No inclusion for the effect of changes in volcanic activity.
No inclusion for the effect of forest fires, a factor which rivals or exceeds impact from industrialization..
No inclusion for the effect in changes in solar radiation, and certainly not since 1780 when Muller claims AGW begins.
.................
Muller's methodology includes gross interpolations about data.
No peer review of Muller's work.
Muller's claim of formerly being a skeptic is rejected; since 2003 he has been in the AGW alarmist camp
> populartechnology.net which includes this>>> "Richard Muller has never been a skeptic, at best he had a moment of intellectual honesty towards skeptics when he acknowledged Steve McIntyre's debunking of Mann's Hockey Stick, only to later dismiss this as irrelevant to the global warming debate, " This result should not affect any of our thinking on global warming". Hardly surprising, as Muller considers the carbon dioxide produced from burning fossil fuels to be, " the greatest pollutant in human history" and likely to have, " severe and detrimental effects on global climate". The future outlook for global warming according to Muller is that, " it’s going to get much, much worse" and thus advocates that the United States immediately pay China and India hundreds of billions of dollars to cut back their carbon emissions or, " it'll be too late". No wonder he endorsed " The Earth is the Great Ship Titanic", Steven Chu as " perfect" for U.S. Energy Secretary and Al Gore's hypocritical alarmism,
"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." - Richard Muller, 2008
"There is a consensus that global warming is real. ...it’s going to get much, much worse." - Richard Muller, 2008
"Let me be clear. My own reading of the literature and study of paleoclimate suggests strongly that carbon dioxide from burning of fossil fuels will prove to be the greatest pollutant of human history. It is likely to have severe and detrimental effects on global climate." - Richard Muller, 2003end quote.
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REGARDLESS, a 1 degree change is insignificant in relation to climate (not weather) change over centuries.
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theregister.co.uk which includes this selection:
>>The second comment is worth taking the time to read, as new research using a much more comprehensive classification system puts the lack of rigour in dealing with the UHI effect in the spotlight. BEST appears to replicate the lack of rigour, and worse, appears not to care overmuch:In their Journal of Geophysical Research submission, the BEST team writes:
"We are not asserting that surface temperature data are unaffected by urbanization, but that a global average based on data that includes stations that may have warmed due to urbanization is not significantly different to one based only on stations that are assumed not to contain urban effects."
McKitrick comments, rather acidly:
I suspect that any reasonable reader, upon completing the paper, would be startled to learn that the authors did not intend to assert that surface temperature data are unaffected by urbanization. I think the above sentence was meant to say something like: “We are not claiming there are no contaminating influences in individual locations, only that they are too small and isolated to affect the global average.”
Unfortunately the whole issue is whether their methodology reliably supports this conclusion, and in this draft they have done nothing to deal with the evidence that it does not, instead they simply assumed the problems away.
Muller also made the claim that he was a former climate skeptic, which was rapidly disputed.
"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," Muller told climate activist website Grist in October 2008, rather undermining his claim to be sceptical or even impartial at that point.
All this leaves much of the press, including the New York Times - which indulged Muller by giving him an op-ed space last week to announce his latest results - with some explaining to do.
This seems to have been acknowledged even by the New York Times Malthusian-in-Residence, Andy Revkin, a very widely read environment columnist who is generally sympathetic to the warmist position. Revkin wasn't impressed with the Mullers' "PT Barnum showmanship".
Meanwhile, the most distinguished co-author of the early BEST papers last year has declined to be involved in the latest. Dr Judith Curry, Professor and Chair of the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at the Georgia Institute of Technology and President of Climate Forecast Applications Network (CFAN), describes the work as "oversimplistic and not at all convincing in my opinion".
There's a critical analysis by two early participants in BEST, writing in a personal capacity, on Curry's blog, here.
The BEST team uses some interesting techniques, such as kriging – estimating values at locations which haven't been sampled by using a weighted average of neighbouring samples to estimate the 'unknown' value at a given location, so named for geostatistics pioneer Danie Krige – to compensate for sampling biases in station coverage.
The team also examines more stations than existing temperature series. However, BEST fails to use the latest, and more comprehensive, WMO standard for station quality, which results in low quality data. And it's limited, by design, to ignore satellite and sea readings – thus ignoring most of the Earth, which is mostly covered by water.
All in all, it would seem that BEST's stated goal - to produce absolutely undisputable climate data and science, for all that this would mean a regrettable absence of simple, clear soundbites - has been abandoned.<<<<<<
wattsupwiththat.com which includes this selection:
>>>> Stephen Briggs from the European Space Agency’s Directorate of Earth Observation says that sea surface temperature data is the worst indicator of global climate that can be used, describing it as “lousy”. “It is like looking at the last hair on the tail of a dog and trying to decide what breed it is,” he said on Friday at the Royal Society in London.
“The models don’t have the skill we thought they had. That’s the problem,” admits Peter Jan van Leeuwen, director of the National Centre of Earth Observation at the University of Reading.
Obviously if the surface temperature was still rising, as it was in the 90s, instead of inconveniently contradicting model predictions, then it would still be considered a valid climate metric. |
