The Romm & Watts Variety Hour
It would be so entertaining, wouldn’t it?
Can someone please cut through the BS for me and explain what is going on with their dueling posts on this Berkley Earth Temperature Station business?
Romm’s latest contains not one but two “bombshells,” a “wow” and a “double wow.” He also says that he meant all along to “smoke out the deniers.” It’s like he’s doing his own psych ops or something.
Over at WUWT, Anthony’s latest claims Romm is pulling the “old pea and thimble trick” and hyperventilating
like some cheap MSM news labeling graphic where they’ve caught some sex poodle on tape.
Who’s smoking who here?
Romm up to his usual babble-speak and one man band equipment. He prematurely went off on a 2% coverage “Test Run” of the BEST methodology and calling it an “exclusive advance draft” of the paper. It is nonsense, and when Steve Mosher and others tried to correct him, all heck broke out. So, probably still smarting over the Willis E. thrashing of the “over population” (Hence the “Not Evil, Just Romm”) paper, he will be in save face mode for a couple of weeks.
Net result, “Not Evil, Just Romm” is pretty funny 😉
The thing is, as I have stated elsewhere, we are pretty sure that the BEST paper is going to agree with all of the other temp series. So what? I have to agree with MoshPit here, it’s about the sensitivity.
Keith, I’m certainly hoping you can snag Muller to do a guest post here in order to clear the air. I personally think this is 1 part misunderstanding between the two “sides” and 2 parts grandstanding! Muller would be able to clarify all the factual errors at least.
WUWT has sufficiently clarified the issue. Romm called “a preliminary paper” what was only a smaoo 2% sample of station data (all from Japan), with no paper at all, just the data, to be used in test runs of some procedures. The data were still the original NOAA or NASA data, with farts and all (farts including uncorrected urban heat island effects, inhomogeneities, and other issues likely to be addressed by the BEST project). Apparently Rohm threw a glance at the data and concluded that they “confirmed” the existing trends from CRU, NASA etc. No wonder: they are (admittedly a small sample of) the same data. The BEST project results are yet to come. Rohm just had it all wrong, as he is unfortunately, and with alarming frequency, prone to.
Errata: “smaoo” meaning “small” and “Rohm” meaning “Romm”, SA memories aside. Just typos, sorry.
“It would be so entertaining, wouldn’t it?”
No. If I thought so, I’d actually follow those blogs.
“Apparently Rohm threw a glance at the data and concluded that they “confirmed” the existing trends from CRU, NASA etc. ”
That was from Caldeira, but from skimming the screeds it now seems that Romm is saying that *Muller*, said
”
“We are seeing substantial global warming”
“None of the effects raised by the [skeptics] is going to have anything more than a marginal effect on the amount of global warming.”
Now, Muller apparently says a lot of stuff that isn’t correct re:climate — RealClimate peeps did a brief evisceration of him in a recent thread comment — so maybe he’s wrong here too, though he’s presumably talking about his own team’s findings here, and why would he get THOSE wrong? Or maybe these quotes are out of context and don’t reflect Muller’s actual point, a la Jones’ ‘no warming in 15 years. If so feel free to provide that context.
As for the rest of the yammering about Mosher and Watts, it looks like Romm is just turning their ‘transparency’ and ‘conspiracy’ memes back on them. There’s a certain pleasing turnabout-is-fair-play aspect to that, IMO.
Let’s see if I can clarify. I’ve been in intermittent contact with BEST for a few months. Nothing special, just passing on some of the things I had found in the past couple years.. datasets, concerns, etc. Judith made the introduction.
Zeke and I made a visit to discuss a few things with them. So they shared some very preliminary charts. 2% stuff. And we discussed what stage they were at in the project. We met with a good number of the team. I volunteered to do some R coding. They work in Matlab. I also volunteered to pass a couple papers along that covered some issues. We exchanged some mails, primarily on what I needed to get working on the data formats. Zeke wrote a nice piece on our visit over at Lucia’s. I was gunna write one, but Zeke did a complete job, so what’s the point.
