After my last post I thought it'd be wise to take something of a break from blogs. As you can imagine though, that's been fairly difficult. The internet has made it so news organizations and blogs have become so interconnected you practically can't avoid one without seeing the other, and I want to keep up on the news of some things. As a result, I've largely accepted I'll just have to watch and try to resist saying anything about how stupid what people are saying is. And yes, it is all quite stupid.

Today I'd like to talk about one of the more remarkable examples, largely because it involves an update on a story I posted about here a while back. As people who've followed this blog know, I've discussed the Berkeley Earth Station Temperature project, obnoxiously titled BEST (seriously, who is arrogant enough to title their work "BEST"?), a number of times. There work has received some attention in the global warming debate, and I want to make it clear I don't focus on it because I think there is some great fraud going on in which they manufacture global warming to advance some political cause. I just think their work is crap.

Oh, and I don't like that the group compared me to a Holocaust denier. Yeah, that actually happened. It's not important in the grand scheme of things, but I do think it's rather remarkable the sort of response one might get from BEST representatives when pointing out issues with their work can be something like:

But you realize that the brandons of the world would remain skeptical. You know there is uncertainty over exactly how many died in the holocaust.

That was a remark from one Steven Mosher, comparing me to a Holocaust denier in a discussion I wasn't even involved in because he dislikes the fact I criticize his group's work. It's about as pathetic of behavior as you can find on a moral level.

But today I'd like to discuss behavior that's even worse. Nor on a social level, mind you. It isn't as socially disgraceful as smearing people like that simply for having the audacity to question your work. It is as morally reprehensible though. You see, the BEST group has actively misled the public for about a year now by making false statements which nobody in the media appears to have made any effort to verify.



To understand what I'm talking about, the head of the BEST team, Richard Muller, gave an interview for the Carbon Brief website last April which led to an article by on Roz Pidcock titled:

Prof Richard Muller: Not adjusting global temperature records would be “poor science”

This article gives Muller the opportunity to respond to questions/concerns raised by a number of people about the surface temperature record used to monitor global warming, but it is really nothing but an empty puff piece for Muller to say whatever he wants, regardless of whether or not what he says is true. While there are a number of problems with the piece, the one which I have focused on deals with the hot topic issue of adjustments made to the data. There has been all sorts of talk in certain crowds about how these adjustments exaggerate, or even manufacture, global warming. In response to these concerns, Muller said:

“Furthermore, because of the interest, we re-analyzed all the data with ZERO adjustments, just to see what we would get. These results have been made available online. What we found was that the conclusions we had previously drawn were unchanged. The data are available here

This was a hugely important claim for BEST as it had been making the rounds promoting this idea, with them having posted pieces on many sites about the topic (e.g. here). Naturally, when you go around telling a bunch of people what your results are, some people might want to look at those results for themselves. That's why Muller provided a link so they could.

The problem is the link Muller provided didn't go to a page with those results. In fact, those results weren't available anywhere. BEST had never published them for anyone to look at. Nobody anywhere could see them, unless maybe they spoke to BEST directly and got a copy. I know this for a fact because that's exactly what I did. When I saw this article claiming the results had been posted online, I sent an e-mail to BEST asking about what Muller had said:

Heya. A few days ago, an article

was published at The Carbon Brief which quoted Richard Muller

extensively, primarily to address the five questions the GWPF poses

for it's recent "temperature review." When answering the second

question, Muller said: "Furthermore, because of the interest, we re-analyzed all the data

with ZERO adjustments, just to see what we would get. These results

have been made available online. What we found was that the

conclusions we had previously drawn were unchanged. The data are

available here" I don't see the data for the results he refers to on that page. I

don't even see a graphics for those results. Was there supposed to be

a link to the results on that page? I've looked at all the other data pages on the BEST website, and I

couldn't find any links to what BEST would get if it did its analysis

without adjusting the data. Muller says that has been published. Am

I missing something, or is he just mistaken?

Simple enough, right? I didn't accuse anybody of any wrongdoing. I didn't use any harsh language, insult anyone or suggest there was some nefarious plan going on. And I got a response, which was equally friendly. It pointed out the existence of things I already knew about, suggesting they might have been what Muller had in mind, but as I pointed out in a follow-up e-mail, none of them remotely matched what he had said. There was no explanation offered for that, but within a couple days, I was sent a copy of an unadjusted global temperature series created by BEST. I responded:

Cool, thanks. Do you happen to have any info on if/when the gridded results for the same comparison will be public?

I got a prompt answer:

I'm waiting to hear back from Robert our meeting today was cancelled. He and zeke may still be out of country

But it turns out now, seven months later, those results still haven't been made publicly available. In fact, the unadjusted global temperature series I was e-mailed hasn't been made publicly available either. It was e-mailed to me, but it hasn't been published online for people to examine themselves.

