Amid criticism, Berkeley Earth extends record, upholds findings : News ...
blogs.nature.com/.../amid-criticism-berkeley-earth-extends-record-upholds-findings.ht...
30 Jul 2012 - University of Georgia climatologist Judith Curry, who was a co-author on the prior studies but declined to sign her name to the latest , offered a lengthy criticism ...

It's usually seen as a pretty strong statement when an academic refuses to put their name to a paper.
In other words, she left in disgust.

I’ll add a bit more interpretation about Judith Curry finally refusing to sign her name as a Berkely-thing author. I still recall her making some rather opaque, yet pointed, comment along the lines of “he has a grant”, in italics.

While it is not unusual for academics in the US to set up companies and employ close family members on federal grant funded studies [*], I got the impression that maybe she thought Mueller had crossed a line somewhere and was possibly letting funding prospects override the science. Certainly, anybody producing results that may undermine the alarmist global warming “consensus” can not expect to receive lavish federal grants to continue their work, either now or then. A company employing his daughter might then suffer.
This is of course my attempt at reading between the lines of the situation as I understood it and Judith Curry is too diplomatic to be explicit about such things, but it seemed there was clearly ‘something else’ beyond the science.

NB. A few years ago when Michael Mann was saying things about Curry that were not only extremely professionally discourteous but quite possibly libelous, she gently hinted that she could probably play the US academic sex-discrimination/harassment card against him should she so choose. Whether he ever got the hint and toned things down a bit we may never know, but once again, her standards are too far above his for her to go down that road.

[*I’ve seen similar such arrangements myself in academia and industry. It may seem a bit nepotistic to some British sensibilities, but they tend to work harder and more diligently than regular employees or students in my experience.

But there are also some bad apples, and funnily enough, global warming alarmists in US academia again provided us with a famous example when Shukla and the #RICO20 drew a bit too much attention to thenselves by writing an open leter to The President.
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2015/10/15/are-jagdish-shukla-and-the-rico20-guilty-of-racketeering/
I wonder what the end game was with his little scam?]

In other words, she left in disgust.

You might just be reading too much into this, yes, Dr Curry disagreed with the attribution statement made by Mueller/BEST, which went further than the IPCC in assigning warming to anthropogenic causes. Fair enough, but it is hardly unusual for academic teams to change personnel, once the initial project has been delivered, indeed Dr Curry was just one of 6 or more who were part of the first paper but subsequently not named as co authors on later work.

Not long before that blog post, on her own blog, she posted a piece by Zeke Hausfather and Steve Mosher describing the new work in detail, and she commented

The new version of the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature dataset is now achieving its goal as an unprecedented data resource, including transparency and user-friendliness.  The addition of Steve and Zeke to the team was an excellent move.  They have clearly added value to the product.

And since then she has regularly hosted updates from the BEST team on her blog and even used their analyses in her own posts, see for example here from last year.

I am struggling to see much 'disgust' there.

While it is not unusual for academics in the US to set up companies and employ close family members on federal grant funded studies , I got the impression that maybe she thought Mueller had crossed a line somewhere and was possibly letting funding prospects override the science.

Well, yes, she would know. In 2016 Dr Curry set up the Climate Forecast Applications Network, a private short range hurricane forecasting business. CFAN is cagey about its clients, but she has said they include an oil company, and the Network also receive grants from NOAA, Department of Defense, and the Department of Energy. Dr Curry is President and she employs Dr Peter Webster as Chief Scientist. Peter Webster is her husband, but no line has been crossed, oh no.

When it comes to trust and respect in Climate Science, Judith Curry has some major advantages over Hockey Teamsters. She has trust and respect because she understands science.

Anybody citing water-diviner Nils Axel Morner automatically loses the argument.

Sorry, but there it is. Curry noisily confirms her opponents' argument.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nils-Axel_M%C3%B6rner#Dowsing

Whatever you think of the merits of the paper, it does seem to nicely illustrate that in a relatively long list of highly cited researchers, there are virtually none who publish papers that substantively dispute our basic understanding of climate change. There’s a pretty thin bench of climate change contrarians who would also be regarded as leading researchers. So, maybe it’s worth acknowledging what was being suggested (climate scientists should be more visible in the public discourse) even if one doesn’t particularly like the idea of publishing papers in which people are labelled in some way.

https://andthentheresphysics.wordpress.com/

I probably won't read the paper, but it has Dr Curry and Mr. Eschenbach well and truly triggered, so - good effort!

