Global Cooling

[Simon of the Playa]

since CSS loves to use the EU times as a source, i thought we might examine that...

http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/European_Union_Times


yeah, go away, css, please, everytime you open your yap i can smell the bullshit thru the monitor.

[Simon of the Playa]

"Almost everything the site claims about the world and, more worryingly, itself, is demonstrably deliberate falsehoods. Anyone who takes the site seriously, despite the evidence of its utter unreliability and lunatic views which springs to the eye almost immediately upon visiting it, is either a Nazi, an ideologue or a complete fucking idiot."


yup.

[dr.placebo]

There was an interesting development recently when "climate skeptic" darling Richard Muller and his group published the results of the BEST (Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature) Study on the temperature record since 1800. The study site is here. An external summary of it is here. The graphic result that I like best is:

which shows that the BEST results closely match the other leading data sets, and actually come out warmer than the HadCRU results that so often bother the "climate skeptics."

To me this is surprising in several ways, partly because Anthony Watts (of WattsUpWithThat fame) actually said in March of 2011:

I’m prepared to accept whatever result they produce, even if it proves my premise wrong....the method isn’t the madness that we’ve seen from NOAA, NCDC, GISS, and CRU....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. Dr. Fred Singer also gives a tentative endorsement of the methods....Climate related website owners, I give you carte blanche to repost this.

As one might imagine, Watts does not accept the results.

I consider the paper fatally flawed as it now stands, and thus I recommend it be removed from publication consideration by JGR until such time that it can be reworked....it appears they have circumvented the scientific process in favor of PR.

He also has an issue with their results not yet being peer reviewed, although that apparently is not a problem with his own work.

I was also surprised that the study confirmed the scientific consensus since the study was partly funded by the Koch brothers, oil billionaires who aggressively fund climate disinformation. I wonder if they want their money back?

I really don't know how rigorous the BEST results are. They take in a lot more data than previous efforts, and do a boatload of analysis, but that does not make them inherently accurate. What impresses me is that an independent group that uses different data sets and different methods has arrived at a nearly identical result as the NOAA, NCDC, and GISS results. I am relieved that the BEST head was classified as a skeptic yet appears to have honestly followed the data.

[chiefdanfox]

BEST group used the same data used in nearly every climate study produced since the 1970s, but looked for bias. He and his group of skeptics tested the hypothesis that the use of inaccurate or unreliable weather station data skewed the results. They also claimed that the numerous station data around cities skewed the results because of the urban heat island. What they found was that the "unreliable" or "skewed" data sets agreed with the calibrated and "reliable" data sets. They used something like 1 billion records. Muller also went back into historic records, and found they agreed with current liberal, fucko claims. He was probably the most heavy-hitting denier in the game, as far as CV goes. This guy is a real scientist, in every conceivable notion. He is not saying what is causing the the increase in CO2, but he is saying that it is increasing, and that increase is a leading indicator of the increase in global temperatures, that is, increasing CO2 is causing global temperature rise, not the other way around. The study has been released for peer review, and the reviews are not in, so with respect for his work, and the work of his peers, let us see whether or not it gets panned by the community.

What is disturbing to me is that many, many studies have been produced over the years, that accounted for bias, and they made very conservative claims, and did proper and good science. Muller, having not looked into many (if any) of these studies, became the poster boy for the deniers and skeptics. Once he evaluated the simplest base-line data on global temperature rise, within the stringent and narrow guidelines and statistical analysis as approved by the BEST group and their funding partners, he found correlation. News flash: the earth is a spheroid! Bias in the data has been the only credible claim against the science, and his group found that their results matched prior studies supporting global temperature rise.

"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."