Beperktedijkbewaking schreef op 15 augustus 2022 03:38:
Goed, mensen als gokarm en New dawn, en bijna onze hele reguliere politiek, vol 'wetenschappers' als Jetten (heeft hij enig benul van de fysicus Jan Terlouw, D'66-er?) of meisje Ouwehand (van de heerlijke zure haring?) willen niets van sceptische twijfels weten.
Dan hier het verhaal over de zeer reguliere fysicus Muller, in zijn jonge jaren overigens een progressieve demonstrant in Berkeley, demonstrerend voor 'free speech' (@ratio veert nu vrolijk op) en ondanks zang van Joan Baez belandend "in jail".
www.theguardian.com/science/2011/feb/..."Today, Muller is still on the Berkeley campus, ...., as a professor of physics. ... 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 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. ....
Muller calls his latest obsession the Berkeley Earth project. .... 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. ....
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. "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."
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. ....
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.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. ....
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.
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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.
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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.
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Walking 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."