Thursday, October 27, 2011

GW and AGW skepticism is crumbling by Republicans do not care

During much of the last decade, LLNL researcher and University of California Physics professor Richard Muller has been something of a darling too the right-wing GW deniers. In December 2003 Muller published a column in the MIT's Technology Review, announcing support for the contentions of notorious climate change skeptics Steve McIntyre and Ross McKitrick. In a follow up column, dated October 2004, Muller stated,
Canadian scientists Stephen McIntyre and Ross McKitrick have uncovered a fundamental mathematical flaw in the computer program that was used to produce the hockey stick. In his original publications of the stick, Mann purported to use a standard method known as principal component analysis, or PCA, to find the dominant features in a set of more than 70 different climate records.

But it wasnt so. McIntyre and McKitrick obtained part of the program that Mann used, and they found serious problems. Not only does the program not do conventional PCA, but it handles data normalization in a way that can only be described as mistaken.

Now comes the real shocker. This improper normalization procedure tends to emphasize any data that do have the hockey stick shape, and to suppress all data that do not. To demonstrate this effect, McIntyre and McKitrick created some meaningless test data that had, on average, no trends. This method of generating random data is called Monte Carlo analysis, after the famous casino, and it is widely used in statistical analysis to test procedures. When McIntyre and McKitrick fed these random data into the Mann procedure, out popped a hockey stick shape!
This statement made Muller a hero to the critics of GW. This brought Muller to the attention to the infamous right wing anti-AGW oil billionaires, the Koch Brothers. Muller had supported the argument of Weather forecaster Anthony Watts, that surface temperature data for the United States was an artifact of the location of temperature measuring platforms. Most official weather measuring were located in inappropriate locations where man made structures - buildings, parking lots, etc. - interfered with temperature readings. Watts had under taken a project document the problem by having his fellow GW skeptics document the weather station location problem by photographing the weather stations. These photographs showed that not only some, but most of the weather stations poorly placed, thus seemingly confirming Watts theory. However. in a paper published by the Journal of Geophysical Research, Matthew J. Menne, Claude N. Williams Jr., and Michael A. Palecki amassed evidence that the Watt hypothesis required further testing. They wrote,
Given the now extensive documentation by surfacestations.org [Watts, 2009] that the exposure charac- teristics of many USHCN stations are far from ideal, it is reasonable to question the role that poor exposure may have played in biasing CONUS temperature trends. However, our analysis and the earlier study by Peterson [2006] illustrate the need for data analysis in establishing the role of station exposure characteristics on temperature trends no matter how compelling the circumstantial evidence of bias may be. In other words, photos and site surveys do not preclude the need for data analysis, and concerns over exposure must be eval- uated in light of other changes in observation practice such as new instrumentation.
Thus definitive confirmation would have to come by comparing the data from well chosen location weather stations with data from poorly chosen location data. This project was large and complex, and Muller helped organize it with the help of Koch brother money. The Muller "Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature project" was to be a major test of GW theory. If it could demonstrate that the the temperature trends observed in weather station date was an artifact of weather station locations, then a serious blow would be struct against the the GW hypothesis.

Muller's findings did not turn out to be the triumph for the anti-GW crowd that they had expected. Muller told Congress last winter:
We have done an initial study of the station selection issue. Rather than pick stations with long records (as done by the prior groups) we picked stations randomly from the complete set. This approach eliminates station selection bias. Our results are shown in the Figure; we see a global warming trend that is very similar to that previously reported by the other groups

We have also studied station quality. Many US stations have low quality rankings according to a study led by Anthony Watts. However, we find that the warming seen in the "poor" stations is virtually indistinguishable from that seen in the "good" stations.

