New Excitement in the Climate Change Controversy (Updated)
Roger A Pielke, Sr., a respected climate scientist, comments on the Watts et. al. paper on his blog:
Anthony has led what is a critically important assessment of the issue of station quality. Indeed, this type of analysis should have been performed by Tom Karl and Tom Peterson at NCDC, Jim Hansen at GISS and Phil Jones at the University of East Anglia (and Richard Muller). However, they apparently liked their answers and did not want to test the robustness of their findings.
In direct contradiction to Richard Muller’s BEST study, the new Watts et al 2012 paper has very effectively shown that a substantive warm bias exists even in the mean temperature trends. This type of bias certainly exists throughout the Global Historical Climate Network, as well as what Anthony has documented for the US Historical Climate Reference Network.
Now, I’ve only just skimmed the Watts et. al. paper, but its conclusions are very interesting: if they hold true, it appears to me that the BEST paper, which draws its data from the USHCN, may be flawed.
Update:
I’ve reached Dr. Judith Curry of Georgia Tech, who was a co-author of the first four BEST papers but who declined to be listed as an author of this one. She was in an airport, and has promised me more tomorrow, but in the meantime she referred me to the New York Times Dot Earth blog and her quote:
The BEST team has produced the best land surface temperature data set that we currently have. It is best in the sense of including the most data and extending further back in time. The data quality control and processing use objective, statistically robust techniques. That said, the scientific analyses that the BEST team has done with the new data set are controversial, including the impact of station quality on interpreting temperature trends and the urban heat island effect.
Their latest paper on the 250-year record concludes that the best explanation for the observed warming is greenhouse gas emissions. Their analysis is way oversimplistic and not at all convincing in my opinion.
There is broad agreement that greenhouse gas emissions have contributed to the warming in the latter half of the 20th century; the big question is how much of this warming can we attribute to greenhouse gas emissions. I don’t think this question can be answered by the simple curve fitting used in this paper, and I don’t see that their paper adds anything to our understanding of the causes of the recent warming. That said, I think there are two interesting results in this paper, regarding their analysis of 19th century volcanoes and the impact on climate, and also the changes to the diurnal temperature range.
As usual, you have to look carefully at this. Curry strongly disagreed with the conclusions of the paper, and needs to be taken seriously: she is, after all, a co-author of the previous studies. Her point is simply that:
(1) the paper does say there has been warming, but well, everyone knew that. The question is the magnitude of the warming, the part of that which is anthropogenic, i.e., human-caused, and then what part of that part is caused by CO2. They have done a lot to clean up the data set, but as Watts et. al. note, that dataset may be subject to a systematic error.
(2) the strength of the conclusion that essentially all of that is both anthropogenic and caused by CO2 is being overstated. (My own choice of words would be “wildly overstated.”)
A couple of other links:
- At Science Blogs, William Connolley calls the BEST announcement “rubbish.”
- Steve Mosher and Zeke Hausfather have a detailed technical critique at Climate Etc, Judith Curry’s blog.
- Andy Revkin has a relatively even-handed piece in his Dot Earth blog. (Note that Connolley comments there that he wasn’t saying that the conclusions of the BEST study were rubbish, but that Mueller himself is rubbish. I’ve got to admit the argument there sort of escapes me, but the amusement value is enormous.)
It no (or known ineffective) attempts to correct for acknowledged sources have been made by people compiling or using BEST, how is this possibly not fraud or incompetence?
If Watts et al’s paper hadn’t been published yet, how would Mueller et al have taken their critique into account?
Charlie, there were critiques of their methodology prior to Watts et al. Muller simply ignored it and carried on.
Right, but they don’t include the systematic error that Watts identified.
Seriously, the BEST stuff is a real improvement as far as the way they handled the data set. Mueller appears to be an overanxious publicity-seeker (see his book on “Nemesis”) but don’t go overboard.
Mr. Martin, this is politics. Git thar furst with the most.
You do know that none of Muller’s 4 papers had been published yet? As far as I know they have been either waiting for peer reviews or have denied publication and withdrawn.
If no (or known ineffective) attempts to correct for acknowledged sources have been made by people compiling or using BEST, how is this possibly not fraud or incompetence?
If Watts et al’s paper hadn’t been published yet, how would Mueller et al have taken their critique into account?
(Hint: Comments are moderated and can take a little time to be published. You don’t need to repost.)
Actually, I thought I caught a typo in time by hitting STOP and the browser, fixing it, and resubmitting. It didn’t work.
Because the corrections to the data set are something that would have occurred to anyone who’d taken a thermodynamics course, and I presume knowledge of how heat moves is a prerequisite for calling yourself a climate scientist.
If that presumption isn’t true, then why the hell are we listening to any of them?
