Guest Post by Willis Eschenbach 
Folks have said that I’m far too hard on Dr. Richard Muller of the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature (BEST Project). So let me stick to the facts. I fear I lost all respect for the man when he broke a confidentiality agreement with Anthony Watts, not just in casual conversation, but in testimony before Congress. So there’s your first fact.
[NOTE: ACTUAL FIGURE 1 PHOTO REMOVED BY THE DEPARTMENT OF FACTUALITY FOR INSUFFICIENT FACTITIOUSNESS.]
Figure 1. Actual un-retouched photo of a verified fact.
Next fact. Dr. Muller has put in motion an impressive publicity machine, including an op-ed piece in the Wall Street Journal, to draw attention to his four new papers. He did this before the papers had been through peer review. He has been criticized by many people for doing this. I among others have wondered, why release the papers to with a big PR blitz before peer review? It made no sense to me. What is his official response to these criticisms? From the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature web site FAQ:
Why didn’t Berkeley Earth wait for peer review?
Some people think that peer review consists of submitting a paper to a journal and waiting for the anonymous comments of referees. Traditional peer review is much broader than that and much more open. In science, when you have a new result, your first step is to present it to your colleagues by giving presentations, talks at local and international conferences, colloquia, and by sending out “preprints.” In fact, every academic department in the sciences had a preprint library where people would read up on the latest results. If they found something to disagree with, they would talk to or write the authors. Preprint libraries were so popular that, if you found someone was not in the office or lab, the first place you would search would be in the preprint library. Recently these rooms have disappeared, their place taken over by the internet. The biggest preprint library in the world now is a website, arXiv.org.
Such traditional and open peer review has many advantages. It usually results in better papers in the archival journals, because the papers are widely examined prior to publication. It does have a disadvantage, however, that journalists can also pick up preprints and report on them before the traditional peer-review process is finished.
Now, that stuff about it being like traditional and open peer review among colleagues, that sounds great. Heck, it even sounds progressive, it seems to include the blogosphere, who could oppose that? It’s all logical, or at least seens possible, until you hear what Dr. Muller’s unofficial explanation is for the big PR push. Judith Curry reports it like this, as a result of talking about it with Dr. Muller:
… Second, the reason for the publicity blitz seems to be to get the attention of the IPCC. To be considered in the AR5, papers need to be submitted by Nov, which explains the timing. The publicity is so that the IPCC can’t ignore BEST. Muller shares my concerns about the IPCC process, and gatekeeping in the peer review process. SOURCE
There’s a few problems with that explanation.
• If Dr. Muller’s real reason for not waiting for peer review is so that it can get into the IPCC report … then why is he being so very much less than accurate and candid on his website?
• Dr. Muller is claiming that somehow the IPCC is not aware of the BEST project, that he needs to advertise because the IPCC scientists never heard of him … … I’m just hanging the facts out on the line here. You can decide if he needs to advertise.
• Dr. Muller is also claiming “gatekeeping” by the IPCC, presumably to keep out climate alarmists like himself … I’m just reporting here, sticking to the facts. [FACT] If there is gatekeeping in the IPCC to keep out climate alarmists, the guard at the gate post is not asleep. He is pining for the fjords.[/FACT]
• There is no IPCC deadline in November of any kind. To be eligible for assessment by WG1, the cutoff date is not until next summer.The papers have to be submitted for publication before August 2012. And even then, the papers do not have to be published until the following year, by March 15, 2013. Here’s the timetable
IPCC AR5 Timetable
CMIP5 and WG1 milestones and schedule
2011
• February: First model output expected to be available for analysis.
• July 18-22: Second Lead Authors Meeting (LA2) • October 24-28: WCRP Open Science Conference will include a CMIP5 session (Denver, Colorado)
• December 16 – February 10, 2012: Expert Review of the First Order Draft (FOD)
2012
• April 16-20: Third Lead Authors Meeting (LA3)
• July 31: By this date papers must be submitted for publication to be eligible for assessment by WG1.
• October 5 – November 30: Expert and Government Review of the Second Order Draft (SOD)
So why the hurry to get these papers out now? Why the sudden emphasis on the manyfold virtues of pre-prints? My best guess is that Dr. Muller wants to get his papers considered by the December-February Expert Review of the First Order Draft.