We are developing statistical methods to address the other potential biases.
By the end of this summer the statistical study was completed, and the findings were such that GWs skeptics were wishing that Richard Muller had never joined theur cause. The problem was, as Muller explained to Congress,
poor station quality
although
poor station quality might affect absolute temperature, it does not appear to affect trends, and for global warming estimates, the trend is what is important

Our key caveat is that our results are preliminary and have not yet been published in a peer reviewed journal. We have begun that process of submitting a paper to the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society, and we are preparing several additional papers for publication elsewhere.
In his congressional testimony, Muller paid tribute to many of the leaders of the anti-AGW movement, even though he rejected their contention:
Without the efforts of Anthony Watts and his team, we would have only a series of anecdotal images of poor temperature stations, and we would not be able to evaluate the integrity of the data

This is a case in which scientists receiving no government funding did work crucial to understanding climate change. Similarly for the work done by Steve McIntyre. Their "amateur" science is not amateur in quality; it is true science, conducted with integrity and high standards.
What ever hopes the anti-GW crowd took from Muller's remarks, they were dashed when he recently published the study's conclusions in the Wall Street Journal.
Over the last two years, the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature Project has looked deeply at all the issues raised above. I chaired our group, which just submitted four detailed papers on our results to peer-reviewed journals. We have now posted these papers online at www.BerkeleyEarth.org to solicit even more scrutiny.

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.

Over the last two years, the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature Project has looked deeply at all the issues raised above. I chaired our group, which just submitted four detailed papers on our results to peer-reviewed journals. We have now posted these papers online at www.BerkeleyEarth.org to solicit even more scrutiny.

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.
So much for GW evidence being a scientific hoax. So much GW science being careless.

The war over global warming is over, although the war over AGW is not over. Many of the more sophisticated AGW skeptics have acknowledged that global warming is real, but continue to argue that human CO2 emissions are not its cause. The case for such views is crumbling, however. The sophisticated critics point to the work of two climate scientists, Roy Spencer and Richard Lindzen to support their beliefs. But these two researchers are not without their own critics, and indeed their conclusions have received troubling questions. Recently as I pointed out:
The work of Climate Change denier Roy Spencer has recently been demonstrated to contain large scientific errors. (see here, here, here, here, and here, here, and here), while a recent paper by Texas A&'M professor Andrew Dessler offers a devastating critique to the skeptical claims of both Spencer and MIT Professor Richard Lindzen. Needless to say the Climate change skeptics are not folding their tents yet, but their days are numbers.
The argument that AGW is a Liberal hoax is in shambles, while the case is growing that AGW skepticism is growing steadily weaker. What has not yet surfaced, although it is obvious, is the argument that GW and AGW skepticism has been a Libertarian/Conservative hoax all along. Almost without exception AGW and GW skeptics identify themselves with Conservative and Libertarian political causes. Right wing Talk Radio figures have fanatically backed the Global Warming hoax line, while Fox News, notorious for its lies about about all sorts of issues, has repeatedly parroted the anti-GW, anti-AGW lines. AGW skeptics have been virtually lionized by Fox News. While right-wing Republican Presidential candidates Rick Perry, Michele Bachmann, Herman Cain, and Rick Santorium, all reject GW or AGW out of hand.

Michele Bachmann demonstrated her profound understanding of science,
Carbon dioxide is not a harmful gas; it is a harmless gas ... And yet we're being told that we have to reduce this natural substance and reduce the American standard of living to create an arbitrary reduction in something that is naturally occurring in the Earth.
Herman Cain believes that he is qualified to determin what real science is and what its conclusions are,
I don't believe ... global warming is real. Do we have climate change? Yes. Is it a crisis? No. ... Because the science, the real science, doesn't say that we have any major crisis or threat when it comes to climate change.
While Rick perry believes that scientists are manipulating data,
I think there are a substantial number of scientists who have manipulated data so that they will have dollars rolling in to their projects. I think we're seeing it almost weekly or even daily, scientists who are coming forward and questioning the original idea that man-made global warming is what is causing the climate to change.
If you want' to believe Perry's statement about scientists, don't ask him about his undergraduate science grades. Clearly many Republicans Presidential candidates support the right-wing anti-science hoax.

8 comments:

Anonymous said...

