TheEEStory.com

BBC Report on Berkeley Project Study

Berkeley Earth Project

BBC wrote:

The Earth's surface really is getting warmer, a new analysis by a US scientific group set up in the wake of the "Climategate" affair has concluded.

The Berkeley Earth Project has used new methods and some new data, but finds the same warming trend seen by groups such as the UK Met Office and Nasa.

The project received funds from sources that back organisations lobbying against action on climate change.

Apologies to UnDeleted whose post in the anti-AGW thread appears here. However, it doesn't make sense just to append such a noteworthy post at the end of a thread titled Global warming is now a confirmed scam

Regards,
Peter

Last edited Fri, 21 Oct 2011, 7:57am by Technopete

sure wish they had waited for peer review.

Strange goings on.
See http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/10/20/the-berke...

EEventually wrote:

sure wish they had waited for peer review.

Regards,
Peter

Global warming is real? Gosh, alert the media. Yes, there has been a global warming trend since the early to mid 1800s. Why are we still seeing articles about this? It would be equally informative to see a headline reading "The earth is not flat!"

It seems like the Natural Climate Change Deniers see it as some sort of triumph for their Cause (with a capital "C") every time global warming is confirmed.

Lensman wrote:

Global warming is real? Gosh, alert the media. Yes, there has been a global warming trend since the early to mid 1800s. Why are we still seeing articles about this? It would be equally informative to see a headline reading "The earth is not flat!"

It seems like the Natural Climate Change Deniers see it as some sort of triumph for their Cause (with a capital "C") every time global warming is confirmed.

The issue here is that the work which has been independently checked here (climate temp records & modelling etc) is shown to be correct.

You will remember many AGW skeptics (including you?) saying after Climategate that the mater was proven, we should believe nothing the AGW people say.

It seems now we should believe, at least, what the Climategate AGW people said. In spite of the unfortunate e-mails.

We should further therefore not take the climategate scandal as in any way showing the "system" is broke. At least as far as it has been independently checked it seems to have worked well. Of course this is no news for AGW skeptics, who always thought the system was fine ;)

Maybe you always did?

I have no doubts (no reason to doubt) that the earth has warmed by 0.9 c over the last 50-60 years... It's called nature, things get warmer, and things get cooler... That's just what happens... There was a little ice age, then there was a warming period... And the cycle continues...

...the Economist still doesn’t get it. The issue of “the world is warming” is not one that climate skeptics question, it is the magnitude and causes...

...the Muller et al paper uses data for comparison from 1950 – 2010 as stated on lines 142-143:
“We calculated the mean temperature from 1950 to the present for each of these sites, and subtracted the mean of the poor sites from the OK sites.”
I see this as a basic failure in understanding the limitations of the siting survey we conducted on the USHCN, rendering the Muller et al paper conclusions highly uncertain, if not erroneous.
There is simply no way siting quality can be established as static for that long. The USHCN survey was based on photographs and site surveys starting in of 2007, plus historical metadata. Since the siting of COOP stations change as volunteers move, die, or discontinue their service, we know the record of siting stability to be tenuous over time...

parallel wrote:

Strange goings on.
See http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/10/20/the-berke...

ee-tom wrote:

You will remember many AGW skeptics (including you?) saying after Climategate that the mater was proven, we should believe nothing the AGW people say.

I don't believe anything they say, without confirmation from other sources. If one of the Natural Climate Change Deniers said it was raining outside, I'd look out a window to see if it's true.

But there is what I regard as incontrovertible evidence from other sources. For example, the historical records of Thames Frost Fairs, when the Thames river near London froze hard over, are sufficient proof that in the early 1800s it occasionally got substantially colder there than it ever does now, at least in the area near London and presumably elsewhere in the Northern Hemisphere. More recently, biologists have reported a northward creep of the range (territory) of various flora and fauna, so widespread it can only be a result of a general warming trend in the Northern Hemisphere. I don't believe there is a massive worldwide conspiracy of historians and scientists working in legitimate branches of peer-reviewed science faking these results, and that's what would be required.

That is very different than the tightly-knit so-called "peer reviewed" climate science community, all of which feed raw data to only three worldwide climate data centers, and use data from those centers after it has been "massaged" in their so-called peer reviewed papers.