If it is true, it was fraud or incompetence that it wasn’t done.
Good work, Charlie. Please keep us posted.
Muller is a liar and a fraud: he was NEVER a skeptic. He’s a warmist from way back, with a published track record.
His “conversion” is as bogus as an Elmer Gantry faith healing- he was no more a skeptic than Edna Mae was a cripple.
He is a skeptic all right. Just like some of the so called conservative posters we find shilling for Obama on PJM every day. You just can’t take anything at face value on the internet anymore. Here is one: Diet Coke causes cancer. Or another: Clinton balanced the budget twice. Or another: Lead is a poisonous metal. Or this: Obama was born in Hawaii. And: Eggs are bad because they have lots of cholesterol in them. And: Fracking is bad for your drinking water. And: Walmart is a bad employer. And: There is a scientific consensus on ————-(fill in the blank). Or: DDT causes cancer. Or: Cell phones cause cancer Or: Marijuana is medicinal. Or: John Kerry was a hero in Vietnam. Or: genetically enhanced food is immoral. Or: Autism is on the increase Or: diabetes is on the rise. Or: Aids is on the rise Or: we had a bird flu pandemic Or: Al Gore knows something about climate change…….
I think disingenuous would be a better word. His critique of Mann et al was completely dead on. Note that the dualling papers here don’t deal with the proxy junk that Mann was peddling. So his critique of Mann stands. The spin that he’s putting on this is dishonest, because he clearly was never skeptical of high climate sensitivity, he was just skeptical of Mann’s statistics.
Odd that he chose to deal with the surface stations, which he never criticized in the first place. I’m not sure what the point of all this is supposed to be.
As Pielke Jr (not Sr, who helped Watts) said; “yawn”.
Charlie Martin: BEST based their critique on Watt’s prelimnary assessment of his survey to date.
“…the BEST paper, which draws its data from the USHCN, may be flawed.”
mmmm…”flawed.” “Gutted” is the word I think more appropriate. I hope that translates from Australian.
I try so hard to be judicious.
Hee hee!
Yes, and it’s really much more fun to use the oh-so-careful scientific language when one is DESTROYING their lies!
Easy fix whether the climate changes or not: reduce human activities.
Obama II will certainly kill off the economy. When unemployment doubles, use of gasoline dives, factories close down, electricity use down, child bearing age unemployed will put off having the little CO2 spilling critters to warm up the earth.
To ward off global warming, re-elect Obama. To save the earth, forgo your baby showers, birthday and wedding gifts, donate to Obama re-election fund so his wife can afford a $6800 jacket.
Anthropogenic Global Warming, the same thing that CREATED the fossils during the Cretaceous Period that we’re now burning in the form of oil and coal to keep warm.
How does that work again? Dinosaurs and 300 foot tall ferns drive Hummers and produce reams of goods in coal-fueled factories,did they? Is Planet of the Apes what they’re teaching in science class these days? People are so imbecilic these days I wouldn’t be surprised…
How do they get away with their nonsense when the f***in’ evidence that they are lying (or SERIOUSLY delusional) is the same thing they’re calling the “culprit” in their narrative? Are they REALLY not teaching kids where oil and coal come from these days-or are people really so f***in’ stupid that they can’t remember somebody telling them that the oil and coal came from a period of millions of years of high carbon dioxide and high global temperatures in which animals and plants grew to monumental sizes,a period of GLOBAL WARMING for which humans COULD NOT,UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES,have been the culprit?
Seriously,what the @*%$,people? Where is all the stupidity coming from? Are people busing in mental patients to the halls of academia,the politics circuit,and the media? I don’t understand the controversy on this subject. Warming has happened before. It’s probably happening now. Someday,it’ll happen again. To the extent that humans have wiped themselves out in the past with bad environmental practices, it appears deforestation played a MUCH larger and more regularly recurring role than so-called “greenhouse gases”.
I’m no historical scholar, but these retards do not even have the benefit of the sixth grade public school education I got in history and science.By which I do not mean to say I have a sixth grade education,but rather that these facts were known to my peers by the end of my sixth grade education.
I’m no historical scholar
I’ll say.
Climite change is caused by humans. Just as Noah’s flood was caused by humans. This time we get fire.
We have sown the wind. Now, we will reap the whirlwind. We have earned G-d’s wrath. The whole world has.
There was global warming from about 9AM today through 4PM, but I’m not sure we can prove how much of it was anthropogenic.
Sigh.
No there wasn’t. It was getting cooler on the side away from the big shiny thing.
Look, go read the Watts paper: they actually have a generally better definition of global average surface temp.
Are you saying I misread the thermometer? You talkin’ to ME?
I’ve seen almost the same thing everyday for a year, how can it be wrong?
