: October 30, 2011 at 10:11 pm
Yes, and there was one file (in your same comment, IIRC) that automatically displayed the stations as they were added year by year. That’s the one that shows how few sources of temperature measurement there were for the first 150+ years.”
Well, there is a text list here of the stations that started before 1850, in order of commencement. But the KMZ file can display them in GE in order (to the nearest decade or more) just by tinkering with the folders. Turn them all off – then click open pre-1850, then 1851-1880 etc.
Tilo Reber says: October 30, 2011 at 9:50 pm
“After a year and a half, why only 47 Arctic stations when the rest of the world has the rest of the data. And why does the data for May look more or less correct?”
I’ve no idea why the SCAR set only – the others would have been available at the same time. They aren’t necessarily biased relative to global temp – just very hit-or-miss. They hit once, nissed once.
barry says: October 31, 2011 at 1:11 am
“I also think that the April 2010 anomaly is an unreal value in BEST’s downloadable data set, and may not reflect the data they worked with in their time series.”
It probably didn’t affect the analysis the way BEST do it, which would downweight by the very large uncertainty. But it certainly affects simple OLS.
New Satellite Data Contradicts Carbon Dioxide Climate Theory
Industrialized nations emit far less carbon dioxide than the Third World, according to latest evidence from Japan’s Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA).
Global warming alarmism is turned on its head and the supposed role of carbon dioxide in climate change may be wrong, if the latest evidence from Japan’s scientists is to be believed.
Japanese national broadcaster, NHK World, broke the astonishing story on their main Sunday evening news bulletin (October 30, 2011). Television viewers learned that the country’s groundbreaking IBUKU satellite, launched in June 2009, appears to have scorched an indelible hole in conventional global warming theory.
http://www.suite101.com/news/new-satellite-data-contradicts-carbon-dioxide-climate-theory-a394975
Scientific Online Letters on the Atmosphere
http://www.jstage.jst.go.jp/article/sola/7/0/161/_pdf
http://www.jaxa.jp/projects/sat/gosat/index_e.html
Nick Stokes says:
October 30, 2011 at 8:27 pm
It’s not a negative sign. The huge down-spike in April, …., in fact happens because in April/May 2010 BEST has just 47 stations, all Antarctic.
—————————-
Well, if that is the case, then we have to throw out ALL the Berkeley records until someone re-analyzes what they have done and what they have included and what errors there are in the database.
These months ARE used in the averages in their published papers/charts.
It most definitely needs to be reviewed first now.
Just like most people have been saying.
@ur momisugly M.A.Vukcevic About “heat transfer”: Why is it so that “heat transfer” is proportional to electric conductivity?, perhaps we are giving names to one and the same energy…
orkneygal, it makes total sense that a hyper CO2 producing pump (which probably is in a net CO2 increasing oscillation mode) is balanced elsewhere by a hyper CO2 absorbing sink (which is probably in a net CO2 reduction oscillation mode). That the emitter is equatorial and the absorber is further North/South also makes sense.
These opposing conditions, many times in synchronous opposition to one another, provide the sustaining energy to keep things going. In other words, we NEED the pump and the sink. What we have been hanging our AGW hysterical hat on is the equatorial pump measurements centered right where the natural equatorial CO2 pump is, and have ignored the higher latitude sink measurements, giving the false impression of human involvement.
Mona Loa is measuring a natural equatorial CO2 pump. Long live the pump me thinks.
I have downloaded the BEST data and looked at a few UK temperature site’s results & some other countries as well.
I have assumed that the data is in sequential Month order throughout the years.
If that is the case then the data has some very serious problems, at many sites quite a few years have the highest average temperatures in JANUARY & October.
In Greenwich UK, January 1962 11.004, June 9.404, July 9.468 October 11.239.
In Oxford UK, January 1974 12.055, February 10.860, June 9.561, July 9.486 November 10.665 & December 13.578.
In Canada a site has the temperature for January 1947, 10.25 only beaten by August 11.183 and October? 11.629, whereas June was 7.109 & July 7.369.
This pattern appears throughout the records so WHERE IS THE QUALITY CONTROL?
How can this dataset be the best?
I agree, this could be another study that overturns the AGW apple cart. What I find astonishing is the lack of reaction to this paper. I would think the howl from the Climate community would be deafening. After all, it shows that current mitigation efforts are exactly, the opposite, of what efforts are indicated by this study.
This is a great paper illustrating the danger, of the misapplication, of the precautionary principle. Always look before you leap. GK
Pamela Gray says:
October 31, 2011 at 7:01 am
“orkneygal, it makes total sense that a hyper CO2 producing pump (which probably is in a net CO2 increasing oscillation mode) is balanced elsewhere by a hyper CO2 absorbing sink (which is probably in a net CO2 reduction oscillation mode). That the emitter is equatorial and the absorber is further North/South also makes sense.”
Well said. And once again this new information drives home the truth that so-called climate science, as controlled by the IPCC, is sorely lacking in its empirical component. As the Japanese satellite shows, climate science simply has not done the work of collecting the necessary empirical information. The empirical information contradicts the existing “a priori” science practiced by the IPCC and used to fuel its propaganda war against the developed world.
Friends:
I have now read the Daily Mail article and (more importantly) the related editorial in the same edition of that newspaper. Both are staggering in their importance.
Since the early 1980s I have been calling for scientific honesty and fighting against the irrational AGW-scare here in the UK. The Daily Mail article is the first rational report of the issues in a UK national news medium that I have seen in all that time. And the Daily Mail editorial is equally fair: it concludes saying;
“Given this contradiction, isn’t it time for the Energy Secretary, Chris Huhne, and other ministers, to at least open their minds about climate change?
They are – many would say arrogantly – sure they are right and stubbornly parrot the scientists as they make the case for being ‘the greenest government ever’. But what if they are wrong?”
Such questions in a national newspaper are a sea change in UK media coverage of the AGW-scare. But the decade of stasis to global warming was always likely to induce such a change.
And it can now be hoped that this is the start of ‘leak in the dyke’ which will result in a flood of factual reporting of AGW, climate change and climate science. Hence, it is not surprising that this thread has suffered a deluge of troll comments from the likes of Nick Stokes, John Brookes and steveo. Their trolling is a clear attempt to stem the ‘leak’, but the ‘leak’ can be expected to increase if the existing stasis to global warming continues.
Richard