As you may recall, Tom, one of those three data centers was the origin point of the "Climategate" e-mails, and some of those very e-mails give strong indications of a similar or identical agenda at one of the other data centers. Is there much hope that the third data center is free of the tendency to manipulate data in support of the NCC Denier agenda? I don't personally think so.

Note also that those data centers routinely refuse to release raw data to those outside their community who want to check their results. That's definitely not how the real science community works. It's more the sort of thing we'd expect from a fringe science community like cold fusion/LENR research.

ee-tom wrote:

At least as far as it has been independently checked it seems to have worked well.

How strange to claim that a study from Berkeley is "independent" of the NCC Denier community. The activist political agendas of the two institutions are exactly aligned, and for both institutions it's been repeatedly shown that their common activist political agenda has an undue influence on their activities.

Last edited Fri, 21 Oct 2011, 9:56am by Lensman

The accuracy of the BEST report is not clear. See http://bishophill.squarespace.com/blog/2011/10/...

Of course the world has warmed since the little ice age and probably 1°C since 1950. This does not prove that CO2 was responsible. If global warming stopped, as it seems to have for the last ten years, it doesn't mean it is hiding, it means it has stopped.

How long does it have to stop warming before the models are falsified?

parallel wrote:

Of course the world has warmed since the little ice age and probably 1°C since 1950. This does not prove that CO2 was responsible. If global warming stopped, as it seems to have for the last ten years, it doesn't mean it is hiding, it means it has stopped.

How long does it have to stop warming before the models are falsified?

The models have been falsified every time we discover a new factor significantly influencing climate. That's happened at least three times that I know of over the past four decades. The Natural Climate Change Deniers just ignore the fact their models have been repeatedly falsified, and continue to insist they are accurate.

And when you truly Believe in the Dogma you're spouting, you can do that without embarrassment!

The BEST study is a big deal, since many AWG deniers claimed that there was no warming and the scientists were manipulating the data. Now we have this project, partially funded by Koch organizations and headed by a climate skeptic, Richard Muller, that says there is warming and previous studies are valid. It's disingenuous to say that this study is wrong just because it is not in agreement with your beliefs.

A. Watts, whose blog the most popular denier(skeptic?) blog, said “I’m prepared to accept whatever result they produce, even if it proves my premise wrong.“. He is now backing off that commitment, but this report should put the UHI and siting issues to rest relative to temperature data set.

Now that those that denied warming have been shown to be wrong (again), this time by a partially Koch funded study and by skeptics, we can move on to the greenhouse gas issue.

Lensman wrote:

How strange to claim that a study from Berkeley is "independent" of the NCC Denier community. The political philosophies of the two institutions are exactly aligned, and for both institutions it's been shown that their activist political agenda has an undue influence on their activities.

Be objective about this study and it implications. It was performed a bunch of scientists who were regarded as impartial by guys who support your view. These funders included the Koch brothers, the billionaire US industrialists, who, according to the BBC, have also donated large sums to organisations lobbying against acceptance of man-made global warming.

This independent study confirmed the results of mainstream climate change studies. It set out to address the methodological criticisms of the temperature measurements that have been made by natural global warming supporters, and funded by such supporters. Far from uncovering a systematic bias, the independent study has confirmed that the mainstream results are pretty spot on and that the odd criticism of weaknesses of mainstream studies matters a great deal less than previously you would have us suppose.

Now, the really key thing here.

If there is not a trace of systematic bias in the mainstream temperature studies, then that means there is no mainstream conspiracy.

If there is no mainstream conspiracy, then that means that the modelling of causes of the temperature rise and predictions of future temperatures are best-efforts basis from concerned scientists doing their utmost to produce objective scientific results.

And that would mean that you should be open to researching the mainstream studies on their own terms, rather than through a filter that says as a matter of policy you are never going to believe anything said by people who have reached a conclusion that global warming is human-induced.

Regards,
Peter

Last edited Fri, 21 Oct 2011, 10:42am by Technopete

Yazzur wrote:

The BEST study is a big deal, since many AWG deniers claimed that there was no warming and the scientists were manipulating the data.

Note how the Natural Climate Change Deniers keep attacking those few remaining on the lunatic fringe who still deny the reality of global warming, instead of just ignoring them as all those on the lunatic fringe deserve to be ignored. The NCC Deniers like to do that because it's part of how they convince themselves there is "consensus" on their NCC Denier dogma. You'll note that their Belief in their cause is so strong that they have convinced themselves that all CAGW skeptics are actually among that lunatic fringe.

