Koch-Funded Climate Skeptic's Own Data Confirms Warming

[marmar]

Treehugger, via AlterNet:




Koch-Funded Climate Skeptic's Own Data Confirms Warming


Graph via Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature


This week, a climate hearing was held in the US House of Reps. Six 'experts' on climate were brought in, but only three were scientists. And it turns out that one of the GOP's star witnesses -- a scientist who's been vocal in his skepticism of global temperature records, the physicist Richard Muller, of University of California, Berkeley, didn't quite help them disprove climate change. Quite the opposite, in fact.

GOOD reports on what's got to be my favorite anecdote from the climate hearings. But first, some background:

(Richard) Muller has been working on an independent project to better estimate the planet's surface temperatures over time. Because he is willing to say publicly that he has some doubts about the accuracy of the temperature stations that most climate models are based on, he has been embraced by the science denying crowd. A Koch brothers charity, for example, has donated nearly 25 percent of the financial support provided to Muller's project.

Skeptics of climate science have been licking their lips waiting for his latest research, which they hoped would undermine the data behind basic theories of anthropogenic climate change. At the hearing today, however, Muller threw them for a loop with this graph ...

That's the one above.

As you can see -- and more importantly, as Muller himself has come to believe -- the established data collected by temperature stations around the world are accurate. Muller's independent work confirms that the data on which the majority of the best climate models rely upon is actually quite good.

Which is why it must have pissed off the GOP Reps, who were counting on him to offer testimony skeptical of climate change, when he announced the following: "We see a global warming trend that is very similar to that previously reported by the other groups. The world temperature data has sufficient integrity to be used to determine global temperature trends." ...........(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.alternet.org/newsandviews/article/546941/koch-funded_climate_skeptic%27s_own_data_confirms_warming/

[Igel]

1. Why read a pre-digested report when the actual report is available?

In fact, your link leads to the report it's based on.

http://www.berkeleyearth.org/Resources/Muller_Testimony_31_March_2011

It says both less and more than what the Alternet piece says. This is fairly common with the Alternet articles I've seen--the goal determines what data are real and which are to be eschewed.

What goes to the core of the quibbles between AGW and anti-AGW folk is this:
"Why such close agreement between our uncorrected data and their adjusted data? One
possibility is that the systematic corrections applied by the other groups are small. We
don’t yet know." After all, the complaint isn't that the data show X or Y, but that data were adjusted or selected to support preconceived outcomes.

At the same time, the Berkeley group says their work is preliminary and partial. Their numbers leave no other conclusion. That they've accounted for 2% of their data stations probably doesn't matter; it's a large set of stations and even 2% with a random sample should be fairly close to accurate. It doesn't mean that there aren't biases introduced into the data, which is the other quibble.

The other relevant link is http://www.berkeleyearth.org/Resources/Berkeley_Earth_Summary.pdf . Of note is that a second issue that anti-AGW folk have is the use a single recording station to account for a rather large territory. (In some cases the problem is real; in other cases, the territory isn't as large as the Mercator projection makes it appear.)

[intaglio]

2. Oh whoops, the Koch-amamie brothers hired a real scientist

What a pity science isn't done the same way as business :sarcasm:

or to put it another way ROFLMAO