I'm still skeptical on the whole issue of GW but support thorium 100%. Besides being clean if handled properly it it has many other benefits and great promise.

Mick said...

@Anonymous

True skepticism is based upon a lack of evidence, e.g., there is no evidence that a supreme being exists, so some of us are skeptical that one does exist.

There is substantial evidence that GW, or even AGW, is real.

What is your skepticism based upon?

Anonymous said...

The earth has certainly been warming ever since the 1700s. That is well documented, but it has occurred in fits and starts, not clearly correlated with one particular trend.

Catastrophic anthropogenic global warming -- CAGW -- as opposed to AGW, as opposed to simple GW, is the real question here. That is what persons should be skeptical about, since the evidence supporting climate catastrophe is seriously lacking.

Please focus on the real issue: CAGW, catastrophic anthropogenic warming. That is what people are being either skeptical or credulous about.

Alice

Charles Barton said...

Alice, The global warming skeptics play a game. First they argue that the global temperature is not really warming, when they loose that argument, they then argue that well global temperature has risen in the past, and there is no real evidence that the global temperature rise is man made. When they loose that argument they argue that their no evidence that man made temperature increase will have catastrophic consequences. To that I will point to the current flood in Thailand. This is but one of many large flood events in Australia, North America, Europe and Asia during the last two years. There is already considerable evidence that the catistrophic consequences of AGW is already uppon us.

Anon said...

Alice: The earth has certainly been warming ever since the 1700s. That is well documented, but it has occurred in fits and starts, not clearly correlated with one particular trend.
That's utter nonsense, the observed warming correlates very well with CO₂ concentration (and all the excess CO₂ comes from our burning of fossil fuels).

Now there are questions as to exactly what the impact of global warming will be but it would be very surprising if there were no negative effects from changing the climate and causing a place which is built around particular weather patterns to instead get other weather patterns.

Anonymous said...

@Mick

My skepticism (NOT rejection) is based upon the scientific fact that the earth for the majority of its long existence has not been a very hospitable place. To think that coastlines, water levels, abundance of glaciers and the size of the ice caps are in any way stable in a geological sense that is favorable to life or humankind strikes me as nothing less that a religious attitude of immense anthropocentrism.

Also, the scientists on board with the theory vary widely in the scale of their assessments and predictions. At one time scientists largely dismissed Darwin out of hand and were no more immune to peer pressure, the desire to keep getting funded in their research and foolish prejudices than scientists today. They are human beings, not some sort of high holy priesthood with some sort of magical insight.

Finally, it is hard to fully accept something that has attracted so many seeking to exploit alarmism for profit on both sides of the aisle's, the many who advocate for the belief based upon groupthink rather than rationality, as well as the very real pressure upon those doing the research to find in favor of CAGW and data that is both too narrow and incomplete to draw firm conclusions.

Honestly as a firm conservationist, I am in full support for technology that is clean. I may not see carbon as the evil that some claim but I readily accept the harm done by actual toxins and the serious problems with relying on

Finally, being branded on moral par with a Nazi for daring to have doubts is a very unpalatable bigotry and emotionalism that does little to convince me of anything. This ideological bullying and ostracism is something I expect from the religious and ignorant not the scientifically minded.

In fact, people are largely parroting what they hear or read and have very little understanding of the models (some which have been shown in error) that their belief is based. Forgive me for having some reservation when some such scientists go from declaring an icy doom of global cooling to the burning doom of global warming within my lifetime and I have reservations as a result in accepting everything they say, especially when loaded with "mights" "mays" and "coulds"

I'm sorry if my lack of conversion in the light of such things offends you.

Anon said...

Part 1:

Anonymous: My skepticism (NOT rejection) is based upon the scientific fact that the earth for the majority of its long existence has not been a very hospitable place.
Which is completely irrelevant to whether the global mean temperature is currently increasing, whether any such increase is caused by humans or what the effects of such an increase will be.

