Obviously a man not shy of publicity. I wonder why he unsuccessfully tried to shut this video down.

Ooh, such drama! It must be exciting to be the vanguard battling to expose a vast global conspiracy of evil scientists like Anthony Watts. I bet he wears a cape with his underwear on the outside while he works on his blog.

The pre-release of this paper follows the practice embraced by Dr. Richard Muller, of the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature project in a June 2011 interview with Scientific American’s Michael Lemonick in “Science Talk”, said:


I know that is prior to acceptance, but in the tradition that I grew up in (under Nobel Laureate Luis Alvarez) we always widely distributed “preprints” of papers prior to their publication or even submission. That guaranteed a much wider peer review than we obtained from mere referees.

Climate-change denier changes his mind
Neela Banerjee, AAP Updated July 30, 2012, 11:37 am

The verdict is in: Global warming is real and greenhouse-gas emissions from human activity are the main cause.

This, according to Richard A. Muller, professor of physics at the University of California, Berkeley, a MacArthur fellow and co-founder of the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature project.

The United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and hundreds of other climatologists around the world came to such conclusions years ago.

However, the difference now is the source: Muller is a longstanding, colourful critic of prevailing climate science, and the Berkeley project was heavily funded by the Charles Koch Charitable Foundation, which, along with its libertarian petrochemical billionaire founder Charles G Koch, has a considerable history of backing groups that deny climate change.

In an opinion piece in Saturday's New York Times titled The Conversion of a Climate-Change Skeptic, Muller writes: "Three years ago I identified problems in previous climate studies that, in my mind, threw doubt on the very existence of global warming.

"Last year, following an intensive research effort involving a dozen scientists, I concluded that global warming was real and that the prior estimates of the rate of warming were correct.

"I'm now going a step further: Humans are almost entirely the cause."

The Berkeley project's research has shown, Muller says, "that the average temperature of the earth's land has risen by 2 degrees Fahrenheit over the past 250 years, including an increase of 1 degrees Fahrenheit over the most recent 50 years.

"Moreover, it appears likely that essentially all of this increase results from the human emission of greenhouse gases."

He calls his current stance "a total turnaround."

Tonya Mullins, a spokeswoman for the Koch Foundation, said the support her foundation provided, along with others, has no bearing on results of the research.

"Our grants are designed to promote independent research; as such, recipients hold full control over their findings," Mullins said in an email.

"In this support, we strive to benefit society by promoting discovery and informing public policy."
Some leading climate scientists said Muller's comments show that the science is so strong that even those inclined to reject it cannot once they examine it carefully.

http://au.news.yahoo.com/a/-/world/14402548/climate-change-denier-changes-his-mi...

It would seem that there are plenty of AGW sites using the berkley (so called) best data without it being peer-reviewed. Cant remember anyone being upset about that, but go figure. Hypocrisy abound with you lot

He set up a site called surfacestations**** for readers to post photos of poorly located weather stations, particularly in places that could be influenced by artificial heat, such as air conditioning units or car parks. The photos were compiled into a book published by the right-wing thinktank the Heartland Institute. In it, Watts wrote: "The conclusion is inescapable: The US temperature record is unreliable. And since the US record is thought to be 'the best in the world,' it follows that the global database is likely similarly compromised and unreliable."

But scientists at the National Climatic Data Centre (NCDC) in North Carolina have analysed the weather station data to see what difference poor location actually makes. Watts had ranked the stations by his estimation of the quality of their location, so Dr Matthew Menne and colleagues compared the results from high- and low-ranked stations. They described their results as "counterintuitive" – poorly located stations were actually more likely to be cooler than those in better locations. This is probably because the poorly located stations are more likely to use more up-to-date measuring equipment called Maximum-Minimum Temperature System (MMTS), which has a slight "cool" bias that is already well documented.

progressiveslol wrote on Jul 30^th, 2012 at 12:45pm:


Have you ever heard of something called a Tu quoque fallacy? It's the debating equivalent of "I know you are, so what am I?'" - you're doing it.

progressiveslol wrote on Aug 2^nd, 2012 at 8:50pm:


That is illogical, progs. Watts' paper will stand or fall on its own merits. Now I'm quite happy to spoon feed you, progs, but I was expecting more from a self acclaimed skeptic.

The essential problem with the paper is that Watts et al are using raw unhomogenised data. I know you use homogenised as a dirty word but for real scientists raw data will always be misleading if there are significant variations in how that data is collected. Specifically, there has been a systematic tendency over time for US stations to shift from evening to morning observations, resulting in an artificial cooling of temperature data at the stations affected.

Quote:


The kicker is that there is virtually no time of observation bias in urban-based stations which have taken their measurements punctually always at the same time, while in the rural stations the times of observation have changed predominantly from afternoon to morning. This causes a cooling bias in the data of the rural stations.

Now Watts comes along with his reasonable hypothesis that the data from rural stations is more pristine than the data from urban sensors which are more likely to be affected by heat sinks and new anthropogenic heat sources. He not surprisingly picks up that there has been greater warming in urban areas, which he attributes to the urban heat island. His implicit assumption is that the TOBS impact is insignificant.

It would seem that Watts et al must either prove that TOBS is insignificant or quantify and remove it before they determine the effect of the urban heat island.

Here is what Watts has to say on the TOBS criticism.

Quote:


Progs, if Watts can understand why his paper requires further work, why can't you.

LOL ^^

Tell you what? I'll ignore Muller as the craven little attention whore he is if you do the same with Watts. Let's agree to never mention either again until either one's work passes peer review in which case the work can stand on its merit like all other peer review research? Deal?