Normally, you'd think a journalist would be troubled at finding out there was an error in an article they had written. Based on that expectation, I contacted Roz Pidcock, the author of the Carbon Brief piece on Twitter to point out none of these results had ever been published. This led to her tweeting:

@Corpus_no_Logos BEST tech team are on it, their guess is that it's to do with recent website migration to WordPress. I'll update blog, thx — Roz Pidcock (@RozPidcock) May 8, 2015

And updating the article to have this note:

[ Link not currently working, BEST tech team are aware of the issue and we will update when we have more information]

As I've said before, it takes a huge stretch of the imagination to read, “Link not currently working” to mean, “The data was never publicly available like Muller claimed, and the link he provided isn’t currently working because there was never any real link he could have provided.”

That's literally what I've said before. That's taken straight from a post I wrote a month after BEST e-mailed me the results it hadn't published for the public to examine. From then to a few days ago, the Carbon Brief piece continued to portray the reason these results aren't available as simply being a broken link. That is, a link was supposedly broken for eight months, and that's why nobody could see these results.

Obviously, that's all BS. BEST creates a temperature record for the world so people can see what temperatures have been like in different areas over the years. It then compresses that information down into a single, global record for simplicity so we can talk about one value for how much the planet has warmed. It publishes both of these on its website.

It then, as Muller put it, did the same thing without adjusting the data "just to see what we would get." Based on what it supposedly found when it did this, it went around giving media interviews and whatnot. During these interviews, the head of BEST claimed these results had been posted online so people could examine them for themselves. That was completely and utterly false.

When BEST was contacted to inform them of the error, it didn't try to get the error corrected. Instead, it apparently fed the Roz Pidcock misinformation. Pidcock in turn, apparently didn't attempt to verify what she had been told because if she had ever looked, she'd have found out these unadjusted results had never been posted online for the public to examine. And in fact, they still haven't been posted online for the public to examine. That means people can't check for themselves if Richard Muller is right in exchanges like this from his interview:

4. Are there any regions of the world where modifications appear to account for most or all of the apparent warming of recent decades? “For large regions, I think not.

But fortunately, I am not the average person. Because I e-mailed BEST directly about this, multiple times, I was sent the unadjusted global temperature series. Because I then wrote multiple blog posts and comments, as well as more e-mails, I was, months later, e-mailed a private link (which I cannot share) to the unadjusted gridded results. This meant I could create maps showing rates of warming with and without adjustments. For instance, here is a map showing temperature trends since 1960 in the unadjusted data set:

Here is the same map, shown with adjustments:

There are significant differences. To highlight the one most relevant to Muller's interview, look at this map I made showing the difference between trends in the unadjusted and adjusted data sets:

While Muller said he doesn't think the warming of any "large regions" was largely or wholly accounted for by the affect of adjustments on his results, the reality is much of the United States wouldn't show warming to any meaningful degree in the 1960-2013 period if not for those adjustments. South America wouldn't show much warming without those adjustments either. Other time periods might show other areas with similar results.

Plus we can already see the adjustments BEST introduce significant systematic changes in other areas. People may be focused on the potential for adjustments to introduce spurious warming, but them introducing spurious cooling would be just as wrong. It's important people be able to look at why these adjustments happened. To do that though, they need to be able to see what the adjustments were. People can't hope to tell if BEST's adjustments do a good job if they can't look at what was adjusted and try to figure out why it was adjusted.

That's why BEST was supposed to publish these results. That's why BEST told everybody it had published these results. BEST knew if it told everybody it wasn't going to show them what its results were without adjustments, many people would distrust those results. BEST knew more people would trust its claims if those people believed both the unadjusted and adjusted results were publicly available. So it told everyone both were even though they weren't.

Now, I don't know how the initial error happened. I imagine Richard Muller genuinely believed these results were all published when he said they were. I don't think he intentionally lied. I just think it's a bad sign when the head of a project doesn't even know what results have been published.

Well that, and I think none of this is very difficult to understand. So imagine my surprise when I spoke to people who completely failed to understand it. A few days ago a BEST team member, Zeke Hausfather, tweeted about a new Carbon Brief article Roz Pidcock had written:

When I saw this, I checked the previous article and found the note blaming a broken link was still there. I thought blaming a broken link for results not being available for almost a full year was rather remarkable so I tweeted:

@hausfath It has been nine months since @RozPidcock incorrectly blamed a broken link for it not being available. @curryja — Brandon S? (@Corpus_no_Logos) February 1, 2016

This, unfortunately, led to confusion as can be seen here:

You see, I had called the results gotten when one redoes the BEST calculations without adjustments "data." I did this because they are routinely called data, with that being what they were referred to as in the e-mails I exchanged with BEST. Pidcock presumably found that the raw data was available on the page linked to in the article and thought that was the "data" I was referring to.

