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:
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”!
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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?
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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:
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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