Romm then writes a post reporting that Ken had read the draft paper. This made no sense to me given the briefing that Zeke and I had received. The full data set had not been run through the algorithm, especially one key part, a really cool part.. So the idea that there was a draft paper made no sense to me. maybe the methods part could be written, but hardly the conclusions. Anyways I did some checking and turns out that ken was reading another paper the team was working on.. not the surface stations paper. At least thats the best info I have. Now, Im told that Romm is foaming at the mouth. sheesh. what a marroon.
What I find hilarious, is Romm was trashing the project because Koch Industries is a funder. Then when his buddy Caldeira (funder), sent him the email, low and behold the project proves AGW, priceless.
Romm is a gift to the skeptics.
All hat and no cattle.
Here we have people trying to do science and Romm cherry picks a test run and claims the game is over. If I was not a sceptic before I would be now after this little demo of Romm’s complete disregard for science or ethics.
We can only hope the ninny keeps posting.
mosher #8 – was wondering what role Curry played in BEST; quite informative to realize she provides introductions, yours in particular. Rightly or wrongly, you are seen to hold a skeptical delayers position by many… do you think your “introduction” has helped to further the presumed independence of the BEST initiative?
@7 Steven Sullivan. What do you mean by the last paragraph? AFAIK there is going to be total transparency with BEST. Keeping things quiet pre publication is fine, but they’ll release post publication.
Do you think Joe Romm will need to be launching FOI requests to get their data and methods? I don’t see the reversal at all, why do you? (Not picking a fight, I would like to know why you made the statement.)
I support the effort of BEST. It’s an effort from outside the field without preconceptions. Yes the HADCRUT and GISS are reasonably close, but so are the two groups. I’m not suggesting any collusion or intent to mislead or anything like that, I’m simply concerned that given the closeness of the two major players there might be a tendency to downplay any differences that crop up.
Having an open and transparent third player perhaps confirming the first two groups can only be a good thing.
I can’t speak for other sceptics but I think the instrumental record is of vital importance. It’s what the models are calibrated against. For modellers to get a good calibration then the instrumental record must be the best we can provide them. Therefore the instrumental record and it’s compilation into a GMST must be able to withstand any and all efforts to sink it.
Personally I don’t care what answer the BEST team come up with, so long as it’s right and can be defended as right against all comers.
Keith, as Steven Sullivan points out above Richard Muller’s comments in response to a question at a public talk on Saturday are very much in line with Caldeira’s e-mail to Romm – see from about 1:19:20 here: http://www.ustream.tv/recorded/13429263. How much Caldeira is at fault for describing what he read as a draft report seems a side issue.
I wonder if Steven Mosher would acknowledge that it is unhelpful for him to be seen to be associated with this project? There are already enough concerns with the impartiality of the process given that it was instigated by Muller, who has been far from neutral on the science in the past, and includes Judith Curry. These are people who are very much to one end of the scale of credible commentators. It seems to me that such involvement can only lead to big question marks over any results that suggest the warming is less than has been observed (whilst if anything boosting the credibility of any results that suggest the warming is higher), which undermines the purpose of the project.
Keith Grubb in #9 seems to find it difficult to understand this problem, so perhaps thinking of a reversal of this situation would help? How would a project run by Hansen, with the involvement of CRU and partially funded by Greenpeace be viewed? If their results were to show that warming had been significantly over-estimated would those who want to downplay the significane of anthropogenic climate change ignore the results because they didn’t fully trust the people involved?
I don’t really understand the PR of the Berkeley group right now. They have collected the data, but have not done any meaningful analysis, yet. So why go public already? Yet another temperature reconstruction will be fine, but so far they’ve got no presentable results. Could please somebody give me a call, as soon as the status of their temperature product is upgraded from “vaporware” to “useful”? I’m convinced they’ll make that transition someday, but I expect it to still be quite some man-months away.
peetee, what will make BEST independent is its exclusion of pseudoscientific rhetoric and junk methodologies. What gifts BEST credence, the thing of which other series are devoid, is integrity, transparency and open access. It has nothing to do with who its supporters are, who makes up its sales team or who is singing from this particular hymn sheet.
Who gives a damn which particular “side” an individual supporter of the BEST project is “on”, if in its construction there is no concealment of data, no hiding methodologies, no flouting of FOI laws, no cherry picking or truncating, merging and smoothing of disparate data series?
