Articles Tagged "Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature (BEST) Project"
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Saturday, October 13th 2012, 3:41 PM EDT
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Monday, September 10th 2012, 11:34 AM EDT
New Berkeley BEST project temperature records confirm: changes in solar radiation influence climate
Willie Soon and William M. Briggs
Scientists have been studying solar influences on the climate for over 5000 years.
Chinese imperial astronomers kept detailed sunspot records. They noticed that more sunspots meant warmer weather. In 1801, the celebrated astronomer William Herschel (discoverer of the planet Uranus) observed that, when there were fewer spots, the price of wheat soared. He surmised that less “light and heat” from the sun resulted in reduced harvests.
Earlier last month Professor Richard Muller of the University of California, Berkeley's BEST project announced that, based on their newly constructed global land temperature record, “no component that matches solar activity” was related to temperature. Instead, Professor Muller said, carbon dioxide controlled temperature.
Could it really be true that solar radiation, which supplies Earth with the energy that drives our weather and climate – and which, when it varied, caused the climate to shift over the ages – is no longer the principal influence on climate change?
Consider the charts that accompany this article. They show some rather surprising relationships between solar radiation and daytime high temperatures, taken directly from Berkeley’s BEST project. The remarkable thing about the graphs is that these tight relationships hold for areas as large as the USA, to areas as small as the Sunshine state, and even as minor as our nation's capital.
This new sun-climate relationship picture may be telling us that the way our Sun cools and warms the Earth is largely through the penetration of incoming solar radiation in regions with cloudless skies.
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Wednesday, August 8th 2012, 5:04 PM EDT
It is nearly a year since Professor Muller published his BEST global temperature figures, which made so many headlines at the time. WUWT has neatly summarised some of the fundamental errors Muller made, so I won’t revisit old ground. However the Sunshine Hours blog has highlighted some more problems. I would highly recommending his post on this full as he has done a lot of work collating the data. You can read it here.
In essence though it seems that there are some huge discrepancies between the BEST figures and the official NCDC ones for parts of the USA. Compare these two graphs.
http://berkeleyearth.lbl.gov/regions/alabama
Figure 1:
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Saturday, August 4th 2012, 3:35 PM EDT
Hot summers are invoked as support for climate alarmism; cold winters are dismissed as weather - Image - John S. Dykes
I argued last week that the way to combat confirmation bias—the tendency to behave like a defense attorney rather than a judge when assessing a theory in science—is to avoid monopoly. So long as there are competing scientific centers, some will prick the bubbles of theory reinforcement in which other scientists live.
For constructive critics, this is the problem with modern climate science. They don't think it's a conspiracy theory, but a monopoly that clings to one hypothesis (that carbon dioxide will cause dangerous global warming) and brooks less and less dissent. Again and again, climate skeptics are told they should respect the consensus, an admonition wholly against the tradition of science.
Click source to read FULL report from Matt Ridley
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Friday, August 3rd 2012, 10:59 AM EDT
A reanalysis of U.S. temperature station data shows temperatures are rising only half as much as claimed by the U.S. Historical Climatology Network (USHCN) and other government overseers of temperature data. The reanalysis is the first using the Siting Classification System devised by the MATEO-France French national meteorological service and recently approved by the World Meteorological Organization.
The new analysis, conducted by a team of scientists led by temperature station expert Anthony Watts, shows government overseers are improperly reporting double the temperature increase that is occurring in the real world. Fully 92 percent of the overstated temperature rise results from erroneous and scientifically unjustified government “adjustments” to the raw temperature data.
The new analysis shows U.S. temperatures rose only 0.155 degrees Celsius per decade from 1979 through 2008 according to high-quality surface temperature stations. The 0.155 degree increase is substantially less than is claimed by government temperature overseers, and it is sufficiently moderate to rebut fears of an imminent global warming crisis. The U.S. temperature increase from 1979 through 2008 is even less worrisome when considering that temperatures over the oceans are warming at a slower pace than temperatures over land, and that global temperatures cooled during the 30 years prior to 1979.
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Tuesday, July 31st 2012, 12:01 PM EDT
'Non-partisan' group abandons pretence of neutrality
Analysis Richard Muller's Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature (BEST) project, which began with goodwill from all corners of the climate debate, has made a series of bold announcements (without benefit of peer review) to the effect that global warming is definitely serious and definitely caused by humans. This has aroused derision among formerly supportive climate sceptics, caused an eminent climatologist to abandon the project, and even drawn criticism from generally alarmism-sympathetic media commentators.
