Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature project

[caraher]

I'm attending the American Physical Society's "Physics of Sustainable Energy" conference and Richard Muller gave us a quick peek at some preliminary results of his team's analysis of surface temperatures, the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature (BEST) project. Since its announcement, Muller's initiative has been under fire from folks like Joe Romm, questioning the value of another analysis and the implications of some of Muller's funding (which includes the Charles G. Koch Charitable Foundation; when I brought that up, Rich quoted himself from a radio interview, saying he also took money from an organization that invaded Afghanistan - a reference to the US government).

They plan to release some preliminary results fairly soon (sounded like in 2-4 weeks or so). Tonight he showed us the surface temperature data from Hadley CRU, Goddard and NOAA for the past few decades and superimposed what BEST is getting so far on top of those. The data did not include all the stations they will ultimately have in their analysis. Based on what I saw, I don't think Koch family will be pleased if they thought they were buying a skeptic's rebuttal.

Muller listed about 5 skeptical arguments that he felt BEST's analysis will address (things like apparent surface temperature rise is an artifact of the urban heat island effect) as motivation for doing this work, and emphasized that the sorts of corrections the established groups have made to their data were all done for very legitimate reasons. He just feels that the skeptics - defined narrowly by Muller as people who are not flat-out deniers, but those who have genuine questions and are willing to listen to science - deserve more thorough answers than they've received to date.

It's pretty clear that the whole project has ruffled some feathers. Benjamin Santer was clearly irked by Muller's billing his effort as "non-partisan" (Muller has an upcoming talk at Berkeley with the title, "The Current Status of Climate Change - A Non-Partisan Analysis"), saying in his talk that title and some quotes in a recent Guardian article imply that the other groups' work IS partisan. In reply, Muller denied that he thinks that, and added that he's spent a lot of time lately apologizing for quotes he considers inaccurate.

I think one irony of some of the criticism Muller is receiving is that he's making an effort to work with the skeptics in such a way that, if they are sincere, they may be compelled to admit human-caused climate change is real after all. For instance, The Carbon Brief's blog says,

"Anthony Watts, retired TV weatherman, climate sceptic and owner of Watts Up With That? has been invited to take part in the research. His blog was among the sceptic sites to push the "Climategate" story attacking published climate scientists.

Watts reports that he was in regular correspondence with Muller before the project's launch and that he "spent the day with the BEST team yesterday at Lawrence Livermore Berkeley Laboratories". However, he is not named on the BEST website and he has not yet revealed his exact role."

I think the reason he invited Watts is very simple. Muller wanted Watts' trust. I think the main goal may be less to contribute many new things to the science than to advance the dialog with honest skeptics. That may prove a fool's errand, but it's worth a try. It's at least a way to find out how many of those exist.