BEST study; Global Warming is Real.

For those who don't know about this, Climate Skeptic physicist Richard Muller, with the blessing of Anthony Watts of climate denier website Wattsupwiththat and partial funding by the Koch Brothers, set up a study with independent scientists to review the temperature record to determine if global warming is real:http://berkeleyearth.org/index.php

Berkeley Earth Team

Berkeley Earth team members include:

Richard Muller, Founder and Scientific Director
Robert Rohde, Lead Scientist

David Brillinger, Statistical Scientist
Judith Curry, Climatologist
Don Groom, Physicist
Robert Jacobsen, Professor of Physics
Saul Perlmutter, Professor of Physics
Arthur Rosenfeld, Professor of Physics, Former California Energy Commissioner
Charlotte Wickham, Statistical Scientist
Jonathan Wurtele, Professor of Physics

Elizabeth Muller, Founder and Executive Director

Anthony Watts has agreed to accept their results. Well they've published four papers and guess what? They drew several conclusions:

The earth is indeed getting warmer. Global average land temperatures have risen 0.91 degrees Celsius over the past 50 years. This is "on the high end of the existing range of reconstructions."
The rate of increase on land is accelerating. Warming for the entire 20th century clocks in at 0.73 degrees C per century. But over the most recent 40 years, the globe has warmedat a rate of 2.76 degrees C per century.
Warming has not abated since 1998. The rise in average temperature over the period 1998-2010 is 2.84 degrees C per century.
The BEST data significantly reduces the uncertainty of the temperature reconstructions. Their estimate of the temperature increase over the past 50 years has an uncertainty of only 0.04 degrees C, compared to a reported uncertainty of 0.13 degrees C in the most recent Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report.
Although many of the temperature measuring stations around the world have large individual uncertainties, taken as a whole the data is quite reliable. The difference in reported averages between stations ranked "okay" and stations ranked "poor" is very small.
The urban heat island effect—i.e., the theory that rising temperatures around cities might be corrupting the global data—is very small.

Van: Anthony Watts is Hillbillys god, so it will be interesting to see what he has to say, although Watts is already waffling on his pledge to accept their results,

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Replies to This Discussion

Permalink Reply by Hillbilly on October 21, 2011 at 10:01pm

Anthony Watts is Hillbillys god

Not really. Watts is okay even though he takes his own BS too seriously. His "guest posters" drive me bananas. They don't know what they are talking about and just make sht up.

As far as the BEST study, I've been waiting to read it. Maybe I'll take the time this weekend. Maybe not. I've got a lot to do. That chick from GT is on the committee and she tries to be reasonable.

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Permalink Reply by Van on October 22, 2011 at 3:19am

Ok. I just know you used to post a lot of links to him. And to his credit, scientists had to take his assertions about the placement of temperature measuring stations seriously.

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Permalink Reply by Van on October 22, 2011 at 3:34am

Here's a link to The Economist where they explain the study and why it came about in layman's terms:

http://www.economist.com/node/21533360

To build confidence in their methodologies, NASA and NOAA already publish their data and algorithms. Hadley CRU is now doing so. A grander solution, outlined in a forthcomingBulletin of the American Meteorological Society, would be to provide a single online databank of all temperature data and analysis. Part of the point would be to encourage more scientists and statisticians to test the existing analyses—and a group backed by Novim, a research outfit in Santa Barbara, California, has recently done just that.

Inconvenient data

Marshalled by an astrophysicist, Richard Muller, this group, which calls itself the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature, is notable in several ways. When embarking on the project 18 months ago, its members (including Saul Perlmutter, who won the Nobel prize for physics this month for his work on dark energy) were mostly new to climate science. And Dr Muller, for one, was mildly sceptical of its findings. This was partly, he says, because of “climategate”: the 2009 revelation of e-mails from scientists at CRU which suggested they had sometimes taken steps to disguise their adjustments of inconvenient palaeo-data. With this reputation, the Berkeley Earth team found it unusually easy to attract sponsors, including a donation of $150,000 from the Koch Foundation.

Yet Berkeley Earth’s results, as described in four papers currently undergoing peer review, but which were nonetheless released on October 20th, offer strong support to the existing temperature compilations. The group estimates that over the past 50 years the land surface warmed by 0.911°C: a mere 2% less than NOAA’s estimate. That is despite its use of a novel methodology—designed, at least in part, to address the concerns of what Dr Muller terms “legitimate sceptics”.

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Permalink Reply by Hillbilly on October 22, 2011 at 7:03am

His site is well organized and when looking for a plot, I probably will find it on WUWT.

PS - I really do like the BEST project. The temperature record has always been suspect because the CRU people wouldn't reveal the original data (they lost it). Moreover, one can now interrogate the data on a data point by data point basis and that is the best way to do science.

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Permalink Reply by Michael Walker on October 22, 2011 at 9:34am

Global warming is a moot point IMO. Anyone who thinks that all the polution this planets inhabitant cockroaches pumps into the air is not F$#king with it's balance is an idiot!