It is generally expected that the result of the project will show that the earth has warmed, but that case will not be fully made by the BEST project team until the project’s efforts are completed. This is real research, being done scientifically and according to traditions of the scientific method. This is, all said, a first in this aspect of climate study.
Watts has made clear that he will accept the findings of the BEST project, whatever they are, because he has at last found confidence in a team to do the job of assessing the evidence diligently and with the utmost integrity. This is because, in spite of Keith’s long-held belief that Watts and Romm are opposite sides of the same coin, Watts has only ever been seeking good science, done right. That is a different coin entirely from the advocacy coin on which Romm’s face sits.
I don’t really understand the PR of the Berkeley group right now. They have collected the data, but have not done any meaningful analysis, yet. So why go public already?
This is something that’s caused me to worry about the project. I keep hearing about how it’s going to be open and use whizz-bang stuff to do amazing things and be authoritative and so on and so forth.
However they haven’t actually done anything yet. I’d have expected to first hear about this thing when it had done a substantive analysis of data and produced at least preliminary conclusions. Instead I’m hearing about it via WUWT and various blogs before it’s done much of anything.
John B above-
I would agree generally with your whole post, but I would specifically like to echo your last three paragraphs, as I feel that the issues with the instrumental record have needed addressing for a long time and this latest project may actually go some way towards reconciling some of the differences between camps, Romm’s efforts to trash things notwithstanding.
Oops first paragraph in my comment above should be quoting bluegrue @14
Not sure what the kerfuffle is about. UAH satellite data shows warming – at least in the satellite era – and Christy is generally considered a sceptic…
I’ve never understood the interest in a surface station global average temperature metric. Averaging inhomogeneous data improperly distributed in both time and space to calculate a number that no thing or creature or person experiences seems a fools errand. Frankly, so what if models match this metric.
OTOH, anything that keeps Romm going is good for sceptics.
@kdk33
Not sure what the kerfuffle is about. UAH satellite data shows warming
At which point UAH stopped being the “best” and HadleyCRU at 95% significance became the “best” (i.e. “no warming” since 1995 and it doesn’t matter what any other record says).
Also remember that over at WUWT it’s generally considered to be the case you can just subtract arbitrary numbers from the warming trend to account for UHI, site problems, errors etc
“Also remember that over at WUWT it’s generally considered to be the case you can just subtract arbitrary numbers from the warming trend to account for UHI, site problems, errors etc”
Can you qualify that, please? I haven’t seen arbitrary subtractions. I’d be interested to understand where and when these have been performed.
Sharper00
“Also remember that over at WUWT it’s generally considered to be the case you can just subtract arbitrary numbers from the warming trend to account for UHI, site problems, errors etc”
Huh?
@Simon Hopkinson
Can you qualify that, please? I haven’t seen arbitrary subtractions. I’d be interested to understand where and when these have been performed.
I can only assume you don’t read WUWT then. Take this post for example
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/01/13/tale-of-the-global-warming-tiger/
There seems to be general agreement here at WUWT that the official climate Team has exaggerated the extent and danger of Global Warming by adjusting past temperature data in a manner biased (perhaps by about 0.3ºC) towards supporting their dire projections for the future. We believe the actual net temperature increase (perhaps about 0.5ºC) since 1880 is nearly all due to natural processes, including cycles of the Sun, ocean oscillations, and other causes not under human control.
Arbitrary numbers get inserted for the values above which just happen to leave very little room for AGW. Practically any discussion about temperature will include multiple comments declaring that UHI and removal of bias will make the warming go away.
@Stu
Huh?
I’ll have huh? your “huh?” Do you want to communicate in something more than a grunt?
sharper00, ahh (Cantona), I see! I forgot to take into account your habit of arbitrary ad hominem insinuation.
In fact this is overt conjecture, actually identified AS conjecture – belief – rather than conjecture asserted as fact. While I appreciate that you are more used to treating pure conjecture as if it were factual assertion, in fact this example is nothing of the sort.
Take a moment to clean yo’ hatin’ specs.
Okay so Romm reported something that a member of the funding team told him. Muller, the leader, said the exact same thing in a speech. Somehow Mosher and Watts are saying that these two people would make these statements based on 2% of the data. This makes no sense. But if we read Romm’s article, the mess becomes clearer.