The reason I say that, is there’s an oddity about the first order draft (FOD). To be in the final IPCC Fifth Assessment Report (AR5), in theory the work must be peer-reviewed. The only exceptions seem to be for WWF opinion pieces.
But to be considered in the IPCC FOD, the rules are much more lax (op. cit.). For the FOD the bar is lower because
preprints, papers submitted, accepted, in press, and published are all eligible for consideration
Which seems to me to be the final link in the chain connecting why he is talking so much about pre-prints on his website, while at the same time telling Judith that it’s a propaganda show to convince the IPCC to notice him. (In passing, does the push for preprints mean he hasn’t submitted the paper yet? Unknown but possible …)
Disquieting conclusions from the above:
First, from Dr. Muller’s actions it seems to be considered business as usual to try to persuade the IPCC to consider your claims by putting on a huge media blitz so that they can’t “ignore” you. Presumably this is because if the New York Times prints it, it must be science.
Is this how low we’ve fallen? Is this the scientific process the IPCC really uses to select what to consider? I don’t know … but clearly Dr. Muller thinks it is the process the IPCC uses, and that it is a legitimate way to get in the door.
Second, while solid, verifiable pre-print results might be worth a look-in for a first-order draft, these four papers were released without the accompanying data. You might have thought that Dr. Muller released the data when he released the four papers … but if so, you have been fooled by Dr. Muller. I was fooled for a bit, too, I didn’t read the fine print.
Someone pointed out that the bottom of the README file released by Dr. Muller it says:
… This release is not recommended for third party research use as the known bugs may lead to erroneous conclusions due to incomplete understanding of the data set’s current limitations.
In other words, to match the pre-prints, we have pre-data. Isn’t science wonderful?
Now, recall that Dr. Muller’s explanation of putting his papers out into the world right now was to subject them to “traditional and open peer review”. Recall that he is out hyping the results of these papers to anyone who will give him some publicity. He is discussing them in the media. And he is claiming he has put them out for “traditional and open” peer review.
Perhaps Dr. Muller can explain why either we or the media should believe his results when we cannot subject them to any kind of review at all without the code and data.
To summarize, here’s what I think are facts:
• The four papers appear to have been published in pre-print to be eligible for consideration for the first order draft of the IPCC report.
• A very different explanation for that was given in public on the BEST website.
• Dr. Muller thinks that the way to get the four papers into the IPCC report is a full-on media blitz.
• Dr. Muller may be right about that.
• The four papers have been prepared from some unknown subset of a “buggy” dataset.
• The subset was determined by looking at the “current limitations” of the buggy dataset.
• We do not know what the rules for extracting the subset were.
• We do not know what the current limitations of the buggy dataset might be.
• The actual data has not been released.
• Code for the individual papers has not been released.
• Their “homogenized” dataset, containing the result of all of their scalpel slices and adjustments of all types, has not been released.
• Finally, the dataset that they did release was not even the raw data. It was processed by removing the monthly averages … but we don’t know what those averages were, or how they were constructed.
So, despite a promise of transparency, to great fanfare BEST has released four pre-prints, based on admittedly “buggy” data, without the accompanying code or data to back them up.
That’s what I think are the facts in the case. I leave you to draw any conclusions.
My regards to all.
w.
Doug in Seattle says:
November 1, 2011 at 4:05 pm
What is the “It” that you say may not have been my hope?
And also, you say you expect that we will do “exactly that”, but what is the “that” that you expect us to do?
My high school english teacher used to whack my papers with her red pen and write “unclear antecedent” … you have two of them.
w.
PS—my point is that no matter how it plays out with Steve and I and others, for a man claiming “transparency” as Muller is, releasing these papers without the code and data hardly polishes his reputation for honesty …
Since there are already questions about the quality of the data realeased so far, that would seem to put paid to EVERY claim he made. Still amazed that people believe that he was a sceptic. Doesn’t anyone use search engines anymore??
stirfry says:
November 1, 2011 at 4:21 pm
Thanks, stirfry. Unfortunately, neither of those issue you mention were problems that had I pointed to, they have nothing to do with the issues I raised.
w.
The IPCC? It’s one thing to rush to the head of the line to get a ticket for the Titanic, but to climb aboard when the iceberg is already looming? (All) Saints preserve us!
So much for global warmers requiring peer review of studies they use.
