Maybe there is hope for Hank yet.


Richard Muller, Global Warming Skeptic, Now Agrees Climate Change Is Real










WASHINGTON — A prominent physicist and skeptic of global warming spent two years trying to find out if mainstream climate scientists were wrong. In the end, he determined they were right: Temperatures really are rising rapidly.

The study of the world's surface temperatures by Richard Muller was partially bankrolled by a foundation connected to global warming deniers. He pursued long-held skeptic theories in analyzing the data. He was spurred to action because of "Climategate," a British scandal involving hacked emails of scientists.

Yet he found that the land is 1.6 degrees warmer than in the 1950s. Those numbers from Muller, who works at the University of California, Berkeley and Lawrence Berkeley National Lab, match those by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and NASA.

He said he went even further back, studying readings from Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson. His ultimate finding of a warming world, to be presented at a conference Monday, is no different from what mainstream climate scientists have been saying for decades.

What's different, and why everyone from opinion columnists to "The Daily Show" is paying attention is who is behind the study.

One-quarter of the $600,000 to do the research came from the Charles Koch Foundation, whose founder is a major funder of skeptic groups and the tea party. The Koch brothers, Charles and David, run a large privately held company involved in oil and other industries, producing sizable greenhouse gas emissions.

Muller's research team carefully examined two chief criticisms by skeptics. One is that weather stations are unreliable; the other is that cities, which create heat islands, were skewing the temperature analysis.

"The skeptics raised valid points and everybody should have been a skeptic two years ago," Muller said in a telephone interview. "And now we have confidence that the temperature rise that had previously been reported had been done without bias."

Muller said that he came into the study "with a proper skepticism," something scientists "should always have. I was somewhat bothered by the fact that there was not enough skepticism" before.




There is no reason now to be a skeptic about steadily increasing temperatures, Muller wrote recently in The Wall Street Journal's editorial pages, a place friendly to skeptics. Muller did not address in his research the cause of global warming. The overwhelming majority of climate scientists say it's man-made from the burning of fossil fuels such as coal and oil. Nor did his study look at ocean warming, future warming and how much of a threat to mankind climate change might be.

Still, Muller said it makes sense to reduce the carbon dioxide created by fossil fuels.

"Greenhouse gases could have a disastrous impact on the world," he said. Still, he contends that threat is not as proven as the Nobel Prize-winning Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change says it is.

On Monday, Muller was taking his results – four separate papers that are not yet published or peer-reviewed, but will be, he says – to a conference in Santa Fe, N.M., expected to include many prominent skeptics as well as mainstream scientists.

"Of course he'll be welcome," said Petr Chylek of Los Alamos National Lab, a noted skeptic and the conference organizer. "The purpose of our conference is to bring people with different views on climate together, so they can talk and clarify things."

Shawn Lawrence Otto, author of the book "Fool Me Twice" that criticizes science skeptics, said Muller should expect to be harshly treated by global warming deniers. "Now he's considered a traitor. For the skeptic community, this isn't about data or fact. It's about team sports. He's been traded to the Indians. He's playing for the wrong team now."

And that started on Sunday, when a British newspaper said one of Muller's co-authors, Georgia Tech climate scientist Judith Curry, accused Muller of another Climategate-like scandal and trying to "hide the decline" of recent global temperatures.

The Associated Press contacted Curry on Sunday afternoon and she said in an email that Muller and colleagues "are not hiding any data or otherwise engaging in any scientifically questionable practice."

The Muller "results unambiguously show an increase in surface temperature since 1960," Curry wrote Sunday. She said she disagreed with Muller's public relations efforts and some public comments from Muller about there no longer being a need for skepticism.

Muller's study found that skeptics' concerns about poor weather station quality didn't skew the results of his analysis because temperature increases rose similarly in reliable and unreliable weather stations. He also found that while there is an urban heat island effect making cities warmer, rural areas, which are more abundant, are warming, too.

Among many climate scientists, the reaction was somewhat of a yawn.