/sarc
#4 is right. Mueller pulled the same stunt last year in the Wall Street Journal.
His data is the same garbage that the Hockey Team has been grinding over for years. Beyond the stick of dynamite that Anthony Watts tossed into it, it suffers from more noise than you can shake a stick at.
The data was never that good to begin with. Just imagine the amount of error that is possible in reading an old fashioned mercury thermometer outside when it is cold and raining at night, and it is illuminated by a candle.
How many of those logs were just numbers filled in randomly by keepers who had too much else to do. “I am too tired to go out and read the thermometer. It was 35 last night it feels a little warmer tonight so I’ll write in 38.”
Further, and Mueller says it upfront, the data covers land temperatures only. In fact it it is really only good for the USA and parts of western Europe. More than three fourths of the earth’s surface is not part of the data set.
Mueller also says that CO2 is the oly variable that explains rising temperatures. But that cannot be generally true, temperatures rose and fell long before there Humans, and even within historical times.
Just remember, figures don’t lie, but liars figure.
His data is the same garbage that the Hockey Team has been grinding over for years. Beyond the stick of dynamite that Anthony Watts tossed into it, it suffers from more noise than you can shake a stick at.
No, there were significant improvements in their methods and statistical techniques. See what Curry says in her quote.
Mueller also says that CO2 is the oly variable that explains rising temperatures. But that cannot be generally true, temperatures rose and fell long before there Humans, and even within historical times.
Go back and read it again, I don’t think you’re reading that right.
If people don’t get anything else right, they need to get one key point straight:
This has nothing to do with the Mann hockey stick!
This is about the actual measurements from real thermometers, and how to statistically fineness the data without introducing errors. It’s not about tree rings, it’s not about the MWP, it’s not about any of that. One interesting thing that does come out of it though, is that it confirms the LIA, that Mann once tried to deny.
Fluid flow with changes in temperature and density are described by the Navier Stokes equations. the NS differential equations are non-linear, chaotic, with sensitive dependence on initial conditions. That means that temperature and density trajectories can not be predicted accurately long term by any finite set of past states. Long term for weather is about 7 days. This has been known since the 1963 paper by Edward Lorenz: “Deterministic Aperiodic flow”.
Predicting the distant future for systems described by the NS equations is not possible, even without changes in composition. When you add in changes in composition, it gets more non-linear.
Now the sun is described by the same NS equations, and its temperature states are likewise not predictable long term, but the definition of ‘long term’ is different.
Yogi Berra said “Predictions are hard, especially about the future.”
But these papers aren’t about predictions: they’re after the fact, explore experimental data, and aren’t using the Navier-Stokes equations at all.
Further to the above comment, it’s not about climate models, either. NS (in theory)comes into play in global models.
Repeat: this is only about historical temperature measurements with thermometers (as opposed to treemometers).
This whole controversy that broke out this weekend is a tempest in a teapot.
Charlie Martin: Great summary of both papers and their relationship. Thanks.
A five billion ton block of ice (about a cubic mile) dropped in the ocean every few years should do the trick.
viz. http://theinfosphere.org/Crimes_of_the_Hot
As usual, Charlie, you are a global climate chaos skeptic. I know this because you have once again refused to publish comments from international chaos theorist HARRY_READ_ME. Just as Elizabeth Warren is the theorist behind BHO’s principle, “You didn’t build that!” so HARRY_READ_ME is the theorist behind the current “excitement” you report here.
The check is in the mail.
What?
DANG! Charlie, I was just messing with you, mentioning good old HARRY_READ_ME by way of being a screwball remark.
But I just looked at the McKitrick PDFs, and now I am beginning to wonder if the BEST team is setting up HARRY_READ_ME_AGAIN. For example, in the first PDF, “The material relegated to an unpublished source [Rhode et al., 2010) would appear to include just about everything that readers need to know about the new data set to decide on its validity.” That is the HARRY_READ_ME concept without being all caps. And there is a lot more along the same line. Shaky.
Working with big data sets is a tough task, so you cannot blame a guy for not setting it up gracefully and well — at least, not the first time he goes for it. But after several attempts, with review feedback, it had better tighten up. Otherwise, it becomes as useless and questionable as the HARRY_READ_ME mess.
Thanks for keeping an eye on these goombahs, Charlie.
Actually it was George Lakoff who is the inspiration for “You didn’t build that” narrative.
http://pjmedia.com/zombie/2012/07/09/the-little-blue-book-quotations-from-chairman-lakoff/
“My total turnaround, in such a short time, is the result of careful and objective analysis by the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature project, which I founded with my daughter Elizabeth”
This single sentence should cause everyone to stop, drop, and roll…their eyes.
