Cooling Warming by the numbers

Surely it should have been ‘cooling during the last 13 years (according to land-based stats) and during the last 40 years (according to satellite stats)’ ? That’s my take on it anyway, but willing to stand corrected if wrong.

“These fluctuations help explain why other researchers’ prior attempts to predict next year’s temperature from past trends have been unsuccessful. “The only way to prove these models are any good is to demonstrate that they skillfully predict new data,” said William Briggs, a statistician and member of the probability and statistics committee of the American Meteorology Society. “None have done this. There is reason to suspect all models.””
William Briggs sums it up succinctly: the models are useless.
Bravo, Mr Briggs.

I have read on this blog Re the BEST report that the earth has cooled this century. This is well supported as “this century” is only the past eleven years.
I have read on this blog Rd the BEST report that the earth has warmed over the past century. This is well supported as the past century is from 1911 to 2011.
Casting the WUWT statement that the earth has cooled this century as mean that the earth has cooled over the past 100 years is a good old straw man argument to cast Anthony as an unreliable Climate Change denier.

so they figured out “change” is an essential part of climate
What next, a UN Commission to tell us “wet” is an essential part of water?

It should be pretty clear that nature is surviving us quite well. It’s said the world population has reached 7 billion, and it’s claimed that further increases will be minor and tolerable, since we’re mostly in the process of gentrifying. So the world is warming a little, and lately cooling a little, and mostly tolerating our human infestation remarkably well. But soon enough our time here will run out, not because of a warmer or cooler world and not because we starve (we increasingly do a good job of feeding ourselves). But because with nuclear weapons and the spread of Islamic dictates, we’ll soon enough do ourselves in. Not that I care a lot. I’ll be long gone by then.The back is getting really bad, and I’ve enjoyed a goodly share of prosperity and so has my family. Can’t ask for much more than that, right? So live well, and don’t sweat the small stuff, like “global warming.”

Maurice Garoutte says:
November 5, 2011 at 7:55 am

…to cast Anthony as an unreliable Climate Change denier.

What is it with these people? Since when has variations in temperature (I really don’t need to list all the ups and downs over the past several thousands of years here, do I?) have to do with the term “Climate Change denier”?
Anthony would be the first in line under “The Climate Changes Here” banner and the rest of us would line up behind him. Now, if you have evidence that man is responsible for changing Earth’s climate, then you’re putting man’s impact on climate at least up there where it can be measured, quantified, and determined.
Please provide details. (Wouldn’t you just love to be the one that disproves the null hypothesis?? You’d be famous and rich beyond your wildest dreams!)

Richard Carpenter says:
November 5, 2011 at 9:29 am
We “Deniers” are fighting the wrong war, or at least ignoring the second front. Sure, the science is dodgy and the Warmists lie and cheat without shame. Of course the Warmists are unprincipled thugs who would put us in concentration camps if they had the power. Yes, they deserve ridicule and much, much worse. But what if they were right? Answer: I DO NOT CARE. I do not CARE if Canada becomes a bit less frigid, though it has not happened. I do not CARE if sea level rises by a few inches over the next hundred years, though it has not started yet. I do not CARE if increased CO2 makes trees and plants and plankton grow faster, in fact I welcome it. I do not CARE if the Sahara Desert gets a bit drier or expands a few miles. It will cost very little to move some African goat herders and cattlemen a few miles north or south. In fact, they will probably move themselves with no help from nosy white people. It seems that organized groups, governments, do-gooders, charities, bleeding-hearts, jihadists, whiners, and malcontents all have one thing in common. They want us to sacrifice. It doesn’t matter what for. It can just as easily be global warming or global cooling. Maybe both. But they sure do want us to sacrifice our money, our freedom, and our standard of living. We need to say “no”; we need to say “Hell No.” We need to say “Get a life you miserable whining, sniveling losers.”
————————————————
I agree. I doubt CAGW.
To me, these are the true issues.
If AGW is correct then we open up land a few miles north for ag and more people. Is this what warmists fear?

Just wait and see: “He who laughs last laughs better”, the coming winter and the following ones will be more expressive than words.