Yazzur wrote:

It's disingenuous to say that this study is wrong just because it is not in agreement with your beliefs.

Perhaps there are some non-Americans here who do not realize that Berkeley is the one single college/university, out of all those in the USA, most notorious for having an activist far-left-wing political agenda, and that most definitely includes the Green political movement.

If I were to choose a university at which to conduct a review of IPCC science, Berkeley would quite literally be the very last one I'd choose. Coming from Berkeley, I could have written the conclusion before the study was performed.

And as usual, the NCC Deniers on this forum are claiming that evidence of global warming is equally evidence that climate change is caused by human activity.

Why is it necessary to keep pointing out how fallacious this is? It's almost like their beliefs on this subject are according to Dogma, not according to science...

Technopete wrote:

Lensman wrote:

How strange to claim that a study from Berkeley is "independent" of the NCC Denier community. The political philosophies of the two institutions are exactly aligned, and for both institutions it's been shown that their activist political agenda has an undue influence on their activities.

Lens,

Be objective about this study and it implications. It was performed a bunch of scientists who were regarded as impartial by guys who support your view.

At Berkeley? Seriously? Do you have any idea what a reputation Berkeley has?

Are you an American? I'm guessing not, or you'd know how notorious Berkeley is as a hotbed of far-left-wing political activity.

Technopete wrote:

These funders included the Koch brothers, the billionaire US industrialists, who, according to the BBC, have also donated large sums to organisations lobbying against acceptance of man-made global warming.

In many cases, certainly one should ask where the money came from, because some organizations just fund study after study until they get the result they want, then advertise that one.

But in this case, since the study was conducted at a major university (and presumably was *not* performed over and over again, but only once) I think far more important than where the funding came from is who actually conducted the study. It's not like the Koch Bros' check had some magical power to cause far left radicals to suddenly dump their political agenda, is it?

Why in the world would anyone have chosen Berkeley for a so-called "independent" review? That doesn't appear rational to me. That's like hiring the Vatican to do an "independent" study of the Roman Catholic Church. Why *invite* people to dismiss the study in advance, without serious consideration, merely because of the notoriety of Berkeley?

Sorry Technopete, something smells rather badly here.

Technopete wrote:

This independent study confirmed the results of mainstream climate change studies.

Well, it would if it was actually and truly independent, which appears extremely unlikely to me.

And BTW, I think we are not going to agree on your use of the term "mainstream" here. I don't consider so-called climate "science" from the IPCC crowd to be "mainstream" just because it encompasses the majority of climate researchers, any more than I consider so-called "cold fusion/LENR science" from the LENR crowd to be "mainstream" just because it encompasses the majority of cold fusion/LENR researchers.

Technopete wrote:

If there is not a trace of systematic bias in the mainstream temperature studies, then that means there is no mainstream conspiracy.

One study confirming another by the Natural Climate Change Deniers. Gee, it's almost like their political agenda gave them a motive to agree with each others' conclusions.

Technopete wrote:

...as a matter of policy you are never going to believe anything said by people who have reached a conclusion that global warming is human-induced.

That's right, I'm never going to believe anything said by those who have demonstrated and even publicly admitted over and over and over that their political Dogma is more important to them than speaking and writing Truth.

Lensman:

There is a large contingent of skeptics that deny the earth is warming, it's interesting to see you call them lunatics.

The study was actually run out of Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory, which is part of the U of C family, but LBL share only 250 staff with U of C, out of a total staff of 4000, and is hardly a left wing organization. And both project team members Richard Mueller and Judith Curry, as the Scientific Director and Climatologist, respectively, are as far from, what is your term? NCC denier?, as you are.

I don't think any climate scientist will attribute 100% of warming to anthropological causes only, so I don't know on upon what your NCC Denier argument is based.

Note to Taylor. This is another iteration of a worldwide effort to validate a chart. It will take a lifetime of additional research, with recalibrations at each new revelation, to get an understanding of how the chart took it's shape.

Otherwise, I think global warming is indeed anthropogenic due to a poverty of pirates.

Yazzur wrote:

Lensman:

There is a large contingent of skeptics that deny the earth is warming, it's interesting to see you call them lunatics.

I think the time has long passed in which it was appropriate to describe the few die-hards and cranks left as "a large contingent". How many of them are left who do not work for Big Oil?

Yazzur wrote:

I don't think any climate scientist will attribute 100% of warming to anthropological causes only...