"After lots of work he found exactly what was already known and accepted in the climate community," said Jerry North, a Texas A&M University atmospheric sciences professor who headed a National Academy of Sciences climate science review in 2006. "I am hoping their study will have a positive impact. But some folks will never change."

Chris Field, a Carnegie Institution scientist who is chief author of an upcoming intergovernmental climate change report, said Muller's study "may help the world's citizens focus less on whether climate change is real and more on smart options for addressing it."

Some of the most noted scientific skeptics are no longer saying the world isn't warming. Instead, they question how much of it is man-made, view it as less a threat and argue it's too expensive to do something about, Otto said.

Skeptical MIT scientist Richard Lindzen said it is a fact and nothing new that global average temperatures have been rising since 1950, as Muller shows. "It's hard to see how any serious scientist (skeptical, denier or believer – frequently depending on the exact question) will view it otherwise," he wrote in an email.

In a brief email statement, the Koch Foundation noted that Muller's team didn't examine ocean temperature or the cause of warming and said it will continue to fund such research. "The project is ongoing and entering peer review, and we're proud to support this strong, transparent research," said foundation spokeswoman Tonya Mullins.

Since Muller is a scientist who relies on facts and logic to come to his conclusions, assuming that his findings will carry over to the right wingers who think global cimate change is a liberal plot to destroy 'Merica is a pretty big assumption...they've already ignored science and logic a few hundred thousand other times, I'm sure they'll continue to do it here.

Fish on...

Todd

Nope, no hope for Hanky. There is no evidence - well other than the best available science by the world's top scientists in more than 40 countries. Read the article Hank. Ignorance is not a virture even if it does make you happy.

The GOP and their supporters are proof that if you form your opinion first (typically for partisan political or religious reasons), and can use Google, you will find something to support your hypothesis...and that means it's "debatable", which means their opinion is valid.

Fish on...

Todd

That's not new...it's in the first article that Dave posted up (besides having been on the news yesterday and today)...

Did you bother reading the article he posted?

Fish on...

Todd

Oh.

Fish on...

Todd

As long as Mr. Hanky can cut-n-paste, he'll continue to claim to form his own thoughts.

If climate change wasn't real we'd live on a pretty boring planet

Biggest pile of money wins!

Place your bets!

Copy & paste is as close to an original thought as Hankster gets.

"The libtards want the world to think that in the last 100 years it has magnified."

Um....record highs and lows, earthquakes, hurricanes and tornadoes. Melting glaciers and ice caps. La Nina and El Nino events are much more common. " in the last 100 years it has magnified."

All true, but why look at facts when one can just have an opinion? I provided an article showing that a leading critic of global warming and a well respected scientist reviewed all the data he could find and had to conclude that warming is real and is accelerating rapidly. But hey that can’t trump an opinion based on the political agenda of the far right.

Is this not the same guy?

This link was in the other thread.....I moved it here because it appears to be a "He said/ Wait, no, She said...." deal. What's up?

Global warming is over, says expert
GLOBAL WARMING IS OVER, SAYS EXPERT



Professors Judith Curry and Richard Muller don’t agree on the same set of results on climate change
Wednesday November 2,2011
By Julie Carpenter Have your say(25)
IT'S one of the hottest feuds in science - climate chance zealots insist that we're still destroying the planet but now another scientist has warned the cast-iron evidence just isn't there.

FOR a minute there it seemed the global warming debate had finally been resolved.

While for years scientists and sceptics have raged against each other on the crucial topic, new research hailed “the most definitive study into temperature data gathered by weather stations over the past half-century” seemed to come to an authoritative conclusion.

Global warming IS real it said, strengthening the need for us all to reduce carbon emissions and boost efforts to try to save the planet.

And this research was headed by a physicist who had previously been a sceptic of global warming and an outspoken critic of the science underpinning it, lending the results even greater credibility.


Global warming has stopped
Prof Judith Curry, a member of Prof Muller’s team


Prof Richard Muller had spent two years trying to discover if the mainstream scientists were wrong but concluded they were right. Temperatures are rising and his results, he concluded, “proved you should not be a sceptic, at least not any longer”. Case closed.