Shorter Version, science has finally prevailed. :-)

Wow. No fewer than eight separate articles at WUWT on the consensus paper. Including the inevitable lawsuit from Viscount Monckton of Benchley. His Lordship is to bring an action for fraud, libel and breach of personal data protection. His statement of claim is typically verbose, but a central plank is

The blurb gives rise to at least the following counts of libel, given the widespread circulation of my name by the defendants on the list of those whom they describe as “deniers”, a term calculated to invite invidious comparison with Holocaust denial:
The defendants’ use of the word “denial” twice (once in the headline and once in the opening sentence of the blurb) – constitutes libel in its deliberately false implication that I and others on the list circulated by the defendants deny well-established scientific facts

However in the comments, His Lordship um, denies the greenhouse effect:

However, it has also recently come to light, from the same talented group, one of whose members is also a member of my research team, that the radiosonde data show no radiative imbalance at all in the boundary layer, the troposphere or the tropopause and lower to mid stratosphere (the balloons go pop above that). No radiative imbalance implies two things: first, no feedback response, providing a most powerful empirical confirmation of our own theoretical result; and secondly, no greenhouse effect.

The reason why there is no greenhouse effect is fascinating. Albert Einstein, in a 1919 paper, demonstrated that a molecule of a gas in thermodynamic equilibrium absorbs and at once emits any radiation it receives. This result is usually attributed to Kirchhoff. Apparently, it is only in an environment of thermodynamic disequilibrium that a greenhouse effect can occur: and the radiosonde records show, with a brilliant clarity once they are properly analyzed, that no thermodynamic disequilibrium exists anywhere in the atmosphere, as far up as the balloons can measure (which means 99% of it). No thermodynamic disequilibrium, no greenhouse effect, says Einstein,, and he is usually right.

Now, I am not a lawyer, but that seems to me a remarkably swift act of self-sabotage.

Popcorn, pls. His Lordship The Viscount of Benchley really is the gift that keeps on giving...

https://wattsupwiththat.com/2019/08/16/fraud-breach-of-right-of-privacy-and-libel-by-nature-communications-naturecomms/

denier1
/dɪˈnʌɪə/

noun
noun: denier; plural noun: deniers

1. a person who denies something, especially someone who refuses to admit the truth of a concept or proposition that is supported by the majority of scientific or historical evidence.

Phil. In that definition there is one word right at the end - evidence - that you should concentrate upon. Output from flawed models does not constitute evidence. What else yer got?

For what? The reality of the greenhouse effect? That AGW is real and problematic?

The latter conclusion is based on thousands of published studies, and certainly does not require climate models.

We often get requests to provide an easy-to-understand explanation for why increasing CO2 is a significant problem without relying on climate models and we are generally happy to oblige. The explanation has a number of separate steps which tend to sometimes get confused and so we will try to break it down carefully.

Click

Phil. Few dispute that climates have got slightly warmer, nor that CO2 is a greenhouse gas, nor that human activities have increased atmospheric CO2. But that's not why we are branded deniers. It's because we refute the data manipulation, the selectivity of the data you use and the utter stupidity of using underpowered models to predict the futures and the absolute absurdity of acting upon them to destroy using the greatest boon mankind was ever blessed with.

"That AGW is real and problematic?

The latter conclusion is based on thousands of published studies"

I think you're getting confused, the first part sentence has a question mark so cannot be a "conclusion".

Secondly, I very much doubt if AGW is based upon thousands of published studies. I'm willing to agree that thousands of studies (nay, tens of thousands, may be more) accept AGW as a starting point but do not add to its veracity. But this is old, old ground, not worth ploughing through yet again. Although it's interesting that you repeat the same mantras. Do they bring you peace?

the utter stupidity of using underpowered models to predict the futures and the absolute absurdity of acting upon them to destroy using the greatest boon mankind was ever blessed with.

