Physicists, hurry up and perfect that technique to shrink space/time so we can all work 44 hours a day, and still get a good night’s sleep.
In the meantime, I’m going to have to watch these while I’m working out or something – the information firehose waits for no man.
“There were good reasons for doubt, until now.”
With that characteristically hubristic opener, Richard Muller, director of the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature project starts a piece in the Wall Street Journal.
Our work covers only land temperature—not the oceans—but that’s where warming appears to be the greatest. Robert Rohde, our chief scientist, obtained more than 1.6 billion measurements from more than 39,000 temperature stations around the world. Many of the records were short in duration, and to use them Mr. Rohde and a team of esteemed scientists and statisticians developed a new analytical approach that let us incorporate fragments of records. By using data from virtually all the available stations, we avoided data-selection bias. Rather than try to correct for the discontinuities in the records, we simply sliced the records where the data cut off, thereby creating two records from one.
We discovered that about one-third of the world’s temperature stations have recorded cooling temperatures, and about two-thirds have recorded warming. The two-to-one ratio reflects global warming. The changes at the locations that showed warming were typically between 1-2ºC, much greater than the IPCC’s average of 0.64ºC.
To study urban-heating bias in temperature records, we used satellite determinations that subdivided the world into urban and rural areas. We then conducted a temperature analysis based solely on “very rural” locations, distant from urban ones. The result showed a temperature increase similar to that found by other groups. Only 0.5% of the globe is urbanized, so it makes sense that even a 2ºC rise in urban regions would contribute negligibly to the global average.
What about poor station quality? Again, our statistical methods allowed us to analyze the U.S. temperature record separately for stations with good or acceptable rankings, and those with poor rankings (the U.S. is the only place in the world that ranks its temperature stations). Remarkably, the poorly ranked stations showed no greater temperature increases than the better ones. The mostly likely explanation is that while low-quality stations may give incorrect absolute temperatures, they still accurately track temperature changes.
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.
The Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature team has reported the results of their first studies of surface temperature records. They have submitted four papers for publication, you can get copies of them here.
Ironically, Anthony Watts has already posted about one of the papers, roundly criticizing their efforts. In a textbook example of “sour grapes,” he complains that they’re making results public before acceptance in a peer-reviewed journal, and about their use of trends over a 60-year period rather than a 30-year period which would match the analysis in Fall et al. Neither objection has any merit. The choice of a 60-year period has only one drawback: it gives Anthony Watts an excuse to whine. The pre-acceptance release is actually rather standard practice in the physics community (that’s one of the things the ArXiv is for).
.. it’s clear what Watts is really upset about — the results from the Berkeley team have confirmed that the other main global temperature estimates (NASA GISS, NOAA/NCDC, and HadCRU) got it right, and that station siting/urban heat island effects are not responsible for any of the observed temperature increase. The real reason all these analyses (including Berkeley’s) show temperature rise is: the globe is warming.
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They also graph the difference between the “all stations” and “very rural” stations averages, which shows that “all stations” actually show less recent warming than indicated using only “very rural” stations. That kind of blows the “global warming is due to UHI” argument right out of the water.
There’s this notion among the climate denial community that somehow the entire professional climatology community has overlooked an obvious flaw in the science behind anthropogenic global warming. Their hypothesis is that too many of the thermometers used to record temperatures over the last 200 years have been located in or near cities, and so have produced a warming bias produced by the waste heat generated in urban areas.
It sounds plausible. The problem with the notion, of course, is that it’s so obvious a potential bias that climatologists long ago learned to take the “urban heat island” effect into account. Still, the idea persists, and so a bunch of still-open-minded-despite-reams-of-solid-evidence-scientists, known collectively as the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature (BEST) project, and all but one of them new to the field, decided to conduct their own independent analysis of the data that NASA, NOAA and HadCRU say shows unequivocal evidence for global warming.
Today, that team released its findings. Can you guess what they found?