Dear Several, I don’t understand your quarrel with Garoutte. The man wrote plainly that for someone to confuse this century (2001-2011) with the last hundred years (1911-2011) would be a straw man to frame WUWT. What are you fuming about???

DCC says:
November 5, 2011 at 8:41 am
“@Maurice Garoutte: Please give us a quote where Anthony has claimed that the earth has cooled over the past 100 years. If you cannot, then it’s you who raised a straw man argument.\
REPLY: Yes, I’d like to see that myself – Anthony”
Please read more carefully DCC and Anthony.
My statement was “I have read on this blog Re the BEST report that the earth has cooled this century. This is well supported as “this century” is only the past eleven years.”
This century started in 2000 and is now eleven years old. During “this century” the earth has cooled.
The question is was Mr. Biliak’s misreading of “this century” an innocent misreading of the sentence like DCC or was it an intentional misrepresentation?

Richard Carpenter says:
November 5, 2011 at 9:29 am
Thanks for putting it the way you did. I couldn’t agree more.

newtlove says:
November 5, 2011 at 10:07 am
Here’s a headline we need to see:
Latest Data Confirm Global Cooling This Century
With the accompanying bumper sticker:
Global Warming is Sooooo 1990s

jim at 7:48 a.m.
“‘The only way to prove these models are any good is to demonstrate that they skillfully predict new data,’ said William Briggs . . .”
But Leif, on another thread, has been assuring us that we need to assume that the models have predictive value until proven otherwise. 🙂

ferd berple says:
November 5, 2011 at 9:47 am
……..
http://wmbriggs.com/blog/?p=4614
A Final Solution To The Financial Crisis: Guest Post by Uncle Mike
__________________
I LOVE it, but I think the Bernanke beat us to it…

