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:
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
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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/
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Bad Manners says:
What’s wrong with that – it’s in the time-honoured tradition of putting your mouth where your money is !
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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.