Bishop Hill Briggs on BEST
Oct 22, 2011 Climate: Surface Matt Briggs has penned his own critique of the BEST paper, noting in the process that he broadly agrees with Doug Keenan's points. It's not for the mathematically faint of heart though. Here's the conclusion.
Statisticians and those who use statistics never or rarely speak of model uncertainty (same with your more vocal sort of climatologist). The reason is simple: there aren't cookbook recipes that give automatic measures of this uncertainty. There can't be, either, because the truth of a model can only be ascertained externally.
Yet all statistical results are conditioned on the models' truth. Experience with statistical models shows that they are often too sure, especially when they are complex, as the BEST model is (and which assumes that temperature varies so smoothly over geography). No, I can't prove this. But I have given good reason to suspect it is true. You may continue to believe in the certainty of the model, but this would be yet another example of the triumph of hope over experience. What it means is that the uncertainty bounds should be widened further still. By how much, I don't know.
Reader Comments (32)
I think the revelation that Muller was running his green consultancy business, whilst occasionally posing as a lukewarm quasi-sceptic to gain the confidence of people like Anthony and Judith, tells a lot about the origins of his BEST project.
http://www.mullerandassociates.com/index.php
Despite his current enthusiasm for business, if you follow the link to his .gov personal website, it's not hard to detect the exotic aroma of the lifetime Berkeley student radical:-
http://muller.lbl.gov/
Ask yourself, what kind of a senior academic would illustrate his current professional website with pictures of himself getting arrested at a student sit-in in the 60's?
http://muller.lbl.gov/photos/FSM/FSM.html
And here's a more recent one of the man himself at the "Burning Man" hippy art festival, dressed a a Tuareg:-
http://muller.lbl.gov/
I used to work with R&D groups in Silicon Valley in the post-hippy 70's - even then Berkeley was regarded as the land of "fruits & nuts".
I suspect that some things haven't changed all that much and Anthony would have been wiser to scrub Berkeley from his address book.
The ONLY test of any theory, be it mathematical, statistical, or even folk-lore, is does it PREDICT?
Ain't seen anything out of the Climate Science crowd which even comes close to Irish postman Michael Gallagher as well as the squirrels around my house who have eaten every pine cone they can -- a "sure sign" of a cold winter in the Sierras. So far it has been below average temperature wise. However, we will have to see. Since all the signs of a La Niña ocean current pattern (please note that La Niña is an oceanic phenomenon and is not effected by dry land surface temperatures) my guess is the squirrels will be proven right.
Now if BEST can match that, I would be impressed. Otherwise I suspect it was a waste of time and money.
As noted by others, over 70% of the surface of the world is water, and when you look at North and South America -- there is nothing but many thousands of miles of water of their respective west coasts. And guess which coast the weather comes from? Hint: where the water is.
It is truly a sad statement when I have to argue that the squirrels in my trees are better weather predictors than the nuts in or from Berkeley. I suspect it is because the squirrels have staying alive this winter as their agenda and care little about saving the world from imagined dangers.
Don Pablo
even BEST seem to agree that 1/3 of the land stations show a cooling trend over the period they considered...I guess this is a result of the UHI they have detected
Muller said (in 2008):
' If [Al Gore] reaches more people and convinces the world that global warming is real, even if he does it through exaggeration and distortion -- which he does, but he's very effective at it -- then let him fly any plane he wants.'
http://www.grist.org/article/lets-get-physical
Exaggeration, and distortion are simply tools to get the job done, as far a Muller is concerned.
Yup - and this is the guy the Indie headlines as "Ex Climate Sceptic Now Backs Global Warming"
http://www.independent.co.uk/environment/climate-change/exclimate-sceptic-now-backs-global-warming-2374262.html
I actually think "The Team" have overplayed this one. The way they treated Anthony Watts and the barefaced PR orgy with the non peer-reviewed draft is going to seriously backfire over the coming days and weeks.
Comparisons are bound to be made with the Remote Sensing episode when the editor, Wagner, felt he had to resign because of the way a sceptic paper was overhyped in the media.
@Foxgoose:
The point is they've made their headline in a largely compliant MSM (see my comment in Unthreaded and Andrew's post about how C4 News handled this) - any fallout will be conducted on the blogs, leaving the intended impression hanging in the public arena to be used as a quotable refutation of any sceptical position.