Muller, professor of physics at UC Berkeley, is often regarded as a climate sceptic because he has frequently criticised the techniques used by climate scientists in the past and because he accepted funding for BEST from libertarian oil billionaire Charles Koch. When BEST launched in the wake of Climategate, it vowed to be "an independent, non-political, non-partisan group", with Muller promising that "there will be no spin, whatever we find". Critics of the existing temperature establishment, including well known sceptics Anthony Watts and Doug Keenan, welcomed it.
However each announcement has been aggressively trialled in the press not only before the peer review process had judged them ready for publication - which may not be a major issue - but also before anyone outside the BEST project could examine the papers at all. This requires the ordinary reader to take BEST's accompanying press releases on blind faith - which is not a barrier for some journalists, but is far short of acceptable practice. (The publicity is handled by Muller's daughter Elizabeth, who is the actual executive director of BEST. Ms Muller holds degrees in Literature and International Management, and has worked as a consultant in such fields as e-government, "profitable sustainability" and government energy policy. In fact she still does, alongside her work at BEST.)
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Monday, July 30th 2012, 2:33 PM EDT
The second series of papers from the BEST consortium analysing global land temperatures have been published. They contain some interesting analyses, and the good thing is that all the working and code is posted online even if the papers have not yet passed peer-review! It includes the first analysis of global land temperature 1750 – 1850. However, the papers suffer from being too ambitious in the face of sparse data, and the conclusions reached by Professor Muller in this accompanying article in the New York Times is too far reaching considering the data he has been studying, and the analysis he presents.
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Sunday, July 29th 2012, 5:01 PM EDT
What it means, in a nutshell, is that the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) – the US government body in charge of America's temperature record, has systematically exaggerated the extent of late 20th century global warming. In fact, it has doubled it.
Is this a case of deliberate fraud by Warmist scientists hell bent on keeping their funding gravy train rolling? Well, after what we saw in Climategate anything is possible. (I mean it's not like NOAA is run by hard-left eco activists, is it?) But I think more likely it is a case of confirmation bias. The Warmists who comprise the climate scientist establishment spend so much time communicating with other warmists and so little time paying attention to the views of dissenting scientists such as Henrik Svensmark – or Fred Singer or Richard Lindzen or indeed Anthony Watts – that it simply hasn't occurred to them that their temperature records need adjusting downwards not upwards.
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Sunday, July 29th 2012, 4:23 PM EDT
Climate change study forces sceptical scientists to change minds - by Leo Hickman, The Guardian
Earth's land shown to have warmed by 1.5C over past 250 years, with humans being almost entirely responsible.
The Earth's land has warmed by 1.5C over the past 250 years and "humans are almost entirely the cause", according to a scientific study set up to address climate change sceptics' concerns about whether human-induced global warming is occurring.
Prof Richard Muller, a physicist and climate change sceptic who founded the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature (Best) project, said he was surprised by the findings. "We were not expecting this, but as scientists, it is our duty to let the evidence change our minds." He added that he now considers himself a "converted sceptic" and his views had undergone a "total turnaround" in a short space of time.
"Our results show that the average temperature of the Earth's land has risen by 2.5F over the past 250 years, including an increase of 1.5 degrees over the most recent 50 years. Moreover, it appears likely that essentially all of this increase results from the human emission of greenhouse gases," Muller wrote in an opinion piece for the New York Times.
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Sunday, July 29th 2012, 4:10 PM EDT
PRESS RELEASE – July 29th, 2012 12PM PDT – FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
A reanalysis of U.S. surface station temperatures has been performed using the recently WMO-approved Siting Classification System devised by METEO-France’s Michel Leroy. The new siting classification more accurately characterizes the quality of the location in terms of monitoring long-term spatially representative surface temperature trends. The new analysis demonstrates that reported 1979-2008 U.S. temperature trends are spuriously doubled, with 92% of that over-estimation resulting from erroneous NOAA adjustments of well-sited stations upward. The paper is the first to use the updated siting system which addresses USHCN siting issues and data adjustments.
The new improved assessment, for the years 1979 to 2008, yields a trend of +0.155C per decade from the high quality sites, a +0.248 C per decade trend for poorly sited locations, and a trend of +0.309 C per decade after NOAA adjusts the data. This issue of station siting quality is expected to be an issue with respect to the monitoring of land surface temperature throughout the Global Historical Climate Network and in the BEST network.
Today, a new paper has been released that is the culmination of knowledge gleaned from five years or work by Anthony Watts and the many volunteers and contributors to the SurfaceStations project started in 2007.
Click source to read FULL report from Anthony Watts
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