I used ABBYY to convert the image to text which might be easier to read:
Taking the Earth’s temperature requires more than lots of thermometers. It also relies on surveying tools, satellites—and confidence in statistical models used to put the numbers together.
Still, those thermometer readings do matter. So a team of scientists recently tackled the job of cleaning up and organizing 1.6 billion temperature readings from two centuries and nearly 40,000 land-based locations.
That required removing duplicate numbers, tossing out clearly erroneous records—such as temperatures above 5,000 degrees Fahrenheit—and fixing Celsius readings mislabeled as Fahrenheit. The process took nearly two years and has yielded a data set the project’s leader says can be analyzed in a matter of hours.
“Before us, there was a huge barrier to entry” in the field of analyzing temperature numbers, says Richard Muller, scientific director of the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature team and a physicist at the University of California, Berkeley.
Many scientists are giving the Berkeley Earth team kudos for creating the unified database.
Plaudits are coming even from some scientists who dispute the conclusions of the Berkeley Earth team itself. The team analyzed its own temperature records and concluded that the Earth’s land has warmed by an average of about 0.9 degree Celsius (1.6 degrees Fahrenheit) since the mid-1950s. That is in line with some earlier efforts that used smaller sets of temperature readings.
Some scientists reaching into the new database, while generally agreeing the Earth has been warming, disagree with details of the team’s findings. For instance, Berkeley Earth’s trend graphs, which reflect some modeling, show temperatures continuing to rise since the late 1990s. But the raw numbers show no definitive evidence of a increase in that time. The group also hasn’t made use of satellite-derived temperature readings. These show a smaller increase. The difference may reflect that some land-based weather stations aren’t well maintained.
I’m inclined to give [satellite] data more weight than reconstructions from surface-stall data,” says Stephen Mclntyre, a Canadian mathematician who writes about climate, often critically of studies that find warming, at his website Climate Audit. Satellites show about half the amount of warming as that of land-based readings in the past three decades, when the relevant data were collected from space, he says.
Such disputes demonstrate the statistical and uncertain nature of tracking global temperature. Even with tens of thousands of weather stations, most of the Earth’s surface isn’t monitored. Some stations are more reliable than others. Calculating a global average temperature requires extrapolating from these readings to the whole globe, adjusting for data lapses and suspect stations. And no two groups do this identically.
The Berkeley Earth team uses a statistical tool it calls a scalpel to cut out data when there is a gap. It uses a process called Kriging to fill in gaps in data, borrowed from geoscientists and surveyors, who used it, for example, to estimate the elevation at point B that is between A and C, points where altitude is known. And it weights data more heavily from stations that are reliable than than from those that produce erratic numbers.
The result is a statistical model of what the temperature was at any given moment at any given location. Actual thermometer readings, when they are available, are used only as fodder for the statistical model.
The Berkeley scientists “have a very complicated model,” says William Briggs, a member of the probability and statistics committee of the American Meteorology Society. “They reported on the setting of one of those dials” in the model. “That is not the actual temperature.”
Calculating a global temperature is necessary to track climate trends because, as your TV meteorologist might warn, local conditions can differ. Much of the U.S. and Northern Europe has cooled in the last 70 years, Berkeley Earth found. So did one-third of all weather stations world-wide, while two-thirds warmed. The project cites this as evidence of overall warming; skeptics aren’t convinced because it depends how concentrated those warming sites are. If they happen to be bunched up while the cooling sites are in sparsely measured areas, then more places could be cooling.
The risk with models is that scientists can become enslaved to one they have chosen, says Mr. McIntyre. “The best antidote is for authors to make all their data available at the time of publication together with scrupulous documentation,” he says, crediting Berkeley Earth with attempting to do this.
Any statistical model produces results with some level of uncertainty. The Berkeley Earth project is no different. That uncertainty is large enough to dwarf some trends in temperature. For instance, fluctuations in the land temperature for the past 13 years make it extremely difficult to say whether the Earth has been continuing to warm during that time.
This possible halting of the temperature rise led to a dispute between members of the Berkeley Earth team. Judith Curry, Mr. Muller’s co-author and a professor of earth and atmospheric sciences at the Georgia Institute of Technology, told a reporter for the Daily Mail she questioned Mr. Muller’s claim, which he published in an opinion column in The Wall Street Journal, that “you should not be a skeptic, at least not any longer.” She said that if the global temperature has flattened out, that would raise new questions, and scientific skepticism would remain warranted. Asked for further comment, she referred questions to Mr. Muller, and on her blog she said that after a 90-minute talk with him, “there isn’t much that we disagree on.”
This sort of messy hashing-out of the global climate record is happening in the open because the Berkeley Earth team chose to release its data, and its papers, before undergoing peer review by scientific journals. Already some feedback has led to updates and corrections to the research. Berkeley Earth plans other work, including adding ocean temperature trends to the land records and fixing errors in its database.
“Some people mistakenly think peer review means secret review by anonymous referees at journals,” Mr. Muller says. “We’re getting wonderful peer review, from Mclntyre, from Briggs, from other people. That’s the process of science.”

RE: Andy: (November 5, 2011 at 7:48 am)
“These fluctuations help explain why other researchers’ prior attempts to predict next year’s temperature from past trends have been unsuccessful. “The only way to prove these models are any good is to demonstrate that they skillfully predict new data,” said William Briggs, a statistician and member of the probability and statistics committee of the American Meteorology Society.
Also, in the case of models used by BEST to fix bad data, I think one must deliberately corrupt known sets of good data by random selections of those errors that their algorithms are supposed to fix and then show how well the their models actually can restore the original data.

I think the WSJ article is basically unreliable. It editorialises McIntyre saying (?) that the satellite temperature records of the last three decades show half the amount of warming as the “land-based” records. That is patently untrue – satellite and surface records are pretty similar over the long term. I doubt McIntyre said that. Also, the WJS takes Judith Curry’s opinion on BEST trends, but she (self-avowedly) did no analysis herself on that (and when she recently posted about it, she still offered no analysis, just linked to graphs – and she didn’t even discuss BEST data)
Lazy article from WSJ – a quote gathering exercise with no understanding or explication of the issues. Surely a science journo didn’t write this?

Mathematically, there was a year zero A.D. That year is commonly referred to as the year one B.C. This is not a conflict; it is a matter of A.D. and B.C. conventions. Matters of convention are usually beyond the reach of logical reasoning.

An interesting fact that everyone is missing. The 20 – 40 year old global warmists and sea level rise alarmists all predict the tipping point for dramatic future change will occur around year ~2030. Well after they are fully tenured or retired.