This is a bit weird, of course, as the page she linked to hadn't been changed to add that data or anything since the time she added the note saying the link didn't work. Since Pidcock had recognized there was a problem eight months ago, I had assumed she would be able to recognize the same problem when she looked at the page now. That was apparently a mistake on my end. Regardless, what's more interesting is how Hausfather responded:

@Corpus_no_Logos @RozPidcock @curryja as are global land unadjusted time series. Only thing not online is unadjusted gridded data. 2/2 — Zeke Hausfather (@hausfath) February 1, 2016

I find this fascinating. As Hausfather say, the raw data is available online. Nobody disputes that. It's just obvious people are, by far and large, not going to redo millions and millions of calculations to take that raw data and, hopefully, come up with the same results BEST came up with while not even being able to know if they succeeded since they wouldn't have anything to compare to.

So what's at issue is the results. Muller said BEST did the same calculations for the data without adjustments as it had done with adjustments and posted the results online. BEST routinely publishes charts showing temperatures for the globe, area by area. It even has an entire section of its website titled "Results by Location" where one can look up results by specific area.

In comparison, Hausfather said BEST publishes a single temperature series showing what the global average is without adjustments. I would say that doesn't remotely match what Muller said. Hausfather would call me pedantic. I think most people would call me reasonable. After all, all I want is for people to be able to look at maps like those I created above to see how BEST's adjustments affect its results. Muller claimed BEST had done the analysis to allow them to, and he claimed BEST had published the results of that work. I would like to think I am being reasonable when I say BEST should actually publish those results rather than just claim it has.

I'd like to think that's being reasonable, not pedantic. But at risk of being further labeled pedantic, I should point out one other tiny, little detail: Hausfather is full of it. See that part where he claims the "global land unadjusted time series" is posted online? Not true. He just made that up. I pointed this out to him:

@hausfath And even then, I was only given the series after multiple e-mails and many blog comments asking for it. @RozPidcock @curryja — Brandon S? (@Corpus_no_Logos) February 1, 2016

And asked about it, multiple times, in the several days since. Strangely, he's chosen to ignore me. Hausfather's apparent strategy is to label pedantic pedantic for pointing out BEST hasn't published results it claims to have published, falsely claim BEST has published other results then just shut up when it's pointed out he's wrong. I can't say I get that.

Another thing I don't get is why Pidcock tweeted this to me:

@Corpus_no_Logos OK article clarified to say BEST publish raw station not gridded data (but you get one from the other) @hausfath @curryja — Roz Pidcock (@RozPidcock) February 4, 2016

To inform me the note in her piece has been changed to say:

[CB note: The raw station data is available in the ‘source’ and ‘intermediate’ sections on this page. BEST does not publish the raw gridded data.]

Leaving aside that we just had confusion over the difference between "data" and "results," so it seems strange to call anything "raw gridded data," there is no amount of semantic parsing which will change the fact BEST hasn't published any unadjusted results on its website. All it has published at the page linked to in Pidcock's piece is the raw data. Her update does nothing to address that Muller was completely and utterly wrong to say BEST has published unadjusted results. This note does nothing to address the issue at hand.

The worst part of all this is none of this is difficult. There are a lot of technical issues I don't expect people to follow in the discussions about how one creates temperature series for the planet. There is, however, no reason for people to have to disagree about what effect adjustments have on temperatures. There's no reason for people to be unable to figure out what data is and is not available. These are simple issues anyone should be able to figure out. All we need is to be able to point to each data sets and show what its results are.

The only reason there's any discussion over any of this is people keep managing to fail at incredibly simple things like... publish your results. Really, it's that simple. You do a bunch of calculations for an analysis because you think it might be interesting, and afterward, before you go around telling everyone what your results are, you toss those results up on a web page so people can download them. That's it.

As for people like Richard Muller and Zeke Hausfather... I don't know. I have no explanation for why these people keep saying things that aren't true. It's not a topic which interests me. The only reason I ever started looking at BEST's work is I find some of the technical details interesting. I'd much rather be discussing those. I just don't see how anyone can be expected to discuss the technical details of work when the people responsible for that work keep going around saying things that aren't true.

As for Roz Pidcock, this is an example of what laziness does for journalism. We all like to think of journalists spending months researching a story, taking weeks tracking down every lead they can find, but the reality is that usually doesn't happen. Puff pieces like Pidcock's are far more common. I mean, if we're being honest, Pidcock's article was really just a puff piece for BEST so you almost shouldn't blame her for anything in it, because really, she might as well have not written anything.

Oh, and as a book end, the BEST team member who compared me to a Holocaust denier did chime in on this topic. I want to point this out because I want to show whatever problems there are going on at BEST, it seems to run from top to bottom.

That's right. Despite Muller clearly and explicitly stating results were published online, BEST member Steven Mosher called me a liar because I "know exactly he meant by raw data being available." You can see more from Mosher in the discussion I had of his comment here, if you care for some reason.

Personally, I wouldn't. I just also wouldn't recommend criticizing BEST. Who knows what they might say about you?