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After almost two years and some false starts, BEST now has one paper that has finally passed peer review. The text below is from the email release sent late Saturday. It was previously submitted to JGR Atmospheres according to their July 8th draft last year, but appears to have been rejected as they now indicate it has been published in Geoinformatics and Geostatistics, a journal I’ve not heard of until now.
(Added note: commenter Michael D. Smith points out is it Volume 1 issue 1, so this appears to be a brand new journal. Also troubling, on their GIGS journal home page , the link to the PDF of their Journal Flier gives only a single page, the cover art. Download Journal Flier. With such a lack of description in the front and center CV, one wonders how good this journal is.)
Also notable, Dr. Judith Curry’s name is not on this paper, though she gets a mention in the acknowledgements (along with Mosher and Zeke). I have not done any detailed analysis yet of this paper, as this is simply an announcement of its existence. – Anthony
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Berkeley Earth has today released a new set of materials, including gridded and more recent data, new analysis in the form of a series of short “memos”, and new and updated video animations of global warming. We are also pleased that the Berkeley Earth Results paper, “A New Estimate of the Average Earth Surface Land Temperature Spanning 1753 to 2011” has now been published by GIGS and is publicly available.
here: http://berkeleyearth.org/papers/.
The data update includes more recent data (through August 2012), gridded data, and data for States and Provinces. You can access the data here: http://berkeleyearth.org/data/.
The set of memos include:
- Two analyses of Hansen’s recent paper “Perception of Climate Change”
- A comparison of Berkeley Earth, NASA GISS, and Hadley CRU averaging techniques on ideal synthetic data
- Visualizing of Berkeley Earth, NASA GISS, and Hadley CRU averaging techniques
and are available here: http://berkeleyearth.org/available-resources/
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A New Estimate of the Average Earth Surface Land Temperature Spanning 1753 to 2011
Abstract
We report an estimate of the Earth’s average land surface
temperature for the period 1753 to 2011. To address issues
of potential station selection bias, we used a larger sampling of
stations than had prior studies. For the period post 1880, our
estimate is similar to those previously reported by other groups,
although we report smaller uncertainties. The land temperature rise
from the 1950s decade to the 2000s decade is 0.90 ± 0.05°C (95%
confidence). Both maximum and minimum daily temperatures have
increased during the last century. Diurnal variations decreased
from 1900 to 1987, and then increased; this increase is significant
but not understood. The period of 1753 to 1850 is marked by
sudden drops in land surface temperature that are coincident
with known volcanism; the response function is approximately
1.5 ± 0.5°C per 100 Tg of atmospheric sulfate. This volcanism,
combined with a simple proxy for anthropogenic effects (logarithm
of the CO2 concentration), reproduces much of the variation in
the land surface temperature record; the fit is not improved by the
addition of a solar forcing term. Thus, for this very simple model,
solar forcing does not appear to contribute to the observed global
warming of the past 250 years; the entire change can be modeled
by a sum of volcanism and a single anthropogenic proxy. The
residual variations include interannual and multi-decadal variability
very similar to that of the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation (AMO).
Full paper here: http://www.scitechnol.com/GIGS/GIGS-1-101.pdf
I’ve not checked every one of the “journals” they publish, but a randomly selected 6 were ALL “Volume 1 Issue 1”. Some with articles, some not.
This smells.
bw says:
January 19, 2013 at 7:52 pm
And now we see the GISS data website has been down for weeks with “technical” problems???
This site, which WFT uses, did have the November anomaly at 0.68, then it went down. When it came back up, it just went to the previous month’s value (October).
http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/tabledata_v3/GLB.Ts+dSST.txt
However the next two sites do work and they are up to date and they show the anomalies for each hemisphere. The bottom line is that the anomaly in November was 0.68 and it dropped to 0.44 in December.
http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/tabledata_v3/SH.Ts+dSST.txt
http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/tabledata_v3/NH.Ts+dSST.txt
“Berkeley Earth finally makes peer review…”
Are you sure? Does this cOMICS outfit have any peers?
Berklely? … I think it’s all due to acid rain … if you get my drift.
“Correct me if I’m out to lunch, but did Phil Jones not lose the CRU raw data and the MET was still promising to reconstruct that record? Or did that get done?
#################
not lost. never been lost. It still exists at NWS. the good news is you can take every station in CRU, delete it, and you still have 32,000 stations. And of course the answer doesnt change.
facts. hard to deal with. but thems the facts.
“Did they use “homogenized” and “gridded” data from GHCN/NOAA ?? Or do we have to lock down their computers and attempt to determine what they actually did?”
no homogenized data from GHCN was not used. But if you dont like GHCN monthly data you can delete those 7000 stations and you are left with 29000 stations. And the answer doesnt change. hard to deal with I know. But if your theory is that GHCN monthly is bad you can test that theory by not using the data. When you get the same answer with different data sources, then your theory needs some looking at.
“have Ross McKitrick’s published concerns been met?”
Ross was not a reviewer on this paper. he was a reviwer on the UHI paper.
“You probably haven’t heard of it because it is volume 1 issue 1… Must be his own journal.”
Do you think we landed on the moon?
Are there any cardinal/ordinal integer tricks?
This analysis will have to stand up to intense scrutiny from all sides. Who care where it was published. The peer review “formally” is only somewhat useful in climate science.The nice workup on Hansen alone is worth the look.