Yeah, but only if you pin them down on that point. Otherwise they will almost certainly say merely "it's man-made" or something similar. That is, of course, their political bias showing. They know better, but they'd rather parrot the "party line".

Yazzur wrote:

...so I don't know on upon what your NCC Denier argument is based.

I base it on their collective claim that anthropic factors have caused most of the current warming trend, despite pretty clear historical evidence to the contrary. In fact, when one points out that the atmospheric CO2 levels have gone up very sharply, yet global temperatures have not risen over the past 60 years appreciably faster than they have at any time since the early 1800s, then they suddenly shift their argument and start claiming "Well, the current warming trend would have ended and temperatures would be going down if it were not for anthropic causes." Do they offer any evidence for this? No. I guess it's based on a "funny feeling in their toes" caused by their activist Dogma.

"NCC Denier" ... what a stupid (or just plain obtuse) label. Accepting the possibility that there may be enough people (7 Billion) on the planet pumping out enough greenhouse gasses to affect the climate, does not preclude natural inputs to climate change.

Human and bacteria behavior have more in common than most would like to admit.

Thanks for this thread Pete. Yes I agree this deserves it's own.

I was going to post this article from that left wing propaganda piece the economist. ;)

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

I think Lensman is employed by the Koch bros. Both are from Kansas. :P

Lens read this over very carefully a few times, slowly. Let it sink in:

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”.

EEventually wrote:

sure wish they had waited for peer review.

This is a peer review. Nothing new here.

Indisputable proof that the temperature readings are 100% accurate:

As far as is presently known the BEST temperatures are close to being correct. (Assuming a global temperature means anything.)

That doesn't absolve them of not doing the statistics correctly. Wrong is plain wrong even if the error is small.

As posted before, see: http://www.bishop-hill.net/blog/2011/10/21/keen...

Fibb wrote:

I think Lensman is employed by the Koch bros. Both are from Kansas. :P

LOL! Are they really? I didn't know.

Lens read this over very carefully a few times, slowly. Let it sink in:

<snip>

Okay. I read that, and I also skimmed over the website for the project.

I note that it only confirms the existence of the current warming trend. As I said above, this is not news.

And their graphs start at 1800. So they are not trying to address the controversy of the Medieval Warm Period, or the dispute over whether or not that was even warmer than current temperatures.

And the study says not one single word about anthropic global warming, and the evidence or lack of evidence for that.

So, altho I agree this did deserve a thread on the subject, I see nothing which should cause any rational person to change his opinion about climate change.... given that I think the few hardcore climate change deniers left are either irrational, or are examples of people working for Big Oil, for whom:

It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it! --Upton Sinclair

Lensman:

According to the latest Stanford U, Ipsos, Reuters poll, about 15% of people in the United States don't believe the earth has warmed over the past 100 years. 29% of republicans don't believe the earth has warmed over the past 100 years.

ONeil wrote:

"NCC Denier" ... what a stupid (or just plain obtuse) label.

Rather like labeling me a "global warming denier", innit?

parallel wrote:

As far as is presently known the BEST temperatures are close to being correct. (Assuming a global temperature means anything.)

That doesn't absolve them of not doing the statistics correctly. Wrong is plain wrong even if the error is small.

As posted before, see: http://www.bishop-hill.net/blog/2011/10/21/keen...

Doug Keena, the supposed statistical expert pretty much said that there was no valid way of building a statistical model from temperature records. Here is the not-very-helpful comment from him :

Doug Keenan wrote:

Although the AR(1)-based model is known to be inadequate, no one knows what statistical model should be used. There have been various papers in the peer-reviewed literature that suggest possible resolutions, but so far no alternative model has found much acceptance.

That leaves the door open for him to criticise any and every attempt to create a valid statistical model of temperatures. Now, the question is, how much weight should be given to his criticism of the statistics when he is not prepared or able to state as to how modelling such temperature series should be approached?

In other words, how wrong can you actually be when the guy criticising you is actually saying there is no right method?

Such dispute (often vitriolic) between statisticians is nothing new. In the late 1950's, Fischer, who had made a significant contribution to statistical theory, was a heavy smoker and a paid consultant of the tobacco industry. He accused Bayesians and other statisticians of dishonesty after a 5 year longitudinal study showed lung cancer rates among physicians were 22 to 24x higher for smokers than non-smokers. His theories included one that lung cancer caused smoking, and another that some people had a heriditary disposition for both smoking and lung cancer.