Two points - Firstly, don't believe all the misinformation about model skill, they've actually done a good enough job. Secondly, that article demonstrated that we have a problem without reference to a single model. Given that we have quantified the increased forcing from manmade greenhouse gases (to within around 10%), the key variable is climate sensitivity, that is, how much warming can we expect the increased radiative forcing to produce, usually expressed as the temperature increase that will result of a doubling of CO2 once the system has achieved equilibrium. This can be estimated using a climate model, but also from examining past climate change for any period where we have a good estimate of the associated forcing change. The RC piece referenced Annann and Hargreaves (2006), amongst many others, more recently Hansen et al 2016 examined paleoclimate data and came to the same conclusion. Both paleo- and model studies and methods yield the same central answer of 3C with an uncertainty of around 1.5C-4.5C, which considering our current emissions trajectory means, Houston, we have a problem.

Ice melt, sea level rise and superstorms: evidence from paleoclimate data, climate modeling, and modern observations that 2 ◦C global warming could be dangerous

Hansen, Sato, Ruedy et al, Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics, 2016.

https://www.atmos-chem-phys.net/16/3761/2016/acp-16-3761-2016.pdf

Aug 18, 2019 at 3:23 PM | Phil Clarke

Aug 18, 2019 at 3:59 PM | Phil Clarke

Aug 18, 2019 at 5:42 PM | Phil Clarke

Your normal bollocks repeated ad nauseam

Monckton invites a polite response from lying and offensive Climate Scientists

https://wattsupwiththat.com/2019/08/17/the-nature-communications-hate-list-a-fast-moving-story/

Obviously if they had abandoned Mann and his bent stick when they had the chance, Trump wouldn't be US President, the EU would not be failing, energy reliability would not be wobbly with soaring prices and St Greta would not have got free boating holidays for corrupting other school children.

Ice melt, sea level rise and superstorms: evidence from paleoclimate data, climate modeling, and modern observations that 2 ◦C global warming COULD be dangerous

could

auxiliary verb
Used to indicate ability or permission in the past.
auxiliary verb
Used with hypothetical or conditional force.
auxiliary verb
Used to indicate tentativeness or politeness

Yawnz

Clipe - Ah, so you didn't actually read the paper then.

Situation normal. Or should that be normalz.

Monckton invites a polite response from lying and offensive Climate Scientists

Sheer projection. As a fan, do you endorse His Lordship's assertion that the Earth has no greenhouse effect?

In his claim of fraud and libel, itself shot through with out-and-out falsehoods, is this one:

the rate of global warming from 1850 to 2011, the year to which IPCC data were updated for the most recent Assessment Report, was only one-third of the medium-term rate originally predicted by IPCC in 1990

This is balony and an example of what I call 'Monckton's Scenario Trick'. IPCC 1990 published projections of global temperature based on 4 different scenarios labelled A-D. Monckton has repeatedly (and to the delight of the readers at WUWT) misrepresented the most extreme Scenario A as 'the' IPCC prediction, even though it never came to pass. The reality was somewhere between Scenarios B and C and the associated temperature projections were pretty much on the money. Can't have that.

But don't believe me:

I had not recalled that IPCC had made its 1 k by 2025 prediction under Scenario A. However, Scenario A was its business-as-usual scenario, and it had incorrectly predicted a far greater rate of forcing, and hence of temperature change, than actually occurred

Says his Lordship, while continuing to misrepresent it at every turn. In other words, he is being dishonest whilst accusing others of dishonesty.

I highly doubt this claim will ever see a courtroom, however it would be extraordinarily entertainment indeed to see the mendacious Lord cross-examined under oath...

Phil. You must get over your habit of insisting upon people reading any old tat that you recommend as essential reading.

Your mini-quote from Hansen et al., 2016. is rather off-putting. How can ice melt, sea level rise and superstorms, paleoclimate data, and modern observations indicate that warming will be dangerous and caused by human activities? As I wrote before, climate change is not disputed by most critics, dangerous change caused by humans definitely is. Sea level rise is probably the most damaging possible future effect, yet despite an undisputed temperature rise the rate of SLR remains moderate to low and not accelerating. Only ill conceived models herald future doom.
The recent habit of ascribing every extreme weather event to climate change reeks of desperation.