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BEST is published [Stoat]
It looks like the first of the BEST papers is published (webcite): A New Estimate of the Average Earth Surface Land Temperature Spanning 1753 to 2011 (h/t WUWT) – Richard A. Muller, Robert Rohde, Robert Jacobsen, Elizabeth Muller, Saul Perlmutter, Arthur Rosenfeld, Jonathan Wurtele, Donald Groom and Charlotte Wickham. Note the absence of La Curry (she’s noticed, though. Note absence of comment on journal quality).
AW has thrown Muller under the bus and is cwuel to the paper, which is almost enough to make me kind, but not quite. The audience duly parrots this back to him, with a few exceptions. “oldfossil” reminds AW of his original words I’m prepared to accept whatever result they produce, even if it proves my premise wrong.
The Watties are criticising the paper for being published in the first issue of a new journal of no known provenance, “Geoinformatics & Geostatistics: An Overview”. And I agree to this extent: BEST would not have published there, had they been able to publish in, say, JGR. Just like no-one publishes in E&E until everyone else has rejected them. But I disagree with the reasoning: the work, I think, is perfectly valid. As I said before. But just as I said before, it isn’t really all that exciting: its really just a new method for constructing a global time series, which agrees with the previous ones. Even if it turns out to be a really good idea, its still only a method, not a scientific result. That is why they’ve had a hard time getting it published. This is a bit of a problem for geophysics-types, and there’s an EGU journal devoted to this problem for GCM code, GMD, featuring several of our usual suspects. That exists because developing GCM code, too, is just a method and not generally publishable in the normal journals.
One possible “new result” is the extension of the temperature record back to 1750. What is striking about the early record is the massive oscillations with a period of about 50 years, that completely disappear from the record after about 1910. Is that plausible? Maybe: they claim to see a volcanic signature in these events. But they have no explanation for the large positive excursion in ~1770 (aside: this may be why they had trouble getting into a “real” journal: they say stuff like Most dramatic are the large swings in the earliest period. These dips can be explained as… but they don’t mention the peaks, which can’t be). Another possibility is that these are an artefact of the poor geographical coverage of the early record. Exactly when to start the record isn’t clear, but other centers use 1850-to-1880.
The other thing they do (inextricably tied up with the above) is fitting volcanoes+CO2 to the temperature record. This gives them a climate sensitivity (f 3.1 ± 0.3°C, since you ask) and although they say this parameterization is based on an extremely simple linear combination, using only CO2 and no other anthropogenic factors and considering only land temperature changes. As such, we don’t believe it can be used as an explicit constraint on climate sensitivity other than to acknowledge that the rate of warming we observe is broadly consistent with the IPCC estimates of 2-4.5°C warming (for land plus oceans) at doubled CO2 this effective endorsement of IPCC does force the Watties to revile BEST from now on. Previously, I called this stuff “absurdly naive” which on reflection I’d tone down to “naive” but I still think they’d have had a hard time getting it through JGR et al..
While writing this my trawling threw up the odd silence over AW’s own draft paper, ludicrously called “game changing by RP Sr.. Well, in a sense the game has changed: RP Sr is now out of the blogging business.
2013-01-20 13:15:11
Source: http://scienceblogs.com/stoat/2013/01/20/best-is-published/
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