WUWT - ?
sorry don't rec the acro.

If you's  are still trying to argue that humans are innocent in the current on-going climate change we are experiencing you's are really blind.!!
Safer to argue about technicalities of ancillary 'papers' ...

AS IF THAT MATTERS  -- ITS HAPPENING.!!
Whether or not we have culpability, we hold responsibility for trying to undo the harm.
Thats undeniable.

Or would you prefer to think that the millions of the poor in the world, dependent on basic sources for survival , should act first. 

Good Grief!!

MOTR wrote on Aug 2^nd, 2012 at 8:55pm:

I didnt say it didnt need further work. Do you have a link to that.

I know what Watts is doing. He is doing brainstorming on an internet scale. He knows he will need help to fine tune the presentation of the paper as well as the hypothesis. I dont believe to be complete but he has my support in his ability to fix the abysmal US temp records and station siting.

muso wrote on Aug 2^nd, 2012 at 8:52pm:

Because a paper is a paper regardless of you.

Act on what. Nothing is happening with the temp while co2 has gone up and up.

Why hasn't it warmed while co2 has gone up. There is no correlation, so why?

How to be a Blog Scientist*

1) Accuse real scientists of not properly accounting for biases in their data.

2) Conduct ‘analyses’ wherein you do not account for any biases or systematic errors in the data.

3) Complain that real scientists do not release their data or code, even when they have.

4) Do not release your data or code.

5) Accuse others of ‘improperly’ releasing papers prior to publication.

6) Release your paper prior to submission for publication.

7) On releasing your paper, expect that others on the internet will do the hard (and no-so-hard) intellectual work for you.

8) Bugger it, ask your ‘scientific’ mates to do the work for you, but don’t tell them exactly what you have and haven’t done to clean your data.

9) ‘Teach’ yourself statistics two days before you release your first draft.

10) Add your mates as authors to your paper, without asking them, or telling them where the paper is to be sent, or with supplying authorship statement forms.

11) Disseminate a press release that is at odds with both your draft paper, your coauthors, and with the real scientific literature.

12) Dig and delve.

[* Qualifications, training,and experience not prereqisite.]

Let the games begin!

4 August 2012

I picked a good weekend to be out of cell phone range and unconnected to the internet – and judging from how the rest of the week has gone, I’d have been minded to stay there…

As most readers are probably aware, there was an op-ed in the Saturday New York Times from Richard Muller announcing the Berkeley Earth team’s latest results. It was odd enough that a scientific paper was announced via an op-ed, rather than a press release, odder still that the paper was only being submitted and had not actually been accepted, and most odd of all was the framing – a ‘converted skeptic’ being convinced by his studies that the planet has indeed warmed and that human activity is the cause – which as Mike and Ken Caldiera pointed out has been known for almost 2 decades.

Not wanting to be upstaged, plenty of ‘unconverted skeptics’ – including Anthony Watts and Ross McKitrick decided to stage dramatic press events and release barbs of their own. This was followed by a general piling on of commenters and bloggers trying to spin the events in their preferred direction combined with plenty of cluelessness in the general media about exactly who these people are (no-one special), what earth-shattering discovery had been made (none) and what it all means (not a lot).

The ‘best’ response to this circus is to sit back and see how pretzel-like the logical justifications can become. I particularly like the recent twist to the “No true scotsman” post-hoc rationalisation. Since the ‘converted skeptic’/prodigal scientist meme is a very powerful framing for the media, the obvious riposte for the ‘skeptics’ is to declare that Muller was not a true skeptic. But since these terms have become meaningless in terms of any specific position, this ends up as a semantic argument that convinces no-one but the faithful.

The actual trigger for all this hoopla is the deadline for papers that can be cited in the Second Order Draft of the new IPCC report. They needed to have been submitted to a journal by Tuesday (31 July) to qualify. Of course, they also need to be interesting, relevant and known to the IPCC lead authors. But there seems to be far too much emphasis being put on this deadline. The AR5 report is pretty much 90% written, and the broad outlines have been known for ages. Very few of the papers that have been submitted this week are anything other than minor steps forward and only a small number will be accorded anything other than a brief mention in AR5, and most not even that.

Furthermore, once the SOD is finalised (Aug 10), Tuesday’s deadline becomes moot, and the only thing that matters for the final report is whether papers are accepted by March 2013. (In a spirit of full disclosure, I should mention that I was working on a couple of papers with an eye to making this deadline, but in the end decided it was preferable to take the time to do a good job on the papers than to submit something shoddy).

The only worthwhile substance to any of this is the work that has mostly been done by Robert Rohde on the Berkeley Earth code and database as we’ve noted previously – and once this weeks drama has faded into the distance overshadowed by some new blog-storm, this work will still be a useful advance.

But still the games go on. Senate hearings are one of the longest running games of political theatre going – where the Senators pretend to listen to the panelists and the panelists pretend that this is an efficient way to inform policymakers. This week’s was little different from the ones in the past – some earnest submissions from the mainstream, and a cherry-pickers delight of misinformation from the Republican invitee, John Christy, who even quoted the woefully inept first draft of the Watts paper as if it meant something.

To confuse the metaphor even further, Roger Pielke Sr loudly declared that whatever the results of the Watts paper it will end up being a game changer:

[indent]The TOB effect could result in a confirmation of the Watts et al conclusion, or a confirmation (from a skeptical source) that siting quality does not matter. In either case, this is still a game changing study.[/indent]

If only people would change the games they play…

My inclination is just to sit back and watch the spectacle, admire the logic-defying leaps, marvel at the super-human feats of hubris and, in two weeks time, remark on how little actually changed