Muller’s campaign is working. Muller was interviewed by Ann Thompson near the end of her piece on tonight’s MSNBC news. She leads in with the repeat of the extreme weather mantra with the east coast snowstorm as the lead-in. After interviewing 3 others, one discussing ocean temperatures, then Dr. Jerry Neil of NCAR (sp?) and John Nielsen- Gammon (Texas State Climatologist) she cites BEST study, flashes it’s website and states that it “finds global warming is real and that the science behind it is not impacted by bias, bad data, or cities that act as heat islands.” Muller only gets to state that “The existence of global warming is, I think, pretty much beyond dispute. We have closed the last remaining questions on that.”
It’s at the msnbc nightly news site.
I am pretty sure that the datasets, when available, will be examined by hordes of informed and uninformed amateur scientists.
In many ways Dr. Richard Muller has been incredibly brave, he has staked his whole reputation and future on the robustness and integrity of the data, the various algorithms and the statistics.
He is an awful lot braver than I am, I am happy with the standard of my work, but I know how the sausage is made.
@ur momisugly Garacka –
This quote by Muller clinches it – ““The existence of global warming is, I think, pretty much beyond dispute. We have closed the last remaining questions on that.”
Muller is clearly a skeptic who would not do or say anything that might seem to support the CAGW by CO2 concept.
/sarc
I think you’ve accidentally posted in the wrong thread, Willis. This appears relevant to the thread on model forecasting abilities.
Otherwise, just wanted to say that I enjoy reading your posts. 🙂
[REPLY: Thanks, Graeme, I moved it. w.]
Thanks Willis,
We know there are some errors in the preliminary temperature dataset released by Berkeley. For one obvious example, the last two months are 47 Antarctic stations only (but these months carry through in the moving averages they produced).
There will most certainly be many, many other errors. The dataset and the programming was not ready for Prime Time, yet Prime Time is exactly what they sought and got.
Secondly, I just do not accept the data of good rural stations versus the average stations they presented in one of their seminal papers. While it has been spun as good rural stations against poor cited stations, they actually only compared “something” (we don’t know what) to the average stations. Second, they used a 1950 to 2010 base period for this analysis while everyone (including Anthony) told them it was only good for 1980 to 2010. Why get this part so wrong? It was easy to do it right.
In addition, once we move the debate to Land Only stations, the Urban Heat Island almost certainly becomes a measureable quantity in the series affecting the trend and Berkeley obviously made a mistake in how they carried through this analysis. The Urban Heat Island is just too large, mathematically, to show up as Zero. It is NOT. When the oceans are included, it might be a small number, but not for the Land series.
Most importantly, the data they released is so close to the NCDC GHCN record that it IS the NCDC record. Berkeley says they used the Raw unadjusted data but the NCDC has published papers showing how much their adjustments add up to. For the US, it is a full +0.425C. Yet Berkeley using the Raw data is virtually the same. For some reason, the NCDC has remained completely silent on Berkeley’s numbers. It doesn’t add up unless the NCDC co-operated in the Berkeley effort or the GHCN Raw data is already the adjusted data.
I won’t buy it, even if it is on sale.
How about THAT preprint obtained by Seth Borenstein?
“Freakish weather disasters – from the sudden October snowstorm in the Northeast U.S. to the record floods in Thailand – are striking more often. And global warming is likely to spawn more similar weather extremes at a huge cost, says a draft summary of an international climate report obtained by The Associated Press.”
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/world/global-warming-worsens-weather-extremes-climate-panel-to-say/article2220698/
Featuring Meehl, Gavin, Andrew, Jeff, Kerry etc…
Dave says:
November 1, 2011 at 3:46 pm
Willis>
Doesn’t seem to have occurred to you that perhaps this is all in order to get an accurate temperature record into AR5 – a cunning and adversarial skeptic might deliberately make unsupportable warmist claims to get the data into the IPCC’s mind as suitable for their cause,
_______________________
No WAY!
Not with Muller’s Connections.
From Muller & Assoc.
A key word is SUSTAINABLE This ties to the UN Agenda 21, Ged Davis, Shell Oil and the IPCC.
Climategate e-mail on Sustainable Development (B1) Ged Davis wrote Sustainable Development (B1) scenario is mentioned.
Here is who Ged Davis is (Shell Oil executive with IPCC connection)
If you then go to the listing of the TEAM at Muller Assoc. you find. Arthur Rosenfeld, Former California Energy Commissioner among others.
