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:
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 ?