This is the way that CAGW PR works, as HSI pointed out.
I looked at Muller's Amazon forest page. He seems to believe in that the candiru swim up urethras and that there are walking trees.
http://muller.lbl.gov/travel_photos/AmazonWebPages/AmazonWebPages.html
Pretty funny.
@woodentop
Yes of course that's the strategy and it works well in the short term. But their problem is that you can't have a diverse group of people, spread around the world, indulging in deception and collusion over a long period without eventual leakage - a la climategate.
Someone will be caught out again soon, the largely indifferent public will detect a whiff of unpleasantness again and public support for the whole scam will dwindle further.
It's heartening to remember that, despite the billions of dollars, the enlistment of most politicians and the wholesale corruption of the mass media - public support for CAGW is ebbing pretty well everywhere.
I think the emergence of abundant, cheap, relatively clean, shale gas is going to appeal to politicians in the US and Europe as a quick way to boost their flagging economies and the whole green movement will quietly be left to wither on the vine. It might even start to happen here within weeks if FIT tariffs are slashed as some are expecting.
Stand by for rows of expensive, rusting windmills and the beginning of the political blame game.
psst foxgoose...jave you heard about the extremely small seismic events in lancashire recently? Blamed by the lying Huhne on frakking...
@diogenes
Good try by the green luddites, but it won't wash - nothing can stand between a panicking politician and his escape route.
I am still personally awaiting Anthony Watts conclusions on this balloon when he has time to digest the BEST results. In the meantime, he is clearly and rightly miffed at the all the razzmatazz, and comments thus:
'The release method they chose, of having a media blitzkrieg of press release and writers at major MSM outlets lined up beforehand is beyond the pale. While I agree with Dr. Muller’s contention that circulating papers among colleagues for wider peer review is an excellent idea, what they did with the planned and coordinated (and make no mistake it was coordinated for October 20th, Liz Muller told me this herself) is not only self-serving grandiosity, but quite risky if peer review comes up with a different answer.
The rush to judgment they fomented before science had a chance to speak is worse than anything I’ve ever seen, and from my early dealings with them, I can say that I had no idea they would do this, otherwise I would not have embraced them so openly. A lie of omission is still a lie, and I feel that I was not given the true intentions of the BEST group when I met with them.
So there you have it, I accept their papers, and many of their findings, but disagree with some methods and results as is my right. It will be interesting to see if these survive peer review significantly unchanged.'
diogenes
Fitting a curve to data is descriptive. It is NOT a theory. Now if you can use that description to predict something happening, then you have a theory.
I can take all that same data and fit a polynomial to it with a much better fit, and it would describe the data better than their model -- but it would be a meaningless effort because it will not tell you anything about the future.
The fact that they come up with warm and cold spots is also no surprise -- have you noticed that some summers are warmer than others and some winters are colder? I already knew that.
Can they tell me what the weather -- temperature will be in my backyard tomorrow? Next week? This winter? Next winter?
BEST is a waste of money. All it does is serve to keep some people employed.
There's a more nuanced, and more Muller-friendly, preliminary analysis of the BEST reports at Climate Audit, http://climateaudit.org/2011/10/22/first-thoughts-on-best/
I'm a bit taken aback at the "piling on" here and elsewhere on Muller and the BEST work. Yes, Muller is a bit of an oddball, and yes, he shoots from the hip (as at WSJ op-ed) -- but he is a first-rate scientist, BEST brought in a world-class statistician , David Brillinger; Robert Rohde, who did the heavy lifting on the data-wrangling, is a *very* sharp cookie.... These aren't bush-league scientists, and they aren't the "Hockey Team". Give this some time, fellows. BEST has done some very interesting work, and it's all open-source and free public access. Have a look at http://www.berkeleyearth.org/index.php
Cheers -- Pete Tillman
Professional geologist, amateur climatologist
Peter Tillman: hear, hear. The twelve comments that you rightly describe as piling on have something important in common. These two of ours are a contrast. As are the conributions of Steve McIntyre and Richard Muller - and Andrew Montfort, William Briggs and Douglas Keenan. The twelve for me denigrate Dr Muller far too much, especially in the light of his encouragement of Steve going back as far as 2004.