Further down you find Marlan Downey
Click on Marlan Downey, Oil and Gas Executive
And we are BACK TO SHELL OIL!
“Marlan Downey, Oil and Gas Executive
….. Former President of the international subsidiary of Shell Oil…..”
If we follow the Shell Oil connection, we find Queen Beatrix of the Dutch House of Orange and Lord Victor Rothschild are the two largest shareholders of RD/Shell.
Prince Bernhard of the Dutch Royal Family is heavily tied to the World Wildlife Fund (WWF)
If you have followed WUWT at all you should be aware that CRU East Anglia UK was originally funded by Royal Dutch Shell and British Petroleum.
Gets positively incestuous doesn’t it?
I left this on Judith Curry’s site.. I felt it appropriate for here as well..
Bill H | November 1, 2011 at 8:53 pm | Reply
I just see a real scientist being taken up and trusting those with an agenda.
the end log is something you write to hype your findings… Muller wrote an end log when the science is incomplete… this screams of agenda and reminds me of others who have done the same: IPCC, EAU, MET, CRU, Jones, Mann, Briffa… and the list goes on. Who writes the end before doing the science?
All in all BEST is only to going to verify that which we already know.. the earth is warming as it has been for over 10,000 years.. That warming is within the standard deviations on the over all long term trend.
so the amount of warming that can be attributed to man is unknown.. BEST will do nothing more to reach that conclusion as it in and of itself in incomplete on a global scale..
I sincerely hope that Curry is not being used. This has the ploy of “she’s a skeptic and she agrees”. a very bad precedent when Muller has shown he will write things and publish them without her knowledge and consent.
Muller has left a very bad taste in my mouth.. I dont trust him. in my opinion neither should she.
Bill
Oh I forgot to mention Dr. Muller is President and Elisabeth Muller is CEO of Muller & Assoc.
This type of story is the specific problem:
http://www.dailycal.org/2011/10/23/global-temperature-up-by-1-degree-celsius-since-1950s-according-to-uc-berkeley-study/
Those statements by Muller and his daughter effectively negate ANYTHING Anthony might find with his surface station study.
After this do you think an also ran study by a team of motley volunteers lead by a guy who does not even have a PhD, much less a Nobel Prize-winning professor is going to even get a back page print up in the local paper???
Dr. Muller beat Anthony to the punch and published where it counts most The Wall Street Journal!
The only way Anthony’s rebuttal will see print is in the blogosphere and if we chip in and buy an ad in the Wall Street Journal, other wise the story is just bird cage lining.
Gail Combs says:
November 1, 2011 at 6:48 pm
Gail,
While i agree that Anthony will not get the publicity he is due, the internet is a wild thing that can expose quite a bit of the lies they spew… Man’s arrogance is going to kill millions…
Sadly the academic world is going to be mans undoing… politics has bastardized science and any hope of man surviving without huge losses is nil.. when the world slumps into cooling and we are unable to produce food because of our own stupidity we have only ourselves to blame…
Bill
Mr. Essenbach: before your next post you might care to read the lecture by Matt Ridley which is an excellent example of exactly how a scientist should approach a topic. Well referenced, full of logical argument, puts up various views and discusses why they’re correct or incorrect. A pleasure to read. I particularly liked his discussion of confirmation bias which is a problem for scientists and non-scientists alike. I’ll be interested to see if my post to RealClimate drawing the lecture to their attention gets posted. Possibly it won’t. It is said, with justification, that scientists are poor communicators. Matt Ridley is the antithesis of that viewpoint
NBC News did a version of The Globe and Mail story linked above tonight in response to the New England snowstorm. Richard Muller made a cameo. Sure sounded to me as though he’s 100% on board with the CAGW crowd. The whole piece was real garbage journalism. It included all the major CAGW cliches , even stooping so low as to use “climate deniers.” Brian Williams ended the segment saying nothing like this extreme weather ever happened when he was a kid. Is he kidding? Even if this were true, does he think the history of weather started when he was born?
When I see this stuff I have to wonder if real science is making any progress on this issue at all. But maybe this is the last desperate gasps of a dying ideology.
Bill H says:
November 1, 2011 at 7:05 pm
Gail Combs says:
November 1, 2011 at 6:48 pm
Gail,
While i agree that Anthony will not get the publicity he is due, the internet is a wild thing that can expose quite a bit of the lies they spew…
____________________________________
I agree that the internet is powerful. I have seen it in action, but the MSM still reaches more people. That is why Muller made the pre-emptive strike to spike Anthony’s guns.