It is impossible to be objective when your own money is on the line.
We already know the earth has fluctuations producing Mini Ice ages and heat waves that last decades, just in the last One thousand years. We know this due to tree rings and Ice cores.
I am all for cutting down pollution to air and water, i remember Los Angeles in the 70′s and today is far better due to restrictions. But getting carried away with data and extrapolating it to fit pre conceived and indebted thesis isn’t going to work.
Thanks Charlie. I did read the paper and it certainly added to the growing body of evidence interspersed with open declarations of intent that AGW is just an excuse for political and economic subjugation. A means to get people in the West to voluntarily submit to central planning and regulating of what should be personal decisions based on economic freedom.
And education, unfortunately, remains the primary tool in the US and globally to get new minds and values and a new noetic system. Regardless of the temperatures or other aspects of reality.
Looking at NOAA’s Climate Literacy work after WUWT’s announcement, you can see that reality has become incidental to the machinations being put in place. Quietly. Because the Belmont Challenge is not about the natural sciences, it’s about the social sciences and people’s behaviors.
I’m not sure what noetic means, but at least your other idea is on the mark. That is, these guys seem to rush their data and their analysis, doing it poorly, so that they can push some kind of agenda outside the actual numbers. In other words, instead of doing it carefully and well, they sacrifice good work in order to protect their $$, advance some command economy, or, as you mentioned: NOESY.
Kind of reminds me of a lot of fool moves, like these suits at Penn State who wanted to protect their big $$ football program more than they wanted to experience embarrassment of perp=walking Sandusky. Result was a lot of kids harmed grievously.
Or how about the suits that defended perjury boy Bill Clinton even after the blue dress came out of the closet?
Given all the articles and studies about poor placement of thermometers (near AC units, surrounded by blacktop, etc.) and other about how over 1/3 of stations have been shut down in favor of using “statistics” to estimate temperatures hundreds of miles away (such as using a station in the Andes mountains to guess at temperatures in the Amazon Jungle a few hundred miles away because the Amazon station had been shut down), how can any of this be taken seriously? Throw in all the Climategate emails and refusal of these “scientists” to show their work on some of their key studies and it all stinks.
They’d probably still be screaming about global warming and the need for global government to control it even if we slipped into another Ice Age, something that isn’t out of the realm of possibility.
But how can this be? How can a noted climate scientist be “converted” to AGW. I thought there was no credible dissent before this?
The chocolate ration has just been raised from 12 grams/day to 6 grams/day.
As far as I can see the main novelty is that the weather station classification scheme of Leroy (2010) is better than Leroy (1999).
It would have been more elegant if Watts had stated in his press release that the differences between stations of various qualities he found in the temperature trends are only visible in the raw data. In the homogenized (adjusted) data the trends are about the same for all quality classes. No more sign of errors due to the urban heat island.
That the trend is stronger in the homogenized data is no surprise, the transition to automatic weather stations during the study period has caused an artificial cooling in the raw data.
For a bit more detailed “review”, please visit my blog.
On a first read, it looks like you’ve concentrated on the methods part and not on the results. Watts et al applied the site selection and homogenization methods recently adopted by WMO; they make no claim of novelty on that at all, and in fact they explicitly note they began this based on the announcement of the new methods.
What they’re saying is their contribution is that after applying these new standard methods, the results are that the total global warming trend is about half what the older methods showed.
Of course, as a consequence, Muller’s vaunted fit with CO2 increase breaks down, but that fit was statistically suspect at best.
Charlie I would think that most people would prefer to take the word of scientists who are trained in this area. Maybe you can expound on what the credentials of this Watts fellow you so blithely follow.
Maybe you can explain why the BEST crowd didn’t control for the elementary aspects of local forcing?
Maybe after you look up the “appeal to authority” fallacy?
Once upon a time, the ideals of science were that a previously unknown researcher could be published based on the content of their research, rather than based on position. God knows this idea is often honored primarily in the breach, but you might read what Roger PIelke Sr, Fellow of the American Geophysical union and Professor, said about the paper here: http://pielkeclimatesci.wordpress.com/2012/07/29/comments-on-the-game-changer-new-paper-an-area-and-distance-weighted-analysis-of-the-impacts-of-station-exposure-on-the-u-s-historical-climatology-network-temperatures-and-temperature-trends-by-w/
Dear Charlie Martin, if the methods are wrong, the results can only be right be coincidence.
For the results you cite: “Half of the trend is spurious”, there is even no discussion of the methods. That homogenization increases the trend is known in the scientific literature and has to be the case due to changes in the way temperature is measured, which make it impossible to track climate using raw data.