This debate (and I mean the whole of the global warming debate, not just the issue of land temperatures) is getting to the point that it requires responsibility in every quarter. It's right to criticise the mainstream media (like Channel 4 most recently) - as Donna Laframboise has just done so brilliantly over the free pass given to the IPCC for over 20 years. But it's also right to identify the irresponsibility on climate blogs, of all hues. Careless talk costs lives, as they used to say.
The math is way above my pay grade, but I always understood that peer review was the gold standard for all disciplines in science. The unseemly haste to get the BEST papers out onto the pages of the MSM before any kind of peer review seems odd to me, and the notion that all sceptics are of the opinion that global warming of any kind is a scam is just plain wrong; the overwhelming majority of sceptics seem quite comfortable with the knowledge that the earth warms and cools for reasons yet to be discovered.
The scam most sceptics suspect is that of catastrophic man-made global warming.
As far as Anthony Watts, Andrew Montford and a few others are concerned; their contributions to the debate from papers or books being published although influential in their own rights are dwarfed by their biggest contribution.
There are a group of people, mainly non climate scientists, which have revolutionised scientific debate in the field.
I have been able to follow the discussions between scientists that five to ten years ago simply was not possible. Conversely the scientists have been introduced to a wealth of knowledge from different disciplines purely from the fact that people are contributing their knowledge in order to solve a problem. We as humans are designed to problem solve, this crowd sourcing of knowledge is extremely effective.
So what about BEST, perhaps the intention to go public before peer review could have been handled better, but you have to realise that this is a turning point in the field of climate science.
The papers are now being reviewed, in the open by all scientists who are interested. If through the publication process the 'peer' reviewers come to a different conclusion than the open review then questions will be asked. Why did the 'peer' reviewers not influence the open review and if they did then why are their 'peer' conclusions different to the open conclusions?
I mentioned revolutionary earlier in this comment and I would like to expand on that. Specifically, with Anthony's site that has been awarded best science blog and consistently achieves a massive following.
There have been many instances of people trying to deride the site, one instance being Richard Blacks latest contribution:
The entire modus operandi of blogging - and in the climate field, Watts Up With That is one of the most successful - is that stuff is chucked into the public domain for discussion with no review at all.
All those posts on Climate Audit and Bishop Hill over the years finding "problems" with historical climate data - how many of them were peer-reviewed?
Exactly. And Anthony Watts is in any case happy to put non-peer-reviewed science onto his pages."
What has this achieved? It's a direct invitation for all of his 'followers' with an open mind to go and join in the open debate. He even provides links to the sites, how nice.
As far as revolutionary, the blogs are now becoming mainstream, if you want to know what the latest is, check out the blogs and then look at the 'journalist' assessments and 'political' assessments to see if you agree with their interpretation. This is open source and is now influencing the peer review, the press and eventually the political debate, so you gentlemen, and ladies who have made this possible.... I for one salute you
Matt Ridley has done a brilliant letter to the Economist over their desperately unintelligent article on BEST - No change makes big news. Ending thus:
Blooming brilliant, to coin a phrase.
@ Peter Tillman
Agree with your point re "piling on" but perhaps you'd explain why SM's account is "more nuanced" that Briggs'?
Perhaps you ought to address that comment to Muller's daughter Elizabeth, who is CEO of his "GreenGov" consultancy business and masterminded the BEST PR extravaganza to meet the October 20th deadline.
http://www.mullerandassociates.com/elizabethmuller.php
The idea that Muller is an impartial "truth seeker" with sceptic tendencies, or just a bit of a "loose cannon" who shoots from the hip is somewhat at odds with his long term business involvement in green politics.
His consultancy registered the "GreenGov" brand which was adopted by the Obama White House for all its green propaganda activities:-
http://www.whitehouse.gov/greengov/collaborative
His company logo is an image of the White House with a green growth spreading over it - for God's sake!
http://www.mullerandassociates.com/greengov.php
I'm afraid all those, including Anthony Watts, who accepted this project as a genuine attempt to produce an honest and transparent temperature record have been duped - and Anthony at least has recognised it.
It's fascinating that the PR blitz has worked, the headlines and tweets have zoomed around the world - but the complete data set is still not downloadable in a useable format.
"but the complete data set is still not downloadable in a useable format."
