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:
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