Romm, ” I published his email in part because I wanted to smoke out the deniers. A number of climate scientists had told me they believed the deniers were working feverishly to change and/or spin the main results. What I didn’t know “” what few people knew “” was that the hard-core deniers in fact had unprecedented access to the BEST work-product.”
Watts said, “The issue hasn’t been the slight warming over the past century, we’ve always conceded that there is some. The issue has always been magnitude, uncertainties, and cause. With the BEST project, we’ll get closer to the ground truth of magnitude and uncertainties, but it will say nothing about the cause, except perhaps to help define the contributions of UHI and station siting.
And there it is. Both badly wanted to spin the BEST results first in their own way. The temperature game is weird one. Even Muller says that it’s warming substantially but the amount of which concerns “we have time”. So there’s your PR talking point, coming to a website near you!
grypo, LOL!
Keith – I think your question should be “who’s smoking what here?” with the obvious answer that they are both hitting it a bit. While I don’t necessarily believe that Watts has the full story on where Berkely is with the project, Romm and his usual over-the-top writing style is definitely overstating his case. From the video link, it doesn’t seem that Muller is making as strong a case for likely similarity of the outcome with GISS and CRU as Romm makes by picking out a couple of quotes. While Muller definitely says that there will be no major surprises, he is also very clear that the final result of the total warming could be a couple of tenths of a degree lower or higher than the existing estimates (which could amount to a 20-30% difference). He is also very clear that they haven’t come nearly close to a complete anaylysis yet.
I think his best point may have been that there are those on both sides (e.g., Romm and many of those that post at Watts) that simply ignore (or are very selective about) the science but that the properly skeptically have raised some very good and valid questions regarding the science.
Buegrue/Sharperoo – I am not sure that this latest kerfuffle was a result of the Berkely PR group going public but was a result of Caldiera emailing Romm some early information and Romm making a overzealous blog article about it.
Sharper says
“Do you want to communicate in something more than a grunt?”
I’ll try. Firstly, as far as I know there is no other place around which has written and focused more on the issues surrounding the surface temperature records as much as the WUWT site. We’re talking 100s of posts on dozens of topics, just relating to the land records alone, often scaling down to the minutest of details. MAybe you’ll remember that the whole point of WUWT as a climate focused site originally was to think about these issues and to deal with the problems associated with the sometimes arbitrary adjustments being applied to (often incomplete or missing) data. It just doesn’t make any kind of sense that the majority of contributors there who are focused on these things would be happy to simply ‘subtract arbitrary numbers from the warming trend to account for UHI, site problems, errors etc’, when this has been the very antithesis of the WUWT ethos from the beginning. That’s why the ‘huh’. If you were as familiar with the site as you say you are you should atleast have a sense of that.
grypo, Romm gaffed. It would be better to say that he gaffed than tried to pile spin on a spinning thing. Romm screwed up and made himself look a bit silly. There was even a measurable level of sympathy from some sceptics for Romm’s overzealous headlining, once the laughing had died down. But his later “denier” patter has not endeared him and whatever pity I might have felt for him this time over, he has himself foolishly squandered.
What happened to Joe Romm?
His book on hydrogen was great. A nice take-down.
But when he goes into attack dog mode, he really is useless.
And his blogging style is annoying. Just a lot of cut and pastes from previous posts, which probably makes it more inaccurate.
@Simon Hopkinson
In fact this is overt conjecture, actually identified AS conjecture ““ belief ““ rather than conjecture asserted as fact.
That’s strange. I thought I provided a link which both served as an example of what I was saying and which itself also claimed it to be a common view at WUWT. I guess the inconvenience filter caught it.
@Stu
We’re talking 100s of posts on dozens of topics, just relating to the land records alone, often scaling down to the minutest of details.
Ah! I see! There’s just too much uncertainty about what’s happening at WUWT to be able to form an opinion! Hundreds of posts! Even more comments! How could anyone pick up a thread of a common and negative view from that.
simply “˜subtract arbitrary numbers from the warming trend to account for UHI, site problems, errors etc’, when this has been the very antithesis of the WUWT ethos from the beginning.
We’re talking about the same WUWT here aren’t we?