Oct 23, 2011 at 10:47 AM | Foxgoose
That is a highly disingenous comment. The papers aren't published yet. When they are, the dataset will be available in full. But what a surprise, that you try and make it seem like something is amiss.
A debate between Foxtrot and Zebedee would normally be a complete turnoff for me. In other words, I'd barely read their comments, let alone seek to respond. That's my personal blog filter in operation. Life's too short and this subject too important to waste time or be seen to encourage flame wars between the pseudonymous by joining in.
But I came back to this thread to make a related point about the mistakes made by both Willis Eschenbach and Steve McIntyre in their initial critiques of BEST. (I'll leave the reader to find out what I mean - Willis being on WUWT, Steve in the expected place.)
My point is not to denigrate these two - far from it - but to emphasize once again the issue of reputation cost when one uses one's real name. I'm sure Willis and Steve feel this keenly right now. This is a massive corrective for rash statements on a subject as important as CAGW.
A corrective which doesn't exist at all for F, Z and many others, here and across the blogosphere. This really matters. I happen to agree with F on some of what she says and with Z in his latest response (the personal possessives being contrary to expectation to express a deeper point). But, despite the fact that any human being can make a contribution of sorts to any debate, whether using a pseudonym or not, I'm quite convinced our tolerance of angry and provocative comments from those unwilling to be known by their common name leads to much less light shed in total than there would otherwise be.
It's a very hard one. But this is to salute Steve and Willis (and Richard Muller) for putting their heads above the parapet in the only way that really counts.
Let me add one rider to this. The way the BEST pre-release was spun put a lot of people like Anthony Watts, Steve and Willis under what I think was needless time pressure. Or at least perceived time pressure. I don't think Richard Muller was blameless in this. I also think he's a major improvement on the likes of Hansen and Mann.
Part of wisdom is not to rush to judgment. Steve in particular is wonderful at this. In this case he made a simple error, confusing decades with centuries. No real harm done. But a lesson to many of us, who are much too rash with far less insight than Steve.
"but to emphasize once again the issue of reputation cost when one uses one's real name"
Oct 23, 2011 at 12:20 PM | Richard Drake
Actually I'd love to use my real name. However, I believe several posters on this board are in far from great mental shape, and my stance here is a largely oppositional one, which means I'm going to come into conflict with them.
If I used my real name, I imagine I'd be receiving a series of taxis, skips and pizzas delivered to my house at the very least, if not things more unpleasant than that.
Under some circumstances, anonymity is a must.
@Richard Drake
Your new “de haut en bas” pompous sneering at anonymous contributors is making you look faintly ridiculous.
Have you ever visited Tamino, Eli Rabbett, Lucy Skywalker, The Air Vent – they all started as anonymous blogs and still are to most people.
I also think I'm correct in remembering that our own dear Bish was anonymous for his first few years. The Economist article which led the BEST PR bonanza also appeared under an anonymous byline like much of the journalism we all read every day.
Whether you like it or not, internet blogging was largely built on anonymous contributions and will undoubtedly continue thus.
You're also being disingenous since anyone reading this will remember you being quite happy to debate with anonymous contributors,including myself, here quite recently.
I find your attempt to bracket me with ZDB deceitful and offensive since I've managed to largely ignore his trolling attempts since he appeared on here.
As far as the BEST project is concerned, I share your enthusiasm for “open science” where papers, results, data and methods are spread out for all interested parties to see, work with and comment on – but it's only ever going to work if all the parties involved come to it with honest intentions.
So far the BEST project seems to me to be a re-run of the “hockey stick”. The flashy “ever upward” graph and its accompanying soundbites have been fed, in a carefully choreographed PR campaign to a compliant and carefully prepared media - in an obvious attempt to confound and embarrass sceptics like Anthony Watts in time for Durban and, eventually, AR5.
The raw data and methods will gradually leak out and years will be spent by people like Steve M discovering statistical weaknesses and anomalies of mind numbing complexity, which some diligent soul like Bish will eventually expose in an excellent book – which will sadly only ever be read by less than 0.1% of the people who were exposed to the original PR blitz. Mission accomplished.
If you can bear to lower yourself to one last anonymous exchange – can I ask you whether you knew, when the BEST project was announced, that the two prime movers of the project, Muller and his daughter, also ran a consultancy offering “green” advice to governments, which was not listed in any of the affiliations mentioned on the project website.