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Permalink Reply by GodHatesTrash on October 22, 2011 at 9:59am

The deniers are quick to say that climate change is also caused by volcanoes, sunspots, etc.

They are the kinds of idiots that piss on their carpet because their dog pisses on it, too.

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Permalink Reply by Hillbilly on October 22, 2011 at 11:03am

Count me as an idiot then.

There are many contributions to climate change. Cockroach farts being one of them as well as volcanoes and sunspots. There are also significant sources of stability, the water vapor cycle being the most dominate. Despite all the data and modeling, no one really knows how the interactions work.

The foundation of all the pondering and cogitation is the temperature record. That is the value of the BEST project. It is an open source for tabulating temperature changes and ensures that the rest of the work has a sound basis.

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Permalink Reply by Van on October 23, 2011 at 6:24am

Hahaha. And so it starts. Global Warming is real, but now it's probably caused by sunspots, volcanoes, and cockroach farts. Except we know that sunspots have have very little effect, and we can quantify the effect of volcanoes, so it must be cockroach farts! Anyway here is Muller in the WSJ:

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204422404576594872796...

When we began our study, we felt that skeptics had raised legitimate issues, and we didn't know what we'd find. Our results turned out to be close to those published by prior groups. We think that means that those groups had truly been very careful in their work, despite their inability to convince some skeptics of that. They managed to avoid bias in their data selection, homogenization and other corrections.

Global warming is real. Perhaps our results will help cool this portion of the climate debate. How much of the warming is due to humans and what will be the likely effects? We made no independent assessment of that.

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Permalink Reply by Van on October 23, 2011 at 6:32am

Note the part where he vindicates the scientist from NASA, NOAA, and CRU. The same ones the deniers were smearing in the phony 'Climategate' scandal:

Our results turned out to be close to those published by prior groups. We think that means that those groups had truly been very careful in their work, despite their inability to convince some skeptics of that. They managed to avoid bias in their data selection, homogenization and other corrections.

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Permalink Reply by GodHatesTrash on October 23, 2011 at 11:27am

Count me as an idiot then.

Never fear - always!

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Permalink Reply by Hillbilly on October 30, 2011 at 10:20am

So not only did GT beat Clemson this weekend (convincingly) but my little GT Climate babe Judith comes through too.

Prof Judith Curry, who chairs the Department of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at America’s prestigious Georgia Institute of Technology, said that Prof Muller’s claim that he has proven global warming sceptics wrong was also a ‘huge mistake’, with no scientific basis

‘There is no scientific basis for saying that warming hasn’t stopped,’ she said. ‘To say that there is detracts from the credibility of the data, which is very unfortunate.’

‘This is nowhere near what the climate models were predicting,’ Prof Curry said. ‘Whatever it is that’s going on here, it doesn’t look like it’s being dominated by CO2.’

‘Of course this isn’t the end of scepticism,’ she said. ‘To say that is the biggest mistake he [Prof Muller] has made. When I saw he was saying that I just thought, “Oh my God”.’

Yesterday Prof Muller insisted that neither his claims that there has not been a standstill, nor the graph, were misleading because the project had made its raw data available on its website, enabling others to draw their own graphs.

However, he admitted it was true that the BEST data suggested that world temperatures have not risen for about 13 years. But in his view, this might not be ‘statistically significant’, although, he added, it was equally possible that it was – a statement which left other scientists mystified.

‘I am baffled as to what he’s trying to do,’ Prof Curry said.

But although Prof Curry is the second named author of all four papers, Prof Muller failed to consult her before deciding to put them on the internet earlier this month, when the peer review process had barely started, and to issue a detailed press release at the same time.

He also briefed selected journalists individually. ‘It is not how I would have played it,’ Prof Curry said. ‘I was informed only when I got a group email. I think they have made errors and I distance myself from what they did.

‘It would have been smart to consult me.’ She said it was unfortunate that although the Journal of Geophysical Research had allowed Prof Muller to issue the papers, the reviewers were, under the journal’s policy, forbidden from public comment.

In Prof Curry’s view, two of the papers were not ready to be published, in part because they did not properly address the arguments of climate sceptics.

As for the graph disseminated to the media, she said: ‘This is “hide the decline” stuff. Our data show the pause, just as the other sets of data do. Muller is hiding the decline.

‘To say this is the end of scepticism is misleading, as is the statement that warming hasn’t paused. It is also misleading to say, as he has, that the issue of heat islands has been settled.’

Link

Go Yellow Jackets.

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Permalink Reply by Van on October 30, 2011 at 6:56pm

So Curry is mad that Mueller at least had the integrity to report the truth. But she can't because she has her climate and weather predicting business and she refuses to tell which Koch brother is funding it. And the decline they are talking about is just a decline in the rate of temperature increase, not a decline in temperatures. The models aren't perfect, so they don't get it exactly right. But as BEST shows, they are actually very close in their predictions and Judith Curry is a lying Koch Whore. And Georgia Institute of Technology is only prestigious in the eyes of Jethros like Hillbilly.