I am curious if anybody is holding out hope that this “Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature study” has a hope in hell of producing anything worthwhile.
I am posting this to give readers a space to comment on what the Berkeley team are telling us about what they are doing.
I suggest interested people read what is available online, it will not take you long.
I note they seem to be a post-Climategate formation and I also see on the team at least one prominent pre-Climategate “standard IPCC warmist” now very active re-inventing as a “person of reason” in the middle of the current debate.
I am curious about what value they expect to wring out of exploiting – “..relatively short (e.g. a few years) or discontinuous station records.”
If they do as they say, at least it’ll be possible to scrutinise the data and methods. The most interesting part will be their responses to criticisms/suggestions. I also note that they don’t promise anything about publishing either of them.
I wonder if they are aware of Murray Mitchell’s 1953 paper on temperature measurements. He lists many (but not all) of the problems that can lead to incorrect measurements. If they don’t know what the problems are, they don’t know what the measurements mean.
Matt Briggs has a comment wmbriggs.com/blog/?p=3558
As someone once said, “Don’t fire until you see the whites of their eyes”. However, I will be watching carefully for signs of omission, manipulation and UHI effects.
ntesdorf
Warwick
Anthony Watts has posted an upbeat comment about it.
Always suspicious of people who rush in and declare that they represent the middle or third way!
Not impressed with the statisticians on the team. The problem they have is to model spatially continuous data – temperature, rainfall – using point data, a problem in Spatial Statistics. None seems to be very strong in this area.
We’ve seen people trip themselves up by failing to recognise that this data is not necessarily independent ie the observations are correlated both spatially and in time.
Don’t see any explicit recognition of this in their proposed algorithm.
It does not appear that they are revisiting the adjustments to the data. If this is not done they will end up with about the same trend and their work will be useless, except to tout the IPCC Party Line.
As they are filtering for infilling and other data manipulations it is obvious they are using adjusted data and they FAIL before beginning.
Raw data rural shows little warming, raw data urban shows significant warming, adjusted rural data shows significant warming, adjusted urban data shows almost identical significant warming.
This doesn`t stack up to me.
scienceandpublicpolicy.org/images/stories/papers/originals/Rate_of_Temp_Change_Raw_and_Adjusted_NCDC_Data.pdf
Ah but they are including a hell of a lot more stations.
So at the very least BEST will shut up the deniers from claiming stations were deleted to create global warming.
There is a vast amount of utter garbage in global T data. So feeling smug about trolling through 39,000 stations does not impress me. The answer IMHO opinion will be found by the team that examines about 2,000 global stations – handles the homogenization issues scientifically – they could get an answer closer to the truth than the Jones/UEA/GHCN/GISS/UKMO conga-line-of-me-too-copyists and plagiarizers.
Why is it that so many people want to silence so-called deniers? I thought everyone believed in free speech? Skepticism in science improves our chances for discovering the truth. Who amongst you is against that process?
I see scales falling from the eyes of quite a few people after Dr Muller’s House testimony.
See Climate Depot too