Who paid to publish this garbage in a scam journal?
In the political climate it is almost unfathomable how wedded to the consensus influential lobbyists are. And wedded the narrative…
It has been suggested here in a post that graciousness and compromise may be beneficial. Perhaps there is merit in this Berkeley approach.
LOL kim !!!
“Landed on the moon?”
Yes, but this smells cheezy
MattS says:
January 19, 2013 at 8:58 pm
I would be willing to bet that there is a strong relationship between skirt lengths and temperature. (Though the causality probably runs the other way).
As we have seen, this is no impediment to running multi-billion dollar scams for decades.
Leif Svalgaard says:
January 19, 2013 at 7:29 pm
Ed MacAulay says:
January 19, 2013 at 6:55 pm
So how have they concluded that the rise in CO2 is anthropogenic?
presumably because the rise matches that which we know we have produced.
And yet Co2’s rate of change (not its atmospheric concentration) is clearly driven by temperature change.
http://tallbloke.wordpress.com/2012/09/12/is-the-airborne-co2-fraction-temperature-dependent/
OMICS publishing: Is this missing a letter ‘C’ at the start?
I’m sensing the beginnings of what will end in blind panic amongst the Eco-Taliban. By now, even that lot must accept that correlation does not prove causation. This is evidenced by the divergence of recorded temperature from steadily increasing CO2 since ~1998 (see link).
The paper, therefore, is just another example of SISO (GIGO, to be more polite).
http://www.clipular.com/c?1272633=uxyQDogrVLwqXRm229v3kq9OCds
Werner Brozek says:
January 19, 2013 at 9:20 pm
http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/tabledata_v3/NH.Ts+dSST.txt
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Dec 2012 second lowest NH temperature of the millenium after Jan 2008.
So presumeably it’ll make it into AR5 then – after the review process, of course.
Steven Mosher says:
January 19, 2013 at 10:22 pm
Do you think we landed on the moon?
No, “we” didn’t. Neil Armstrong et al, on the other hand …
Steven Mosher says: January 19, 2013 at 10:07 pm
Steve, the Met.Office did indeed destroy most of its raw data. They say that they did this to ‘save space’ (very professional). Unfortunately, they are now in a position of compiling one of the world’s major temperature records by relying on data the provenance of which is unknown. They say on their website…
Do you have a link to the raw data held by NWS in a form that allows it to be compared to ‘homogenised data? It seems very difficult to track down actually which data have been used for surface based temperatures, Reasons for and extent of adjustments are even more difficult to locate. Generalisations such as a database is constructed from 19,000 stations etc. does not really get down to the detail. It gives the impression of being all smoke and mirrors.
Hi @ur momisugly Steve Mosher
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2010/feb/15/phil-jones-lost-weather-data
Doesn’t hold the original data.
“the entire change can be modeled by a sum of volcanism and a single anthropogenic proxy.”
This is a danger to human health – I’m likely to injure myself from falling about laughing!
Mosher,
Everybody’s first thought after hearing that they could not get published and then appear in volume 1 issue 1 ….. is that this is some form of self publishing …. it may not be correct but it is still everybody’s first thought.
Given that this is what everyone is thinking – they should make some form of statement regarding their relationship with the publishers.
If they make no such statement we are probably correct in our first thoughts.
Peter
Dear Anthony Watts
On March 6, 2011 you reported on your visit to BEST and wrote:
And, I’m prepared to accept whatever result they produce, even if it proves my premise wrong. I’m taking this bold step because the method has promise. So let’s not pay attention to the little yippers who want to tear it down before they even see the results. I haven’t seen the global result, nobody has, not even the home team, but the method isn’t the madness that we’ve seen from NOAA, NCDC, GISS, and CRU, and, there aren’t any monetary strings attached to the result that I can tell. If the project was terminated tomorrow, nobody loses jobs, no large government programs get shut down, and no dependent programs crash either. That lack of strings attached to funding, plus the broad mix of people involved especially those who have previous experience in handling large data sets gives me greater confidence in the result being closer to a bona fide ground truth than anything we’ve seen yet.
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/03/06/briggs-on-berkeleys-best-plus-my-thoughts-from-my-visit-there/
Absolutely no progress will be made in the climate debate until all parties abandon their adversarial attitudes. We’re not in a courtroom or a gladiatoral arena now. We’re going to have to settle the question by talking to each other like grown adults. The key to a successful dispute resolution through negotiation is to find agreement. In your earlier blog post cited here, you seemed to have found some people on “the other side” who were amenable to a rational discussion. What a pity that you now find it necessary to destroy that relationship.
I am not really interested in the average surface temperature as a metric for climate change but am surprised that after all the hype associated with BEST that it’s first publication is in a new journal without a citation index. The review policies of these journals are somewhat odd. I quote from their website:
“The Review process for articles being published in SciTechnol Journals is carried out in an easy and quick manner. The submitted manuscript is assigned to one of the Editorial Board Members based on their area of interest. If the Editor agrees to accept the assignment, he can choose any of the three ways:
Review the manuscript himself without assigning it to reviewers; or
Assign atleast 3 potential reviewers for the review process; or
Ask the Associate Managing Editor of the Journal to assign reviewers on his behalf.”
This hardly inspires confidence in the rigour of the peer review process. Can someone associated with the BEST project could clarify which peer review procedure was followed for this paper.