Can a
group of scientists in California
end the war on climate
change?
The
Guardian (London) February 28,
2011
http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2011/feb/27/can-these-scientists-end-climate-change-war
Can
a group of scientists in
California end the war on climate
change?
The
Berkeley Earth project say they
are about to reveal
the
definitive
truth about global
warming
By Ian
Sample
In 1964,
Richard Muller, a 20-year-old
graduate student with
neat-cropped
hair, walked into Sproul Hall at
the University of
California,
Berkeley, and joined a mass
protest of
unprecedented
scale. The
activists, a few thousand strong,
demanded that the
university
lift a ban on free speech and
ease restrictions on
academic
freedom, while outside on the
steps a young
folk-singer
called Joan
Baez led supporters in a chorus
of We Shall Overcome.
The
sit-in
ended two days later when police
stormed the building in
the
early hours
and arrested hundreds of
students. Muller was thrown
into
Oakland
jail. The heavy-handedness
sparked further unrest and,
a
month
later, the university
administration backed down. The
protest
was a
pivotal moment for the civil
liberties movement and
marked
Berkeley as
a haven of free thinking and
fierce independence.
Today,
Muller is still on the Berkeley
campus, probably the
only
member of
the free speech movement arrested
that night to end up
with
a faculty
position there - as a professor
of physics. His list
of
publications
is testament to the free rein of
tenure: he worked on
the first
light from the big bang, proposed
a new theory of ice
ages,
and found
evidence for an upturn in impact
craters on the moon.
His
expertise
is highly sought after. For more
than 30 years, he was
a
member of
the independent Jason group that
advises the US
government
on defence;
his college lecture series,
Physics for Future
Presidents
was voted
best class on campus, went
stratospheric on YouTube and,
in
2009, was
turned into a
bestseller.
For the
past year, Muller has kept a low
profile, working quietly
on
a new
project with a team of academics
hand-picked for their
skills.
They meet
on campus regularly, to check
progress, thrash out
problems
and hunt
for oversights that might
undermine their work. And for
good
reason.
When Muller and his team go
public with their findings in
a
few weeks,
they will be muscling in on the
ugliest and most
hard-fought
debate of modern
times.
Muller
calls his latest obsession the
Berkeley Earth project. The
aim
is so
simple that the complexity and
magnitude of the undertaking
is
easy to
miss. Starting from scratch, with
new computer tools and
more
data than
has ever been used, they will
arrive at an
independent
assessment
of global warming. The team will
also make every piece
of
data it
uses - 1.6bn data points - freely
available on a website.
It
will post
its workings alongside, including
full information on
how
more than
100 years of data from thousands
of instruments around
the
world are
stitched together to give a
historic record of the
planet's
temperature.
Muller is
fed up with the politicised row
that all too often
engulfs
climate
science. By laying all its data
and workings out in the
open,
where they
can be checked and challenged by
anyone, the Berkeley
team
hopes to
achieve something remarkable: a
broader consensus on
global
warming. In
no other field would Muller's
dream seem so ambitious,
or
perhaps, so
naive.
"We are
bringing the spirit of science
back to a subject that
has
become too
argumentative and too
contentious," Muller says, over
a
cup of tea.
"We are an independent,
non-political,
non-partisan
group. We
will gather the data, do the
analysis, present the
results
and make
all of it available. There will
be no spin, whatever
we
find." Why
does Muller feel compelled to
shake up the world of
climate
change? "We are doing this
because it is the most
important
project in
the world today. Nothing else
comes close," he says.
Muller is
moving into crowded territory
with sharp elbows. There
are
already
three heavyweight groups that
could be considered
the
official
keepers of the world's climate
data. Each publishes its
own
figures
that feed into the UN's
Intergovernmental Panel on
Climate
Change.
Nasa's Goddard Institute for
Space Studies in New York
City
produces a
rolling estimate of the world's
warming. A separate
assessment
comes from another US agency, the
National Oceanic and
Atmospheric
Administration (Noaa). The third
group is based in the
UK
and led by
the Met Office. They all take
readings from
instruments
around the
world to come up with a rolling
record of the Earth's
mean
surface
temperature. The numbers differ
because each group uses
its
own dataset
and does its own analysis, but
they show a similar
trend.
Since
pre-industrial times, all point
to a warming of around
0.75C.
You might
think three groups was enough,
but Muller rolls out a
list
of
shortcomings, some real, some
perceived, that he suspects
might
undermine
public confidence in global
warming records. For a
start,
he says,
warming trends are not based on
all the available
temperature
records. The data that is used is
filtered and might not
be as
representative as it could be. He
also cites a poor history
of
transparency
in climate science, though others
argue many climate
records and
the tools to analyse them have
been public for years.