To prove half of the trend is spurious, you have to prove that homogenization is producing the wrong result, but the paper is not about homogenization, only about the current siting of the stations. It would be great if the climate network in the US would have a better quality, but there is no proof that homogenization makes the trend stronger. There is some proof that the trend could be underestimated; see this validation study of the US homogenization algorithm.
After all these years and all these studies, people still can’t agree whether or not there is global warming, let alone if people are the cause of it. All I know is that when I was growing up in the 1970s, we had some of the coldest winters on record. Newsweek had big articles stating that we were headed into a new “Ice Age” and that the weather would only get colder by the turn of the century. You can actually read one of the articles here: http://sweetness-light.com/archive/newsweeks-1975-article-about-the-coming-ice-age
Now we’re all going to burn to death and there is no way to stop it. Do I believe that? Not at all. Why? Because, in general, when a bunch of “scientists” get together and tell you that, without a doubt, something is about to happen, it usually doesn’t. I’ll take my chances with what’s to come WITHOUT destroying our economy in the process by forcing it to conform to carbon standards that few people will follow.
Well, no.
Pretty well everyone agrees, and agreed in the 70′s, that it had gotten warmer since the Little Ice Age. Everyone pretty much agreed in the 70′s that it was warmer around the first century CE than it is now — the British were raising red wine grapes that now grow in Southern Europe. Particulate models were saying in the 70′s that a current cold snap would get colder, which is why all the predictions of the next ice age.
When the new ice age didn’t materialize, and the overpopulation catastrophe didn’t happen either, and Ehrlich lost his bet with Julian Simon, and the Club of Rome predictions didn’t materialize, then CO2-forced warming was the next coming catastrophe.
What always strikes me is that the solution is always to put a cadre of scientist-kings over all democratic institutions to manage things “rationally”.
It’s also enlightening to listen to the founder of Greenpeace describe what happened to the environmentalist movement after the Soviet Union collapsed.
It seems since all of our global heat comes from the sun, somebody would at least study that. However, we are told the sun has ntohing to do with our temperature. To me that is a big elephant to be ignoring….
It appears you are not aware that people do study the sun and in the past 30 odd years the sun and our temperatures have been going in opposite directions. The sun has been getting cooler (one of their cycles) and the planet is getting warmer and that is why we cannot say it’s the sun that is warming this planet at this time.
Oh and the real question is not that we are not getting warmer (only a dunce would say we are not) but what is the cause (most scientists educated in this field say man is the prime driver) and more important what do we do about it if anything. But first we have to convince the deniers like the oil and coal companies that it’s really in their interest to be honest.
You are lying. It is only in the last four years or so that the sun has been reducing output.
Five years ago, the hottest sun ever was the prediction.
Then came talk of a minimum instead, as sunspot counts plummetd.
But that decline did not come soon enough to explain the decline the AGW con men still can’t explain.
I’ve address you idiotic post with facts on another climate discussion. Go over there and discuss it and stop whining because you ave no clue what you are talking about
Hey you lie in two threads, I respond in two threads.
Get a clue and a helmet.
If I agreed with you, we’d both be wrong, BL.
First of all anyone that has been to college knows that there is no such thing as “scientists”, that is a group of homogeneous people that move as one. And when people are presented as if it is, they are right to be skeptical.
If you want to throw out the whole “oil company” meme, then be fair. There are a lot of agendas in the Global Warming crowd. There is a lot of grant, publishing, tenure, position, money and prestige at stake. And now that it’s become an article of faith, it’s simply a question of “do you want to keep your job”.
I’ve studied graduate level statistics, and the general rule of thumb for me is that the broader the scale and the grander the conclusion, the less likely it is to be true.
Well, at least you didn’t mention the Koch brothers, I suppose since they actually provided some funding to BEST.
Of course, since the oil companies provide rather more funding — between one and two orders of magnitude more — to institutions like the Climate Research Unit than to any skeptical groups (one of the surprises that showed up in the Climategate files) I presume their results are useless too?
And a dunce can see that if you argue for control of the climate, you certainly don’t argue for the evolution of all things. What was the year when the tempe4ratures around the globe were ideal? Environmentalism is a religion, not a science, and I say that you have been immersed in its faith based tenants. Mind you, that doesn’t make you a dunce, it only makes you seem like one.
