Muller/BEST analysis confirms climate science

[caraher]

Bad news for deniers:

The head of the Berkeley team, Richard Muller, confirmed at a public talk on Saturday that they have started writing a draft report and based on their preliminary analysis, “We are seeing substantial global warming” and “None of the effects raised by the is going to have anything more than a marginal effect on the amount of global warming.”

This is the effort that took Koch foundation money and had many on the left worried... Muller gave us a sneak peak of the BEST analysis at a conference on sustainable energy just over two weeks ago, and their plot of surface temperatures lay right on top of all the other analyses (NOAA, NASA, Hadley) (with a few wiggles different in the noise, of course).

I think Joe Romm has misread Muller all along. To be sure, Muller has a contrarian streak, and probably gives some of the skeptical arguments more credence than they deserve. But there's also a point to taking those arguments seriously: proving to the honest skeptic that the science is, indeed, correct. And I think that ultimately Muller has been more concerned about making sure the skeptics know they're getting a fair hearing than with keeping the mainstream climate scientists happy.

[whoneedstickets]

1. Even skeptics can be swayed by facts....

Only ideologues and religious zealots are immune to data.

[caraher]

2. True

One real positive that should come of Muller's effort is to smoke out which "skeptics" are really skeptics and which are deniers who will change their stories when things don't turn out their way.