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/01/26/new-paper-on-surface-temperature-records/
From the paper published by Watts and D’Aleo (through the SPPI of course)
An increase in the percentage of compromised stations with interpolation to vacant data grids may make the warming bias greater than 50% of 20th-century warming.
Remember what we’re talking about here – why do we need BEST when we have UAH and RSS which account for practically every argument levelled against the temperature record while still showing almost exactly the same trend. UAH didn’t make those arguments go away (despite Spencer and Christy being skeptics) and it’s likely BEST won’t either.
BobN,
IIRC the site berkeleyearth.org has been around since late November. What for? They have nothing to offer so far. The site is so full of announcements of what they are going to do and so full of shiny, flattering bios, patting each other’s backs on how jolly good their product will be. If you look for scientific content, it’s one large, hallow, echoing void. The one “paper” in the resource section is a an announcement, with a few insightfree formulas tacked in, to make it look scientificy.
Scientists tend to go public, if they have a final analysis or a reliable preliminary result. So far, Berkeleyearth.org is indistinguishable from a vanity site, IMHO, using the Berkeley brand to add importance to themselves. I hope that will change soon. The sooner, the better.
charlie, you’re not the first to make mention Romm’s self-quoting recently. Apart from the obvious diminishing value effect that this has on his posts, I get the sense that this self-echo-chambering is probably an unconscious exercise in résumé padding. I suspect that Romm is experiencing a crisis of redundancy, which could also explain the urgency we’ve seen recently in his half-baked headlining. He seems to feel the need for everyone to perceive that he’s on the leading edge, rather than the bleeding edge. Personally, I think he’s on the outside edge of relevance in the debate.
sharper00, I think you would have served yourself better and finished reading the text of the post you linked, rather than just looking at the pretty pictures. The overt conjecture that I was talking about is very clearly stated as conjecture, right there in the text of the post. Glickstein states:
“I do not claim a high level of accuracy for these estimates and freely admit they may be off by 50% or more, which is why I have specified them with only one significant digit of precision. I find it humorous when government-funded climate and sunspot researchers state their estimates to two or even three or more significant digits, and then go back and change their estimates by far more than that precision indicates. (The humor fades when I realize I am paying for their efforts.)”
If there is a gaff, it is on Caldiera. Of course Romm’s going to report what he was told to. But how is it a gaff when Muller also said essentially the same thing in a speech. Both said the results were preliminary, both said that they agree that there is substantial warming with other reconstructions. Watts is mad because he didn’t want it spun that way. He wants to see how much “less”, if at all, and what the uncertainty and what it says about UHI. But that won’t change what Muller, Caldiera, and Romm reported. Nothing they said is wrong. It was a race to the headline.
“BEST agrees with GISS, CRU!”
“BEST shows UHI uncertainty!”
Why is the Berkeley thing something we’re supposed to care about? What journal will their results be published in and what bearing will that have on the all the other existing temperature analyses? This is basically just a souped-up blog-style analysis backed by some questionable funding and involving characters of questionable qualifications and partiality.
No Watts cultist seemed to get what Steven Sullivan pointed out in #7. Romm was being intentionally over-the-top, turning the whole transparency/openness/conspiracy rhetoric back at them, and getting them all wound up in the process. It’s hardly a surprise to anyone that Mosher or Watts are involved in this project. From my observations, Richard Muller himself has a poor understanding of climate science.
Short answer:
Romm is incorrect about results being out, but most likely correct about them being pretty much in line with existing records, at least on the global level.
The BEST project, and particularly the work of Robert Rhode, are taking some of the innovations developed over the last year (least squares method, spatial interpolation, additional data sources) and combining them with a novel approach (treating inhomogenities as the start of separate records). They will publish initial results in the next few weeks, and it should provide a good resource for improving regional temperature assessment, as well as for folks interested in analyzing issues like UHI that require a highly sampled field.
Frankly, most of the publicity BEST has received is a result of the blog scrum, rather than any outreach on their part.
NYJ:
– souped-up blog-style analysis
– questionable funding
– characters of questionable qualifications
– Watts cultist
At least your keeping an open mind 🙂
mosher #8 ““ was wondering what role Curry played in BEST; quite informative to realize she provides introductions, yours in particular. Rightly or wrongly, you are seen to hold a skeptical delayers position by many”¦ do you think your “introduction” has helped to further the presumed independence of the BEST initiative?
