Last week I wrote about Dr. Richard Muller’s BEST (Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature) program and its depiction by the press in the post Press punked by Berkeley temperature study.

Now, another voice has come forward.  The British paper Mail Online says that “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.”  (See article here.)  Dr. Curry is a member of the BEST team and co-author of the four papers Dr. Muller released.

The Mail article goes on:

“In fact, Prof Curry said, the project’s research data show there has been no increase in world temperatures since the end of the Nineties – a fact confirmed by a new analysis that The Mail on Sunday has obtained.”

‘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.’

However, Prof Muller denied warming was at a standstill.

‘We see no evidence of it [global warming] having slowed down,’ he told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme. There was, he added, ‘no leveling off’.

See Dr. Curry’s version of the Mail interview on her blog here.

The Mail Online article included the graph below.  The top panel shows the temperature data, which stopped in 2006, as published by Dr. Muller.  The bottom panel shows the last ten years of BEST data including 2011 so far.  The bottom panel shows a graph with level temperatures in spite of continuing increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide.

Dr. Curry, on her blog, says of the graph, “I agreed that the way the data is presented in the graph ‘hides the decline.’”

The phrase “hide the decline” refers to a now infamous part of the Climategate emails where we learned that in the construction of the Michael Mann’s “hockey stick” graph, tree ring proxy temperature data that had been used for most of the graph started to decline. It  was therefore truncated and surface temperature data was substituted in order to hide the decline and make it appear that warming was accelerating.

Dr. Curry adds in her criticism of the BEST graph, “There is NO comparison of this situation to Climategate.  Muller et al. have been very transparent in their methods and in making their data publicly available, which is highly commendable.”

Meteorologist Anthony Watts says on his blog, referring to the flatness of the temperature during the last ten years versus what was depicted on the BEST graph:

Indeed Best seems to have worked hard to obscure it. They present data covering .. almost 200 years… with a short x-axis and a stretched y-axis to accentuate the increase. The data is then smoothed using a ten year average which is ideally suited to removing the past five years of the past decade and mix the earlier standstill years with years when there was an increase. This is an ideal formula for suppressing the past decade’s data.

Watts also comments on how Muller handled the press and peer-review in the post: The BEST whopper ever.

To get the full story to date, read my last post, the Mail article, and Dr. Curry’s article, all linked above.  There are additional links of interest within Dr. Curry’s post.

I will reiterate that the BEST study dealt with only (rather unreliable) surface temperature data and does not attribute causes to temperature change.

For my perspective on climate change see:

A Perspective on Climate Change a tutorial

There is currently a raging controversy in the media about Dr. Richard Muller’s BEST (Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature) program. One point the press seems to miss is the distinction between  whether and how much warming there may have been, versus the cause of temperature change.

The Berkeley group, having noted all the charges of data manipulation in temperature databases owned by governments, both British and American, decided to redo all the temperature records.  Everyone was anxious about how they would handle the data.

The current controversy may have been precipitated by Muller, himself, with a Wall Street Journal article titled “The Case Against Global-Warming Skepticism.”

In the WSJ article Muller writes:

The temperature-station quality is largely awful. The most important stations in the U.S. are included in the Department of Energy’s Historical Climatology Network. A careful survey of these stations by a team led by meteorologist Anthony Watts showed that 70% of these stations have such poor siting that, by the U.S. government’s own measure, they result in temperature uncertainties of between two and five degrees Celsius or more. We do not know how much worse are the stations in the developing world.

Using data from all these poor stations, the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change estimates an average global 0.64ºC temperature rise in the past 50 years, “most” of which the IPCC says is due to humans. Yet the margin of error for the stations is at least three times larger than the estimated warming.

 We know that cities show anomalous warming, caused by energy use and building materials; asphalt, for instance, absorbs more sunlight than do trees. Tokyo’s temperature rose about 2ºC in the last 50 years. Could that rise, and increases in other urban areas, have been unreasonably included in the global estimates? That warming may be real, but it has nothing to do with the greenhouse effect and can’t be addressed by carbon dioxide reduction.

But then he writes:

Without good answers to all these complaints, global-warming skepticism seems sensible. But now let me explain why you should not be a skeptic, at least not any longer.

And the press frenzy began.

Much of the controversy revolves around four papers Muller released prior to formal peer-review and publication (They are still unpublished formally).  Many scientists take exception to the methodology of the BEST study, particularly how Muller averaged station temperatures, dealt with the urban heat island effect, and stated the uncertainty.  Also part of the controversy is how the data are depicted on graphs in the press.  Below are two graphs showing identical data, but the difference in the vertical temperature scale makes one look more alarming than the other:

Add to that, the land surface temperature record does not agree with the satellite record, nor is there good agreement with sea surface temperature record..  BEST uses only land-based temperature data and ignores sea surface temperature data.

Steve McIntyre, proprietor of Climate Audit noticed “BEST’s estimate of the size of the temperature increase since the start of the 19th century is much larger than previous estimates….The decade of the 1810s is shown in their estimates as being nearly 2 degrees colder than the present….It’s also interesting to interpret these results from the context of ‘dangerous climate change’, defined by the UN as 2 deg C. Under BEST’s calculations, we’ve already experienced nearly 2 deg C of climate change since the early 19th century.”  McIntyre could not replicate some of Muller’s results using raw station data.