Then there
is the fiasco of 2009 that saw
roughly 1,000 emails from
a
server at
the University of East Anglia's
Climatic Research Unit
(CRU) find
their way on to the internet. The
fuss over the
messages,
inevitably
dubbed Climategate, gave Muller's
nascent project added
impetus.
Climate sceptics had already
attacked James Hansen, head
of
the Nasa
group, for making political
statements on climate
change
while
maintaining his role as an
objective scientist. The
Climategate
emails
fuelled their protests. "With
CRU's credibility undergoing
a
severe
test, it was all the more
important to have a new team
jump
in, do the
analysis fresh and address all of
the legitimate issues
raised by
sceptics," says
Muller.
This latest
point is where Muller faces his
most delicate
challenge.
To concede
that climate sceptics raise fair
criticisms means
acknowledging
that scientists and government
agencies have got
things
wrong, or
at least could do better. But the
debate around global
warming is
so highly charged that open
discussion, which
science
requires,
can be difficult to hold in
public. At worst,
criticising
poor
climate science can be taken as
an attack on science itself,
a
knee-jerk
reaction that has unhealthy
consequences. "Scientists
will
jump to the
defence of alarmists because they
don't recognise that
the
alarmists are exaggerating,"
Muller says.
The
Berkeley Earth project came
together more than a year ago,
when
Muller rang
David Brillinger, a statistics
professor at Berkeley
and
the man
Nasa called when it wanted
someone to check its
risk
estimates
of space debris smashing into the
International Space
Station. He
wanted Brillinger to oversee
every stage of the
project.
Brillinger
accepted straight away. Since the
first meeting he has
advised the
scientists on how best to analyse
their data and what
pitfalls to
avoid. "You can think of
statisticians as the keepers
of
the
scientific method, " Brillinger
told me. "Can scientists
and
doctors
reasonably draw the conclusions
they are setting down?
That's
what we're
here for."
For the
rest of the team, Muller says he
picked scientists known
for
original
thinking. One is Saul Perlmutter,
the Berkeley physicist
who
found
evidence that the universe is
expanding at an ever faster
rate,
courtesy of
mysterious "dark energy" that
pushes against
gravity.
Another is
Art Rosenfeld, the last student
of the legendary
Manhattan
Project
physicist Enrico Fermi, and
something of a legend himself
in
energy
research. Then there is Robert
Jacobsen, a Berkeley
physicist
who is an
expert on giant datasets; and
Judith Curry, a
climatologist
at Georgia
Institute of Technology, who has
raised concerns over
tribalism
and hubris in climate
science.
Robert
Rohde, a young physicist who left
Berkeley with a PhD
last
year, does
most of the hard work. He has
written software that
trawls
public
databases, themselves the product
of years of
painstaking
work, for
global temperature records. These
are compiled,
de-duplicated
and merged into one huge
historical temperature
record.
The data,
by all accounts, are a mess.
There are 16 separate
datasets
in 14
different formats and they
overlap, but not completely.
Muller
likens
Rohde's achievement to Hercules's
enormous task of
cleaning
the Augean
stables.
The wealth
of data Rohde has collected so
far - and some dates
back
to the
1700s - makes for what Muller
believes is the most
complete
historical
record of land temperatures ever
compiled. It will, of
itself,
Muller claims, be a priceless
resource for anyone who
wishes
to study
climate change. So far, Rohde has
gathered records from
39,340
individual stations
worldwide.
Publishing
an extensive set of temperature
records is the first
goal
of Muller's
project. The second is to turn
this vast haul of data
into an
assessment on global warming.
Here, the Berkeley team
is
going its
own way again. The big three
groups - Nasa, Noaa and
the
Met Office
- work out global warming trends
by placing an
imaginary
grid over
the planet and averaging
temperatures records in
each
square. So
for a given month, all the
records in England and
Wales
might be
averaged out to give one number.
Muller's team will
take
temperature
records from individual stations
and weight them
according
to how reliable they
are.
This is
where the Berkeley group faces
its toughest task by far
and
it will be
judged on how well it deals with
it. There are errors
running
through global warming data that
arise from the simple
fact
that the
global network of temperature
stations was never designed
or
maintained
to monitor climate change. The
network grew in a
piecemeal
fashion,
starting with temperature
stations installed here and
there,
usually to
record local weather.
Among the
trickiest errors to deal with are
so-called systematic
biases,
which skew temperature
measurements in fiendishly
complex
ways.
Stations get moved around,
replaced with newer models,
or
swapped for
instruments that record in
celsius instead of
fahrenheit.
The times
measurements are taken varies,
from say 6am to 9pm.
The
accuracy of
individual stations drift over
time and even changes
in
the
surroundings, such as growing
trees, can shield a station
more
from wind
and sun one year to the next.