In the larger picture the hope is to lull the masses for the time needed to get an agreement in Durbin. It seems the whole CAGW is fracturing but I do not trust that picture. I have seen it before.
On another subject we farmers put up a really good fight and thought we had “won” The bill got passed during the lame duck session and we got stuck with stuff that is going to be 100 times WORSE than what we thought we were fighting originally.
These SOBs are nasty and they do not give up they just switch attacks.
Willis,
Thanks for trying to explain the BEST fiasco. But Machiavellian political intrigues are way out of my depth.
What do you think about this quote from a recent post at GWPF?
“Contrary to claims being made by the leader of the Best global temperature initiative their data confirms, and places on a firmer statistical basis, the global temperature standstill of the past ten years as seen by other groups.”
Are they talking about data data, or adjusted ‘data’, or “pre-data”, or Trick-or-Treat data from the BEST website? I must confess that I’d never heard of “pre-data” before today.
Bob Tisdale says:
November 1, 2011 at 3:30 pm
Considering the state of the IPCC, it’s a wonder anyone would push to be included in their upcoming publications.
IPCC = BANK
Larry Fields says:
November 1, 2011 at 7:40 pm
You never heard of pre-data because I made the term up to chivvy Muller about releasing a buggy dataset marked Not Ready for Prime Time along with his pre-prints. I called it “pre-data” because presumably at some point, well after he has been interviewed and feted and gotten his claims swallowed by the media, he’ll release the actual data.
In any case, his pre-data seems to show little warming in the last decade. He claimed that the world was still warming.
Does it “place it on a firmer statistical basis”? No way to know, since the data hasn’t been released yet … all the stuff the media is frothing about is totally unverifiable.
Free the data, free the code, as my buddy Mosh says …
w.
A preprint without a document, empty open datatsets, no peers or scientists involved — this is the long and noble tradition? More like the IPCC SOP.
The problem with this is simple, if you just think about it. Yes, the UHI effect is local, and yes, it only effect a small area of the land. However, half of the official temperature measurements stations from other datasets, and a completly unknown number of stations in the BEST dataset, are from urban stations, or stations which have mini urban environments around them. Thus, saying that they do not impact the “global average temperature” is frankly dishonest. They may not effect the temperature of the earth, but they very definatly effect the temperature measurment of the earth.
Frankly, this statement, far from building my confidence in BEST, causes me to seriously doubt whether this is an honest attempt to measure temperature at all.
Bill H says:
November 1, 2011 at 7:05 pm
……Sadly the academic world is going to be mans undoing… politics has bastardized science and any hope of man surviving without huge losses is nil.. when the world slumps into cooling and we are unable to produce food because of our own stupidity we have only ourselves to blame…
_____________________________
Bill if you look at the timing 1970 – 1975 and the reports coming out, in science: Gleissberg (1939 & 1971) Milankovitch (1938) and the work in 1963 during the International Geophysical Year. The paper by Hays, Imbrie and Shackleton confirming Milankovitch work on glacial cycles.
And especially
http://calderup.wordpress.com/2010/05/14/next-ice-age/
And then look at the politics:
The CIA document dated 1974 predicting an Ice Age. http://omniclimate.wordpress.com/2009/12/03/world-exclusive-cia-1974-document-reveals-emptiness-of-agw-scares-closes-debate-on-global-cooling-consensus-and-more/
The 1972 Earth Summit where Maurice Strong poured lighter fluid on the fringe “environmental movement” and started CAGW.
The Population Bomb theory and Obama’s Science czar, John P. Holdren who co-authored the
1973 book Human Ecology: Problems and Solutions.
Now why all of a sudden does the USA start exporting its manufacturing as of the 1970’s??? Why did V.P. Al Gore over 15 years ago tell a young person They should develop other plans because our production agriculture is being shifted out of the U.S. to the Third World.”
Why are the billionaires rushing to acquire farmland in South America and Africa??? http://media.oaklandinstitute.org/great-land-grab
I have the very nasty feeling that those who really run this world have a lot more knowledge about the climate than what they tell the masses and “Global Warming” is not on the agenda.
Perhaps getting the PR juggernaut going BEFORE winter hit was important, too.