Lies , lies and more lies . This scam of Global Warming was cooked up by Maurice Strong at the UN , way back in the late 1960′s . Then the nut jobs in Washington created the EPA and their radical air rules. Global Warming is the vehicle for their global agenda of the UN running the entire world. It has always been about shutting down the US economy . Agenda 21 is part of this . Man made global warming is a lie , remember the email controversy in which over 1000 were released by hackers to show the world that the scientist pushing global warming were fudging and falsifying their evidence . They use bogus computer models to push this lie. People better wake up to the lefts agenda. The results of their realized upotia are , no more vehicles for us peasants , only mass transit . No more single home ownership , only forced housing in condos and high rises . You will live within a 2mile radius of your job.No more controlling the temperatures in that apartment , smart meters will do that, controlled by a beaurocrat . Over 50 percent of the US will be open to humans. No more meat, no more dairy , only fake food.No more hunting, no more big macs , no more camping, boating , mowing your lawn, growing flowers , NOTHING left of the America we love. Somehow , someway people who support Democrats must be awakened . They are withing one to two elections away from their radical agenda .
You forgot the black helicopters hovering north of the Canadian border.
You will see the black helicopters, SteveB. You will want to take cover but you will be unable to sacrifice your place in the bread line to do so. Life will be just a bitch.
Hilariously, Mann hasn’t forgotten how Muller (correctly) trashed the hockey stick:
http://www.facebook.com/MichaelMannScientist/posts/404262676296607?comment_id=3981836&offset=0&total_comments=21
The poo is flying.
I would think these liberals would eventually find a legitimate
way to make money
sense global warming
is such an obvious scam and lie,
but no one ever said liberals were very bright.
wouldn’t a warmer planet mean more life?
I do not have the links (comment at Joanne Nova’s site) but one of the journal reviewers who looked at the Mueller-Best paper rejected it because of flaws. It was submitted again and the flaws were not corrected so it was rejected a second time. Mueller’s paper could not pass peer review.
Mueller by the way was never ever a Skeptic. His posing as one and then trashing the Surface Station Project by “pre-Publishing” earlier than the people who developed the data was a completely political move.
That this was done by Mueller gives you an indication of how really important this work is. To put it bluntly this newest paper if it stands up trashes the work of the many scientists who used the adjusted data sets on temperature for the last couple of decades. we are talking HUNDREDS of papers.
Does this pass the sniff test? Well the one area that the good thermometers show as having warmed is the southwest. This paper looks at an entirely different set of data untouched by Climate Scientists like Hansen and find no correlation to the US official temperatures.
Study finds stream temperatures don’t parallel warming climate trend
“A new analysis of streams in the western United States with long-term monitoring programs has found that despite a general increase in air temperatures over the past several decades, streams are not necessarily warming at the same rate.”
http://www.terradaily.com/reports/Study_finds_stream_temperatures_dont_parallel_warming_climate_trend_999.html
That was Ross McKitrick. He got the bum’s rush from Muller, so he went public with the criticisms.
And you can find the details via another PJM post from last night: http://pjmedia.com/tatler/2012/07/29/even-more-excitement-in-the-climate-change-world/
In early 1980 I was invited as a film producer to submit a proposal for a film documenting the Global Weather Experiment, which was the first attempt to do a world-wide systematic gathering and analysis of weather data from both manned and automated monitoring stations.
All filmmakers responding to the RFP (“request for proposals”) received a stack of reprints, data, summaries of reports from participating scientists and organizations, and a general review of the history, goals and results of the project. It was as much material as any graduate level course I’d taken.
These materials made the point OVER AND OVER and in many ways that there had never before been any such attempt at worldwide data collection. None of the participants believed that there were sufficient data for useful predictions at that time, but all agreed this first attempt would at least help define the scope of the problem. The consensus was that it would take decades of adding several orders of magnitude of additional weather monitoring stations to provide data that would allow the most primitive general predictions on any timescale beyond 24 hours.
This is AMPLY confirmed by the current state of weather predicting more than thirty years later. Weather reports are only able to predict for a few days out, and only in terms of PERCENTAGES that a given meteorologic pattern will occur. Hurricane strength, paths and landfalls continue to be described in wildly variable fuzzy probabilities, which frequently remain unknowable until the last few hours. In any case, the greatest increase in our ability to gather data and predict weather patterns in the short term, have come from WEATHER SATELLITES, NOT surface weather stations.
The point of this rant is that anyone claiming to have data of sufficient density and reliability and for any significant period to be able to conclude that Human activity has caused a 2.5 degree rise in global average temperatures is a damn liar.
Let’s remember, Mr. Mueller is publishing HIS OPINION, in an EDITORIAL in a popular news publication without ANY DEMONSTRABLE EXPERTISE in Meteorologic Science or Data Analysis. If he wanted to be taken seriously, submit his data and analytic methods to a refereed scientific journal, and see if they take the bait. Otherwise, he should button his lip.
We’ve seen ENOUGH deliberate lies, distortions and plain INVENTION of statistical data by the intellectual pygmies of East Anglia University and several other AGW liars. This is just another dripping, fly-encircled bag of manure from some self-impressed Berkeley pseudo-intellectual.