Regards,
Peter

Last edited Fri, 21 Oct 2011, 2:11pm by Technopete

Yazzur wrote:

Lensman:

According to the latest Stanford U, Ipsos, Reuters poll, about 15% of people in the United States don't believe the earth has warmed over the past 100 years. 29% of republicans don't believe the earth has warmed over the past 100 years.

Okay, I keep forgetting the influence of Faux News. I guess that's wishful thinking on my part.

Of course, this study won't affect their thinking. In fact, if their primary source of info re current events is Faux News, then they won't ever hear about it.

Lensman wrote:

I note that it only confirms the existence of the current warming trend. As I said above, this is not news.

And the study says not one single word about anthropic global warming, and the evidence or lack of evidence for that.

So, altho I agree this did deserve a thread on the subject, I see nothing which should cause any rational person to change his opinion about climate change.... given that I think the few hardcore climate change deniers left are either irrational, or are examples of people working for Big Oil, for whom:

The big change with the publication of these papers is that an independent study found no systematic bias in the previously published results from mainstream groups. In other words the study supports the view that the mainstream climatologist are doing science as well as they can, despite the inevitable disagreements of various professional statisticians.

So the big change for you would be to give the benefit of the moral doubt to the predictive climate models from those same mainstream guys, and to approach their results with an open mind.

While there can always be specific criticisms of specific models, the broad spectrum of such models and the broad agreement generally minimises the possibility that very specific factors can render them all inaccurate.

To consider this you have got to believe that the mainstream climatologists are attempting to get the best available answer, and it is the improvement in confindence in this area that the Berkeley Earth project makes its biggest contribution in my opinion.

Regards,
Peter

Technopete wrote:

parallel wrote:

As far as is presently known the BEST temperatures are close to being correct. (Assuming a global temperature means anything.)

That doesn't absolve them of not doing the statistics correctly. Wrong is plain wrong even if the error is small.

As posted before, see: http://www.bishop-hill.net/blog/2011/10/21/keen...

Parallel,

Doug Keena, the supposed statistical expert pretty much said that there was no valid way of building a statistical model from temperature records. Here is the not-very-helpful comment from him :

Doug Keenan wrote:

Although the AR(1)-based model is known to be inadequate, no one knows what statistical model should be used. There have been various papers in the peer-reviewed literature that suggest possible resolutions, but so far no alternative model has found much acceptance.

That leaves the door open for him to criticise any and every attempt to create a valid statistical model of temperatures. Now, the question is, how much weight should be given to his criticism of the statistics when he is not prepared or able to state as how modelling such temperature series should be approached?

In other words, how wrong can you actually be when the guy criticising you is actually saying there is no right method.

Such disputes between statisticians is nothing new. In the late 1950's, Fischer, who had made a significant contribution to statistical theory, was a heavy smoker and a paid consultant of the tobacco industry. He accused Bayesians and other statisticians of dishonesty after a 5 year longitudinal study showed lung cancer rates among physicians were 22 to 24x higher for smokers than non-smokers. His theories included one that lung cancer caused smoking, and another that some people had a heriditary disposition for both smoking and lung cancer.

Regards,
Peter

One of the AGW skeptics big misunderstandings is that AGW models are "statistical models".

They roll out statistics types used to soft sciences or (even worse) economics where there are no rules, and these types say modelling is impossible.

But Climate modelling is only partly statistical. Many aspects of the modelling have completely understood physical models which basically solve the problem. Others have physical models which provide goos approximate solutions. Al that stuff, and analysing whether it is OK, is complex and completely beyond the ken of statisticians.

To put it more simply:

A decent climate modeller must also be a decent statistician.

A decent statistician will not usually have the necessary physics skill set to be a climate modeller.

Lensman wrote:

I note that it only confirms the existence of the current warming trend. As I said above, this is not news.

It is news to a lot people, as others here have pointed out.

AND the current warming trend is extremely fast. THEY CONFIRMED THAT TOO.

What's happening "now" ie. over the past several decades, normally takes 1000s of years.

And it could easily accelerate because of various positive feedbacks, and cause massive disruptions to our economy, increase security risks, and drought, famine, migration, etc.

The prudent course is to start reducing emissions NOW. Hopefully we can de-carbonize the economy completely by 2050.