I get featured in this WSJ piece from “The Numbers Guy” Carl Bialik, but there’s a curious sentence in the first paragraph.
At first I thought it was an editorial device or maybe a pun. Then I saw this:
Freudian slip perhaps?
The print version of the WSJ contains much more, including photographs and perhaps some graphs that I provided. I haven’t seen it yet. Perhaps readers can fill in those details.
The story is here: http://blogs.wsj.com/numbersguy/a-new-trove-of-global-temperature-numbers-1097/
UPDATE: 4:30 PM 11/5/11 – the print edition article via scan:
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So the earth warmed last century. Cool.
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. 🙂
Hey –
“Maurice Garoutte says:
November 5, 2011 at 7:55 am
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.”
Maurice old boy, just WHAT is the “atmospheric time constant” by your estimation? 1 month, 6 months, 12 months?
You seem to be missing a KEY POINT in the AWG “Claim”. CO2 is a “one way valve”.
Once it’s UP there IS no going back down, at least over any period of time beyond the “lead/lag response time of the atmosphere.”
SINCE the atmosphere CLEARLY responds totally between 6 months periods (North Hem. and South Hem, Winter/Summer), we can probably safely say that the TC has been exceeded and the evidence does not support the “one way valve”.
Now if you are smarmy enough to whine about the “moderation of the oceans..” as the DOG waiting outside the open dryer in the Gary Larson cartoon..with the label pointing into the dryer saying, “Cat fud”…I’m sitting here saying, “Oh please, OH PLEASE… PLEASE take the BAIT!” (Be aware that being put in the tumble dryer and turned over multiple times….will hurt.)
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 read the article yesterday morning, and thought it’s pretty straight-forward, honest.
Berkeley is trying to get their data base to better accuracy…and they sent it out even before
peer-review…bravo. So let’s go along. Warmists are in the dog-house, and they don’t know
what to do for AR5. Let’s hope Berkeley can get their ocean data in line, perhaps even show
where all that missing heat is hiding. Let’s see what peer-review will do to what they’ve just
done. And in the long run, we KNOW 1…CO2 enhances crop growth… 2…higher temperatures
are helpful, and…3….Homo sapiens can adjust
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.”
This century started in the year 2001. The year 2000 was the last year of the 20th century. There is no year zero. Work it out.
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.
RE: Crispin in Waterloo: (November 5, 2011 at 8:36 pm)
“This century started in the year 2001. The year 2000 was the last year of the 20th century. There is no year zero. Work it out.”
For my own personal use, I once created a Gregorian Calendar, day of the week calculator program based on the simple fact that January first of the year zero AD (not a leap year and otherwise known as the year one BC) was a Sunday. I have wondered if this coincidence was intended by those who created this calendar.
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?
Can someone explain why temperature records from cheap mercury in glass – wet and dry bulb – thermometers read predominantly by volunteers are way more accurate than sophisticated expensive satellite temperatures ?
I’d really like to know the legitimacy of that.
Crispin in Waterloo says:
November 5, 2011 at 8:36 pm
This century started in the year 2001. The year 2000 was the last year of the 20th century. There is no year zero. Work it out.
Years are a measurement of time. While there was no year “zero” we do not number our years like our months (Jan 1st, Jan 2nd) we count them.
If you were born in May 1960 like I was you would be 51. But I’m in my 52nd year.
Also consider the number line on the wall in grade school 0 is the beginning going forward so while there is never a 0 measurement there is a space between 0 and 1.
When you were 6 months old your mother referred to as such.
Also consider that we call the 1900’s the 20th century
RE: Rosco: (November 6, 2011 at 1:35 am)
“Can someone explain why temperature records from cheap mercury in glass – wet and dry bulb – thermometers read predominantly by volunteers are way more accurate than sophisticated expensive satellite temperatures ?”
I do not know if I can accept the premise that simple thermometer records are more accurate than satellite records, as Anthony Watts has documented numerous cases where local temperature records have been corrupted by sensor placement in non-representative locations. But most of the sophistication and cost of satellite measurements is related to actually recovering Earth surface temperature data from outer space at great distances from the sites being measured. The assumed advantage of data from this source is that it gives frequent broad area temperature averages in places where minimal reliable local data is otherwise being collected.
Reposted for clairity ( I promise to proof read next time)
Years are a measurement of time. While there was no year “zero” we do not number our years like the days of our months (Jan 1st, Jan 2nd) we count them.
If you were born in May 1960 like I was you would be 51, but I’m in my 52nd year.
Also consider the number line on the wall in grade school 0 is the beginning going forward. So while there is never a 0 measurement there is a space between 0 and 1 that must be accounted for.
When you were 6 months old your mother referred to you as such.
Also consider that we call the 1900’s the 20th century.
Surface air temperatures have been of much interest lately, as some scientists have detected an accelerating ‘global warming’ trend since 1980 (near 1,5°C per century), while others have detected more recently a significant slowing, and even a reversal of this trend since 2001, to near -0.5°C (-0.9°F) per century. This can be shown for the Climatic Research Unit and the UK Met. Office Hadley Centre data (HADCRUT3).
See WoodForTrees.org: Plot of HADCRUT3 Unadjusted global monthly mean temperature anomalies from 1980 (°C) + linear trend from 2001 at http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/hadcrut3gl/from:1980/plot/hadcrut3gl/from:2001/trend
Try the same with the ohers databases, and see for yourself how they differ, or not?
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.
I would like to add a third “front” to Richard Carpenter’s excellent comment (9:29 am)–namely that before treating disease “X” with cure “Y”, we’d better be damn sure the cure isn’t worse than the disease–e.g., as someone recently said,curing a nose bleed with a tourniquet around the neck. So even if (a) “X” is happening (which in the case of GW appears to be completely dependent on the start and stop times) and (b) “X” can be called a disease (and as Richard eloquently points out, GW might be beneficial not harmful), we shouldn’t impose cure “Y” if the effects of cure “Y” are worse than the disease (supposed) “X”. Somehow I believe it just might be the case that limiting CO2 emissions to pre 1980 levels (or pick your own date) will cause humanity considerably more grief than a degree or two of global warming.
As far as Richard’s statement: We need to say “no”; we need to say “Hell No.” We need to say “Get a life you miserable whining, sniveling losers.” AMEN
Re: Mike Bromley the Kurd and our education system. An interesting set of videos here:
http://nalert.blogspot.com/2011/11/skull-and-bones-exposed-former-state.html
Full of conspiracy theories and Skull and Bones. But it just might be correct. Lots of historical references and quotes from books.
Richard Carpenter says:
November 5, 2011 at 9:29 am
“………….. 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……”
Just a minor correction:
The sahara desert is not expanding but losing ground to the Sahel region which is re-greening after decades of desertification. The reason behind the re-greening of the Sahel is increased rainfall and CO2 increase. This is all peer-reviewed science, but it is hidden from us by the MSM, the IPCC and the warmists.
But googling it would confirm what I m saying.
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.
RE: Reed Coray: (November 6, 2011 at 10:44 am)
“I would like to add a third “front” to Richard Carpenter’s excellent comment (9:29 am) …”
I regret to say that article (9:29 am) seems to mirror what I perceive to be the typical ‘Green Earth’ stereotype image of those they see as refusing to accept an undeniable “Inconvenient Truth.”