The press, portraying Muller as a former skeptic who got religion, ran with the WSJ headline.  See, for example, an editorial by Eugene Robinson.  Robinson’s characterization of the BEST study is that it provides evidence against climate skeptics and confirms the IPCC scary scenario projections.  But ultra warming alarmist site RealClimate.org  says the BEST study is not a big deal:

Anybody expecting earthshaking news from Berkeley, now that the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature group being led by Richard Muller has released its results, had to be content with a barely perceptible quiver. As far as the basic science goes, the results could not have been less surprising if the press release had said “Man Finds Sun Rises At Dawn.”

The whole thing boils down to what Muller said, “The temperature-station quality is largely awful.”  That means the surface temperature data is inadequate to come to any valid conclusions.  BEST measured a larger subset of the surface temperature record than some other researchers. BEST merged and “filtered” the data.  Various methods of massaging data lead to different conclusions, none of which may be close to reality.  The science is still not settled and the BEST study, despite its good intentions, provides nothing new.

See another analysis of BEST data here.

A new study claims that Arctic temperatures have risen 2.2 degrees Fahrenheit over the last decade, bringing to an end a 2000-year cooling trend. The study authors claims that human CO₂ emissions are the cause.

The authors claim: “Our reconstruction shows that the last half-century was the warmest of the last 2,000 years. Not only was it the warmest, but it reversed the long-term, millennial-scale trend toward cooler temperatures. The cooling coincided with the slow and well-known cycle in Earth’s orbit around the sun, and it should have continued through the 20th century.” “The evidence was found by generating a 2,000-year-long reconstruction of Arctic summer temperature using natural archives of climate change from tree rings, glacier ice and mostly from lake sediments from across the Arctic, a region that responds sensitively to global changes.”

Why did they use proxy data for the last 100 years when they could have just looked at thermometer records? Oh, but thermometry shows that is was warmer in the 1930s and 1940s.

The new study presents a curve which is reminiscent of the thoroughly debunked “Hockey Stick” of Michael Mann. The new proxy reconstruction fails to show the well-documented Medieval Warm period of 1,200 yeas ago when temperatures were higher than now. It appears that authors of the new study are using the same statistical malfeasance and cherry-picking of data that were used for the old hockey stick.

Steve McIntyre of Climate Audit discusses the new study. “The problem with these sorts of studies is that no class of proxy (tree ring, ice core isotopes) is unambiguously correlated to temperature and, over and over again, authors pick proxies that confirm their bias and discard proxies that do not.”

Records from the Danish Meteorological Institute show no warming since 1958 and that the 2009 temperature variation is almost identical to 1958. DMI says that the Arctic was warmer in the 1940s than now.

A Duke University-led analysis of available records shows that while the North Atlantic Ocean’s surface waters warmed in the 50 years between 1950 and 2000, the sub-polar regions cooled at the same time that subtropical and tropical waters warmed. This pattern can be explained largely by the influence of a natural and cyclical wind circulation pattern called the North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO)

A 2008 study by Håkan Grudd of Stockholm University’s Department of Physical Geography and Quaternary Geology, found that “The late-twentieth century is not exceptionally warm in the new Torneträsk record: On decadal-to-century timescales, periods around AD 750, 1000, 1400, and 1750 were all equally warm, or warmer. The warmest summers in this new reconstruction occur in a 200-year period centred on AD 1000. A ‘Medieval Warm Period’ is supported by other paleoclimate evidence from northern Fennoscandia.”

Besides the controversy over temperatures, there is also media attention given to Arctic sea ice extent. For instance, news media made much of the fact that during the summer of 2007, Northern Hemisphere sea ice area was at a historic minimum (2.92 million sq. km). What was little reported, however, was that in 2007, Southern Hemisphere sea ice extent broke the previous maximum record of 16.03 million sq. km and reached 16.26 million sq. km. (August, 2007). [Source: The Cryosphere Today, a publication of The Polar Research Group, University of Illinois]

To put things in further perspective, consider these reports:

“A considerable change of climate inexplicable at present to us must have taken place in the Circumpolar Regions, by which the severity of the cold that has for centuries past enclosed the seas in the high northern latitudes in an impenetrable barrier of ice has been, during the last two years, greatly abated.”

“2000 square leagues [approximately 14,000 square miles] of ice with which the Greenland Seas between the latitudes of 74 and 80 N have been hitherto covered, has in the last two years entirely disappeared.”

These paragraphs, however, are not the latest scare story from the greenhouse industry, but extracts from a letter by the President of the Royal Society addressed to the British Admiralty, written in 1817 (Royal Society, London. Nov. 20, 1817. Minutes of Council, Vol. 8. pp.149-153).

 When this report was written, 192 years ago, the planet was in the midst of the Little Ice Age. How could the ice disappear in a Little Ice Age?

There is also the following story:

Could it be that carbon dioxide and global warming have nothing to do with it? Well, yes.

A study conducted by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, says unusual winds caused the 2007 Arctic minimum. Their press release says:

“Unusual atmospheric conditions set up wind patterns that compressed the sea ice, loaded it into the Transpolar Drift Stream and then sped its flow out of the Arctic. When that sea ice reached lower latitudes, it rapidly melted in the warmer waters.”

“The winds causing this trend in ice reduction were set up by an unusual pattern of atmospheric pressure that began at the beginning of this century.”

The fact that a 192-year-old report on Arctic ice is very similar to one today lends credence to the contention that changes in ice cover are natural cyclic phenomena and not due to the increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide.  AccuWeather says the changes in wind may be due to changes in the Arctic Oscillation (AO) and the North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO) which are large atmospheric circulations that have major impacts on the weather in certain parts of the world.

Perhaps reporters should do some investigation so they can report all of the news and put things in perspective. Ah, but only sensational headlines sell papers.