Anonymous: To think that coastlines, water levels, abundance of glaciers and the size of the ice caps are in any way stable in a geological sense that is favorable to life or humankind strikes me as nothing less that a religious attitude of immense anthropocentrism.
Past climate change was rarely as quick as the current trend (and when it was tended to correlate with mass extinctions).

Besides, we've already ruled out every natural explanation for those past climate changes as not applying to the current warming trend.

Anonymous: Also, the scientists on board with the theory vary widely in the scale of their assessments and predictions.
A big part of that is that whilst we know that the planet is heating up and why we can't make an accurate prediction as to the exact effects of global warming meaning that there is serious disagreement over exactly what the consequences will be (that also makes it harder to mitigate since we don't really know exactly what we've got to mitigate).

Anonymous: At one time scientists largely dismissed Darwin out of hand and were no more immune to peer pressure,
Actually scientists accepted Darwin's work pretty quickly (largely because they could see that it was correct), the religious were a different matter.

Anonymous: the desire to keep getting funded in their research and foolish prejudices than scientists today.
These days a scientist (or at least someone with scientific credentials) could probably get more money denying global warming than researching it.

Anonymous: They are human beings, not some sort of high holy priesthood with some sort of magical insight.
Science is a self-correcting system for finding the truth and it richly rewards people who overturn long established notions, should someone come along and show that global warming isn't happening or caused by us or will actually be good or whatever then they'll get recognition similar to what those who've replaced older theories got (e.g. the likes of Darwin, Newton, Einstein, Wegener, etc).

Anonymous: Finally, it is hard to fully accept something that has attracted so many seeking to exploit alarmism for profit on both sides of the aisle's,
That's completely irrelevant to whether or not global warming is true, caused by us or likely to have negative effects.

Anon said...

Part 2:

Anonymous: the many who advocate for the belief based upon groupthink rather than rationality, as well as the very real pressure upon those doing the research to find in favor of CAGW and data that is both too narrow and incomplete to draw firm conclusions.
Whilst those who can follow the evidence on their own should do so and decide for themselves most people can't and usually when the scientific community is > 95% on a given side of an issue they tend to be right so unless you are an expert on climate (which you clearly are not, a person who really was an expert wouldn't be arguing over crap like whether anyone is exploiting alarmism but over technical details) you'd be an idiot to disagree with them.

Also if the data are too narrow and incomplete to draw firm conclusions how did Jim Hansen correctly predict global temperature rise back in 1988?

Anonymous: Finally, being branded on moral par with a Nazi for daring to have doubts is a very unpalatable bigotry and emotionalism that does little to convince me of anything.
I suggest you read what is actually there, not what you imagine to be there (or at least if anyone used the term Nazi other than you on this thread I can't seem to find it).

Though now that you mention it most Nazis were people who wanted to do good that just had an inaccurate view of reality, there's a much closer parallel than many people would like to admit (and it doesn't just apply to global warming deniers, those who deny that nuclear is better than wind and ground based solar are every bit as bad).

Anonymous: This ideological bullying and ostracism is something I expect from the religious and ignorant not the scientifically minded.
Yes, the bullying of climate scientists by those who don't like the fact that our reckless burning of fossil fuels when we already have something better by those who deny global warming is disgusting.

Anonymous: In fact, people are largely parroting what they hear or read and have very little understanding of the models (some which have been shown in error) that their belief is based.
The climate is a very complex system, you should not expect it to be easy to model and no one who works on the models thinks that it is or expects their models to be perfect (that's why the models get refined).

Anonymous: Forgive me for having some reservation when some such scientists go from declaring an icy doom of global cooling to the burning doom of global warming within my lifetime
You'll have to forgive me for doubting whether you know what you're talking about when you think global cooling was a major concern (it very quickly turned out that the small effects of the aerosols would be swamped by global warming).

Anonymous: and I have reservations as a result in accepting everything they say, especially when loaded with "mights" "mays" and "coulds"
We don't know what the exact effects of global warming will be so scientists are giving what might happen (as well as a rough indication as to how likely a specific change is according to best available knowledge).

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