#####
The reason she introduced me is because I was working on Metadata, primarily metadata related to UHI. So I offered them help. My work is open anyway
re25
Romm, ” I published his email in part because I wanted to smoke out the deniers. A number of climate scientists had told me they believed the deniers were working feverishly to change and/or spin the main results. What I didn’t know “” what few people knew “” was that the hard-core deniers in fact had unprecedented access to the BEST work-product.”
Unprecedented access?
That’s really funny. Judith Curry Introduced me because of the work I had been doing on metadata. work that is free, open and transparent. I asked if I could visit Berkeley and bring Zeke Hausfather. hardly a Skeptic.
They granted our request. We spent a few hours chating about the data sources and the algorithm. There was a table full of charts and graphs, all preliminary work. Personally, the results don’t interest me much, because I’m fairly sure that BEST will come in line with CRU and GISS, just like RomanM, tamino, Zeke, Ron Broberg, and mys results. We had lunch, Rhodes showed a wicked cool animation. We discuss the Modis dataset which I have just started working on. So I passed along a bug I found in it. I volunteered to refactor their code in R when they are ready.
Subsequent to that I suggested that Nick Stokes get in contact with them which he has. then a couple mails about data format issues.
Romm may think he is smoking people out but I’ve been talking about my contact (limited as it is) for more than a couple months. Publically on blogs for those who know how to read.
yes Romm smoked me out alrighty.
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/03/06/briggs-on-berkeleys-best-plus-my-thoughts-from-my-visit-there/#comment-614849
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/02/11/new-independent-surface-temperature-record-in-the-works/#comment-596926
http://judithcurry.com/2011/02/12/forthcoming-new-surface-temperature-record/#comment-42268
To add a bit to Mosher’s account, I had independently emailed Robert Rhode to ask about visiting the team. I mentioned it to Mosh (we both live in San Francisco), who told me that he had already been chatting with Muller about visiting Berkeley. I suggested that we combine our visits, and we both ended up going.
The funny thing with all of this drama is that the BEST folks are really doing good work. All the spin of the blogosphere aside, their results should help answer some of the real uncertainties remaining about station siting, UHI, and other factors. To the annoyance of both sides, most of issues will probably prove to be neither insignificant nor overwhelming.
Romm probably is wishing he hadn’t put up the post about how BEST is linked to Koch, Judy Curry, etc, so it can’t be trusted. But he really didn’t want anything challenging the conventional wisdom, so he put up a preemptive attack.
RealClimate and Joe Romm are mad at Richard Muller of BEST because he laid out clearly in video what Hide the Decline meant.
‘These are some scientists whose papers I won’t bother reading’
A thought has occurred to me. The BEST program represents a threat to Romms worldview and long stated beliefs.
A major line of insult against the sceptics is that they are “anti science” and that generally they will never be satisfied no matter what the climate community do.
The wide acceptance of BEST by the sceptics due to its open and transparent processes before the results are announced and regardless of what those results are is a direct threat to his commentary.
People coming late to the debate and who are trying to understand the arguments are going to ask why BEST is accepted before the results while others are complained about.
Romm is setting up the story that it’s because we are all funded by the Koch brothers or Big Oil or whatever and he can spin his demented conspiracy theories to the gullible.
The sceptics will say that it’s because BEST is open, transparent and replicable by anyone.
Given the apparent importance of the climate debate this is a fight between two schools of thought about science. One believes that science should be open and available to all for checking while the other believes that the science should be kept “in house” and anybody from outside the club needs an FOI order to see the science.
Think about this for a minute. We are being warned that the end of civilisation as we know it is at hand, that hundreds of millions of lives are at stake but if we want to see the data this prediction is made on we need an FOI?
How did we get to this state of affairs? It’s the end of the world as we know it but I’m going to protect my IP rights? Is this even a sane thing to do? “This matter is of the greatest importance for every man, woman and child on Earth, but it’s not as important as my IP rights.” This shows a seriously skewed sense of values.
Sorry, but if I had data that said the world was ending I’d be giving it evey person that wanted it so that hopefully they would prove me wrong.