BEST Evidence Not So Good?

Richard Muller, a  well-respected physicist and former MacArthur Foundation grantee, put together BEST, the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature project, to try to establish reliable temperature data sets that could be used to evaluate the extent of global warming. The idea was that at all parties in the debate over the cause of global warming could use the same sets of temperature data, even if they disagreed on how they should be interpreted.

Earlier this month Dr. Muller took the unusual step of publishing his results without going through any sort of peer-review process. The lack of peer-review doesn't really bother me, because an important (and public) project such as Dr. Muller was engaged in will be peer-reviewed eventually by any number of interested and talented professionals and amateurs. But in this case, he would have been well-advised to seek some sort of review before he published his initial reports.

The first opinions from the mainstream media were that the BEST  findings settled the global warming debate by showing late 20th century warming.  That, of course, would not be the case, since the warming that has occurred in the temperature record has not been widely rejected among skeptics.  It is the cause of the warming, and whether it is a bad thing, that is at the heart of most skeptics' arguments.

Today we learn that Judith Curry, a well-respected climatologist and co-author of the BEST report, is taking Muller to task for his premature release of two of the four BEST reports.   Steve McIntyre, who operates the  Climate Audit website, has posted on the subject, and noted several problems with the BEST analysis.  Mr. McIntyre also believes the data may confirm the end of the Little Ice Age, which in turn suggests the Medieval Warm Period occurred, a time during the Middle Ages when the world was warmer than today. Anthony Watts, who cooperated with Dr. Muller in evaluating the effect of urban heat islands on the temperature record, has objected to Muller using 60 years of data to compare with Watts' 30 years of data. Jeff Id notes that there is a significant error in the calculations Muller used.  Whether these folks are right or wrong, Dr. Muller probably would have been well-advised to listen to them before going all-out with the press release first.

And to top it all off, the  BEST data show that the last 10 years have shown no warming.  That has seriously puzzled the climate alarmists, according to a report that was on Greenwire.

It will be interesting to see how this plays out.