But is it? Not according to Prof Judith Curry, a member of Prof Muller’s team, who claims the same findings have shown that global warming has stopped – plunging the rest of us into a quandary of what and who to believe.

When Prof Curry heard that Prof Muller was saying that the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature (BEST) findings would put an end to climate change scepticism for good she was horrified. “This isn’t the end of scepticism,” she exclaimed.


“To say that is the biggest mistake he has made. When I saw he was saying that I just thought, ‘Oh my God.’”

Prof Muller, of Berkeley University in California, and Prof Curry, who chairs the Department Of Earth And Atmospheric Sciences at America’s Georgia Institute of Technology, were part of the BEST project that carried
out analysis of more than 1.6 billion temperature recordings collected from more than 39,000 weather stations around the world.

Prof Muller appeared on Radio 4’s Today Programme last Friday where he described how BEST’s findings showed that since the Fifties global temperatures had risen by about 1 degree Celsius, a figure which is in line with estimates from Nasa and the Met Office.

When asked whether the rate had stopped over the last 10 years he said they had not. “We see no evidence of it having slowed down,” he replied and a graph issued by the BEST project suggests a continuing and steep increase.

But this last point is one which Prof Curry has furiously rebuttted. In a serious clash of scientific experts Prof Curry has accused Prof Muller of trying to “hide the decline in rates of global warming”.

She says that BEST’s research actually shows that there has been no increase in world temperatures for 13 years.

She has called Prof Muller’s comments “a huge mistake” and has said that she now plans to discuss her future on the project with him. “There is no scientific basis for saying that global warming hasn’t stopped,” she says.

“To say that there is detracts from the credibility of the data, which is very unfortunate.” New research also seems to back up Prof Curry rather than Prof Muller.

A report published by the Global Warming Foundation, which is based on BEST’s findings, includes a graph of world average temperatures over the past 10 years and it is absolutely flat, suggesting that temperatures have remained constant.

This issue is crucial because the levels of carbon dioxide in the air have continued to rise rapidly over the last decade and if temperatures have remained constant during that period it would suggest there is no direct link between carbon gas emissions and global warming.

Previously carbon dioxide emissions – from the burning of fossil fuels and from deforestation – have been considered one of the biggest causes of climate change, the most damaging effects of which are thought to be the melting of the polar ice caps and the rise in sea levels as well as an increase in extreme weather events such as floods and droughts.

“Whatever it is that is going on here it doesn’t look like it’s being dominated by carbon dioxide,” says Prof Curry.

Prof Muller has made it clear that the BEST study was not conducted in order to gauge the causes of global warming, saying the study “made no assessment on how much of this is due to humans and how much is natural”.

He and his scientists – who also included this year’s physics Nobel winner Saul Perlmutter – set out purely to determine once and for all whether climate change had occurred.

The group had been suspicious of previous results which confirmed a rise in global temperatures , believing that their work may have been skewed by the “urban heat island effect” where increasing urbanisation around weather stations was causing the temperature increases recorded over the past 50 years.

But their exhaustive research discovered that the urban heat effect could not explain the global temperature increase of about one degree Celsius since 1950.

IT IS well to point out that Prof Curry is not disputing the one degree Celsius increase. She is disputing Prof Muller’s suggestion that temperatures haven’t levelled off in the last decade.

Indeed she says this global warming standstill since the end of the Nineties – which has been completely unexpected – has wide-reaching consequences for the causes of climate change and has already led many climate scientists to start looking at alternative factors that may have contributed to global warming,

other than carbon gas emissions. In particular she has mentioned the influence of clouds, natural temperature cycles and solar radiation.

What she also seems furious about is the way that Prof Muller went about publishing BEST’s results without consulting her and before a proper peer review could be carried out. “It is not how I would have played it,” she has said. “I was informed only when I got a group email. I think they have made errors and I distance myself from what they did. It would have been smart to consult me.”

This is, you can be sure, not the last we will hear on the debate