Oh, don’t be a damn fool. Better measurements would be better, of course, but you can measure the speed of light with a six inch piece of cotton twine if you pay attention to the sources of error and apply mathematics that goes back to Gauss.
What Watts et al are showing is that thee was a source of systematic error here that hadn’t been accounted for. If it were impossible to make these measurements, then they couldn’t possibly identify the error either.
Since no one knows precisely what the Sun will do in the future, any predictions are nothing but guesses at best. Certainly nothing useful in dictating economic policies.
AGW was never about science, it was ALWAYS about control, power and money. Anyone who thinks otherwise is delusional.
But neither of these papers is about prediction.
As long as hydro-election dams are being ripped down and nuclear plants are kept from being built, and the alleviation of traffic bottlenecks are being slowed due to laws such as Davis Bacon, I will remain a skeptic.
Mr. Martin, has anybody done a statistical analyis of a) whether post-industrialization warming (if any) is outside the statistical norm and/or variations of temperature increases since the last Ice Age, and b) whether the pre-instrument data is understood well enough to even draw reasonable conslusions about it. It seems to me that the hoopla by the warmists is nonsensical unless whatever they think they see can be conclusively shown to be clearly outside the boundaries of what temperature fluctuations were before the Industrial Age.
And since it is almost impossible to believe that science has an accurate perspective on what the temperature increases and variations were before insturments were invented, how on earth can they declare that mankind is causing a problem when they don’t even know if what they claim they see is really even a problem when compared to normal climate changes?
The paper on the systematic bias in the instrument data is interesting, but it’s a sure thing that older data is many times less reliable anyway. It’s comparable to declaring a star is 100 light-years away when you don’t have a clue how fast light travels in the first place.
Of course, when your main assumption is the result you want, it doesn’t much matter what the data is.
Well, the answer to your first question is yes, and you could look up the extensive literature on dendrochonology and temperature proxies to see some of it. How good that data is, is controversial, and Mann’s methods are now largely discredited because of some poor statistical practices.
On your second question, well, your degree of belief isn’t really evidence one way or the other. Again, what the question is, is where the error bars lie. Going back to the original long-term temperature estimates, what I noticed when I first got interested is that the error bars end up being extremely broad. In fact, they’re broad enough back around 2000 years ago to account for anything from a subtropical Britain to an arctic Sicily.
On your third point, this paper (and Muller’s paper) don’t use data from temperature proxies at all, so that’s really not germane.
Show me the pie chart which attributes the warming factors to each of the following: background cosmic radiation, the sun, natural disasters such as forest fires and volcanos, the natural trend in warming, and then the percent of green house gases as produced by man exclusive of those produced in nature.
Then with said chart, we may begin a reasonable study beyond man as guilt infested and a sucker for a shake-down.
Thanks for posting this, Charlie. I am a geologist, although not working in the field, and this is why I have NEVER been concerned about current global warming:
http://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2012/07/clip_image0021.jpg
http://www.theresilientearth.com/files/images/Phanerozoic_Temperature.jpg
http://www.theresilientearth.com/files/images/Phanerozoic_Carbon_Dioxide.jpg
http://www.theresilientearth.com/files/images/Phanerozoic_Biodiversity-500.jpg
The ONLY reason the CAGW crowd pulled off this scam is because EVERYONE is ignorant of the history of this planet. We are currently approaching the END of an interglacial called the Holocene, during which human civilization developed. When the Holocene ends, the next glacial maximum will follow, repeating the pattern of the last 5 million years. If you want to see what a glacial maximum looks like, visit Antarctica.
So I’m enjoying the climate we have and hope it continues to warm for another few hundred, or even a few thousand years (not likely, unfortunately). Life flourishes when it’s warm, CO2 feeds plants and living is good. During a maximum, not so much.
“it appears likely that essentially all of this increase results from the human emission of greenhouse gases.” Is this conclusion supposed to close the debate? “It appears likely…”? “that essentially all…”? It appears likely to me that essentially all of these scientific prognosticators are selling their best guess as to what is the scientific reality, which no one yet understands completely. It’s whose side do you want to be on?, the side of scientific fact, provable by being consistently able to predict any future climate event using one theoretical mathematical model, which is hard, or the side selectively picking a non-consistent, degenerate set of data, input to one of many computer models, manipulated to produce a desired; i.e., predetermined result, which is easy and a lot more profitable.