We observe the opposite of an urban heating effect over the period 1950 to 2010, with a slope of -0.19 ± 0.19 °C/100yr. This is not statistically consistent with prior estimates, but it does verify that the effect is very small, and almost insignificant on the scale of the observed warming. And that result supports the key conclusion of prior groups that urban warming does not unduly bias estimates of recent global temperature change.So, will this be the nail in the coffin of the UHI canard? Probably not. Comparable analyses that show a complete lack of correlation between solar output and global temperature change has failed to shut down the pseudoskeptical argument that it’s really all about the sun.
Today’s news about the Berkeley Earth Temperature results ( see the next post down on this page) is the more interesting because team leader Richard Muller has all but slandered previous temperature records from NASA and other groups. The story is outlined in the video above.
See the graph below, as described by Tamino:
The paper includes a graph of their global temperature estimate (based on land stations only), comparing the “all records” result to that using “very rural” stations (the graph shows 12-point moving averages of monthly averages):
Below – another former skeptic, US Navy Chief Oceanographer Admiral David Titley tells why “I Used to Be a Climate Skeptic, But no Longer”…
Continue reading “Another Critic Forced to Admit – The Science is Sound. It Always was.”
Anthony Watts and others who have energized climate skeptics by claiming to poke holes in research showing substantial recent warming have their work cut out for them.
Richard Muller, a noted Berkeley physicist who’s been a strident critic of climate campaigners, has released a much-anticipated new package of studies, along with all of his team’s data and methods, that powerfully challenges one of the prime talking points of pundits and politicians trying to avoid a shift away from fossil fuels.
The assertion has been that the world hasn’t really warmed — just the thermometers — due to expanding asphalt and concrete around cities and other locations housing weather stations.
In an email, study Co-author Robert Rohde says:
Our results are very similar to prior work (though with smaller error bars). Even though we have included a variety of innovative techniques in our analysis that approach potential biases in new ways we arrive at essentially the same conclusions as prior studies.
More on this story soon as the material is analyzed.
The First Annual American Geophysical Union Climate Communication Award has gone to Gavin Schmidt of the Goddard Institute for Space Studies.
I am continually humbled by the calm, measured, and authoritative way in which Dr. Schmidt, in the face of constant distortions, slander, abuse and ignorance on the part of the professional anti-science crowd, continues to provide a still center in the midst of a rancorous debate, at this most critical time in history.
A well deserved award for an extraordinary human being. Maybe the best illustration for how most of us feel listening to Gavin cut thru the noise, is this video wherein he patiently teaches a novice the rudiments of juggling…
Continue reading “The Way it Ought to Be – Gavin Schmidt on Communicating Science”
JOHANNESBURG, 17 October 2011 (IRIN) – In the past four years, global prices of staples such as maize and wheat have twice hit record levels, driving hundreds of thousands of the world’s most vulnerable people further towards hunger and poverty.
It is the poorest people in the poorest countries who are most affected by the high price of staple foods.
Recent responses to high prices have increasingly tended to focus on reducing price volatility – sharp fluctuations in food prices.
Sudden weather events like the drought in Russia in 2010, which destroyed wheat crops and in part triggered the spike in wheat prices that year, are another major factor, said George Rapsomanikis, an economist with FAOs Market and Trade Division.
Wright believes that oil prices and government policy on biofuels, not just in the USA and Europe but also in Africa and Latin America, will continue to be major determinants of food price behaviour in the future.
Low stocks of staples “made markets unusually sensitive to subsequent shocks such as high petroleum prices, the Australian drought [in 2006] and other regional production problems,” Wright said in a recent paper.
Not sure where to file this, but it’s pretty amusing. From the description:
Craig Reucassel interviews comedy genius Sacha Baron Cohen in character as his latest creation: climate skeptic Lord Christopher Monckton.
The ongoing drought across Texas has contributed to the increasing numbers of dust storms across this region this past year. The occurrence of haboobs will likely become common as drought conditions are expected to continue across Texas.
Image below comparing this week’s event to the 1930s.
French only for the first 20 seconds or so.
Don’t like all the arguments as much as the last one. Nuke people will say the 4th gen technology will solve all the problems – all except one, maybe.
Worth listening to the end. Find out why Nuclear is not like Napster.