If you had known, would it have diminished your enthusiasm?
Richard,
I appreciate your discussion of how a commenter using their legal identity provides a natural mechanism that encourages responsibility for their comments. Using ones legal identity provides a feedback mechanism restraining the abusive and/or the irrational; such feedback contributes to the overall venue's discourse.
One thing to add. I suggest that, whether a commenter uses his legal identity or not, in the long run the assessment of a commenter's responsibility for his comments will be made by an extended community. What I am concerned about is the short term muzzling effect that irresponsible anonymous commenters cause. So moderation is needed; vigilance.
John
Richie Rich writes,
"Agree with your point re "piling on" but perhaps you'd explain why SM's account is "more nuanced" that Briggs'?
I'd ignore the "more nuanced" bit as a product of late-night posting. Both Briggs and SM are well-worth reading. I'm starting to learn a bit about the statistics of signal-processing.
Briggs @ 23 October 2011 at 10:47 am,
http://wmbriggs.com/blog/?p=4530
"An electronic signal or a temperature (and barring error in the measurement apparatus) is what is actually experienced. In the case of an electronic signal, there is knowledge that it is corrupted by noise which has to be removed. You take the experience and manipulate it (filter it) to create a new experience. But where is the noise in the temperature? Objects feel the temperature as it is, and not what is “behind” it."
Briggs makes common-sense remarks on complex maths, the best sign (imo) of someone who really understands his topic. Read the whole thing, and bring popcorn!
Peter
Thanks for your reply. Agree Briggs is definitely worth a read. Guess that means he won't be asked to review BEST's methodology paper. Shame!
Looks as if Anthony and Josh have got the measure of Muller:-
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/10/23/sunday-silliness-the-new-crop/
CarbonBrief has an excellent round-up of the 'sceptic' response to BEST. Watts and Delingole come off worst.
http://www.carbonbrief.org/blog/2011/10/skeptic-reactions-to-best-study
Muller is finally being exposed in the US media as a long-term committed AGW promoter - who posed as a "sceptic" to promote the BEST project.
http://climaterealists.com/index.php?id=8532
Quel surprise
As a councillor I seem to be targeted with emails from all sorts of interested parties, and received this yesterday from sustainable-gov.co.uk which demonstrates to me the reason why these kinds of press releases are dangerous regardless of the actual conclusions of the paper.
http://www.sustainablegov.co.uk/central-government/energy-and-climate-change/global-warming-sceptics-silenced-by-new-evidence?utm_source=Extravision&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Newsletter%2027/10/11
sustainablegov says "About Us
Sustainablegov.co.uk – Best Practice • Knowledge • Opinion • Debate
Sustainablegov.co.uk provides a unique platform which has been developed to provide a ‘one stop shop’ of information for the public sector community, bringing organisations an insight and providing direction on creating a more sustainable government.
As an organisation, providing a platform, we work closely with both public and private sectors and encourage sharing knowledge, advice/information and best practice to become more sustainable.
With government targets and ever increasing pressure to become a more sustainable government, we believe this can only be achieved by the sharing of best practice across the public sector community with each other and by forming a close partnership with its private sector counterparts.
*Please note Sustainable Gov is independent and any views expressed on this website may not be that of the government*"
Their supporters are
DECC
Govspark
Keep Britain Tidy
Eco-Schools
Committee on Climate Change
Love Food Hate Waste
South West Sustainable Procurement Network
Green Alliance
LBRO
European Commission
One Planet Sutton
London Borough of Sutton
Climate and Health Council
What does that make them? A quango? NGO? The fact that they are supported by DECC seems to me that this is a back door method of delivering the message Buffoon wants out there. Attack from as many angles as possible to make people believe the favoured mantra.
I am part way through The Delinquent Teenager - extremely interesting - another book to add to my pile to loan to the true believers. Whether anyone ever reads them when I foist them upon them is another matter...................
And there's more............have a look at the energy and climate change section under the central gov section.
What is it about all this government-speak? Huhne is quoted (i.e. written by the PR people) as "The coalition is doing all it can to bear down on energy prices" - "bear down"/drive forward - all these hard-hitting active words, when mostly all I ever come across are local government officers beset by inertia. Trying to get them to do anything quickly is a complete disaster and a source of so much frustration that I am totally disillusioned and unlikely to stand again at the next election.