The “anthropogenic global warming, climate change, increasingly violent weather events of any stripe,” movement has demonstrated beyond any doubt a willingness to go to extraordinary lengths to keep their doomsday scenario alive, producing all those taxpayer funded, government grants to finance their “noble, altruistic crusade” to save the planet from the evils perpetrated by greedy, industrial, fat cat, corporate moguls. The latter would be the “evil rich” guys and gals, Capitalists, whose entrepreneurial ambitions and visions have produced all the wonderful gadgets and gizmos we all take for granted and who are directly and indirectly responsible for the fruitful employment millions of “clueless” hard working folk who are easily duped into helpless apathy by the doomsday scenario. Who knew? Heaven (or government?) help us……the sky is falling. When will they wise up? Hopefully, long before they get as long in the tooth as I.
I always thought that in the midst of all the climate science exageration there was some real science trying to get out. It sounds like Mullers paper will corect some problems with the original Mann and jones findings, and reduce documented warming to a much lower 1.5 degres in the last 50 yrs, mch less that the alarming hockey stick graph. But now it looks like this paper has some problems too, and the warming may be halved yet again.
I say let the critics and skeptics keep up their good work, and see what remains when they all finally give up. then they can start to answer the remaining questions, like:
1. How do we know this trend will continue and how do we know some other event, like solar induced cooling will not reverse it.
2. Will the small rise that remains be all that bad.
3. Will the proposed cures, like complete socialistic control of the worlds economy, be worse than the disease.
4. Could they be some way to reverse any warming besides reducing co2 that will be much cheaper.
There are all sorts of questions like these that nobody, or certainly no scientist, has ever answered. In fact some of them, like the economic impact of proposed solutions vs the impact of living with warming, can probably never be answered by science. Because of these open questions, I say let this research continue, and try and keep getting the bias and error out of the results, and also try to get better answers to my other questions, before we cave to the leftists and do something stupid.
This morning at 6:00 am it was 76 degrees Fahrenheit. By 3:00 pm it was alady 84. That’s an 8 degree rise in only 9 hours. At that rate, the oceans will start to boil in 6 days. It’s simple math. You can’t argue with numbers. How can you fools not believe in global warming? Quick! There’s no time to think. Just put me in charge of Exxon so I can stop it before it’s too late! Is that too much to ask to save the world? Trust me. I’m not one of those greedy “1%ers” who cares about profits. No, when I run Exxon, there will be no profits at all, you can count on that. I personally guarantee that if you put me in charge of Exxon, the world will not boil to death in 6 days.
I meantioned the Sun as the main culprit that seems to be mostly ignored. And my comment is blown off as the Sun is cooling? Didn’t we just have news of major suns flares? Anyway, I digress, what happened to all of the reports of Mars, Jupiter, Triton and Pluto, all warming over the last 10-20 years? These reports were released from both NASA and the Russian Observatories. (Again, no inclusion of the sun in the models.) However, this would seem to back up the bias mentioned in this article. Also I am aware of the CO2 issues and the fact that Earht’s CO2 levels were 10 times higher 385 million years ago than today’s .036. I am pretty sure the factories were not as big 385 million years ago as they are today. Maybe man has nothing to do with CO2 levels.
So if the Sun has no effect on global warming, wouldn’t also stand that man doesn’t either given the temperature issues on 4 other major bodies in our solar system?
I am not an expert in climatology, although I have read enough to identify the white and black hats in the conflict. I engineered a score of US nukes, two score fossil fueled power plants and assessed advanced technologies in this field for decades (e.g. superconductivity, ultracapacitors, nanotechnology.) From my expertise I can offer recent facts. 670 million people, in India, are today struggling without a grid. Factories are stopped, railroad passenger cars are stranded miles in the boondocks, toilets do not work, no water comes out of the faucet, operating rooms are dark, with a patient on the table.
The US grid was built by your grand fathers. Our plants are worn out, our transmission lines are near collapse. Far worst, America no longer has the engineering expertise to fix it, our engineering schools dropped vital course work decades ago. Their alumni were laid off. Most of our experienced people (people who engineered 5+ power plants) are now buried.
The new and improved alternate energies will not work, for base loaded supply, at a cost you can afford. The Obama answer is the smart grid, which, at hideous cost, will shut off your air conditioner every summer day, (which can drastically shorten its life, unless they care.)
I led the first US spent fuel storage scheme, “independent” of a power plant. All of nuclear energy is based on a national law: In 1998, all civilian spent fuel, 75000 tons, would rest in Yucca Mountain Nevada. It does not exist, and no one is working the problem. Without a repository, nukes are extremely costly and IMHO, dangerous. (Read about Fukushima.) By basic safety policy, the temporary storage pools in nukes should be almost empty, not crammed full as all of them are today.
IMHO, our grids will collapse long before climate becomes a problem.
We have four organizational barriers to fixing the problem: ignorant, power mad politicians and oligopolists, in leadership roles, biased scientists and engineers in the technical disciples, and a lousy primary and secondary educational system. If we do not break these barriers, we will lose our nation.