Each of these interferes
with
a station's
temperature measurements, perhaps
making it read too
cold, or
too hot. And these errors combine
and build up.
This is the
real mess that will take a
Herculean effort to clean
up.
The
Berkeley Earth team is using
algorithms that
automatically
correct for
some of the errors, a strategy
Muller favours because
it
doesn't
rely on human interference. When
the team publishes its
results,
this is where the scrutiny will
be most intense.
Despite the
scale of the task, and the fact
that world-class
scientific
organisations have been wrestling
with it for decades,
Muller is
convinced his approach will lead
to a better assessment
of
how much
the world is warming. "I've told
the team I don't know
if
global
warming is more or less than we
hear, but I do believe we
can
get a more
precise number, and we can do it
in a way that will
cool
the
arguments over climate change, if
nothing else," says
Muller.
"Science
has its weaknesses and it doesn't
have a stranglehold on
the
truth, but
it has a way of approaching
technical issues that is
a
closer
approximation of truth than any
other method we have."
He will
find out soon enough if his hopes
to forge a true
consensus
on climate
change are misplaced. It might
not be a good sign that
one
prominent
climate sceptic contacted by the
Guardian, Canadian
economist
Ross McKitrick, had never heard
of the project.
Another,
Stephen
McIntyre, whom Muller has
defended on some issues,
hasn't
followed
the project either, but said
"anything that [Muller]
does
will be
well done". Phil Jones at the
University of East Anglia
was
unclear on
the details of the Berkeley
project and didn't
comment.
Elsewhere,
Muller has qualified support from
some of the biggest
names in
the business. At Nasa, Hansen
welcomed the project,
but
warned
against over-emphasising what he
expects to be the
minor
differences
between Berkeley's global warming
assessment and those
from the
other groups. "We have enough
trouble communicating with
the
public
already," Hansen says. At the Met
Office, Peter Stott, head
of
climate
monitoring and attribution, was
in favour of the project
if
it was open
and peer-reviewed.
Peter
Thorne, who left the Met Office's
Hadley Centre last year
to
join the
Co-operative Institute for
Climate and Satellites in
North
Carolina,
is enthusiastic about the
Berkeley project but raises
an
eyebrow at
some of Muller's claims. The
Berkeley group will not
be
the first
to put its data and tools online,
he says. Teams at Nasa
and Noaa
have been doing this for many
years. And while Muller
may
have more
data, they add little real value,
Thorne says. Most are
records
from stations installed from the
1950s onwards, and then
only
in a few
regions, such as North America.
"Do you really need 20
stations in
one region to get a monthly
temperature figure?
The
answer is
no. Supersaturating your coverage
doesn't give you much
more bang
for your buck," he says. They
will, however, help
researchers
spot short-term regional
variations in climate
change,
something
that is likely to be valuable as
climate change takes
hold.
Despite his
reservations, Thorne says climate
science stands to
benefit
from Muller's project. "We need
groups like Berkeley
stepping
up to the
plate and taking this challenge
on, because it's the
only
way we're
going to move forwards. I wish
there were 10 other
groups
doing
this," he says.
For the
time being, Muller's project is
organised under the
auspices
of Novim, a
Santa Barbara-based non-profit
organisation that uses
science to
find answers to the most pressing
issues facing society
and to
publish them "without advocacy or
agenda". Funding has
come
from a
variety of places, including the
Fund for Innovative
Climate
and Energy
Research (funded by Bill Gates),
and the Department of
Energy's
Lawrence Berkeley Lab. One donor
has had some climate
bloggers up
in arms: the man behind the
Charles G Koch
Charitable
Foundation
owns, with his brother David,
Koch Industries, a
company
Greenpeace
called a "kingpin of climate
science denial". On
this
point,
Muller says the project has taken
money from right and
left
alike.
No one who
spoke to the Guardian about the
Berkeley Earth project
believed it
would shake the faith of the
minority who have set
their
minds
against global warming. "As new
kids on the block, I think
they
will be
given a favourable view by
people, but I don't think it
will
fundamentally
change people's minds," says
Thorne. Brillinger has
reservations
too. "There are people you are
never going to change.
They have
their beliefs and they're not
going to back away from
them."
Waking
across the Berkeley campus,
Muller stops outside Sproul
Hall,
where he
was arrested more than 40 years
ago. Today, the
adjoining
plaza is a
designated protest spot, where
student activists gather
to
wave
banners, set up tables and make
speeches on any cause
they
choose.
Does Muller think his latest
project will make any
difference?
"Maybe we'll find out that what
the other groups do is
absolutely
right, but we're doing this in a
new way. If the only
thing we do
is allow a consensus to be
reached as to what is going
on
with global
warming, a true consensus, not
one based on politics,
then it
will be an enormously valuable
achievement
