[Vision2020] Doubters Find Signs of Global Warming

[Tom Hansen]

Courtesy of today's (April 6, 2011) Spokesman-Review.

-------------------------------------------------------

Doubters find signs of global warming
Review in early stage, says scientist
Margot Roosevelt Los Angeles Times

LOS ANGELES – A team of physicists and statisticians that set out to
challenge the scientific consensus on global warming is finding that its
data-crunching effort is producing results nearly identical to those
underlying the prevailing view.

The Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature project at the University of
California, Berkeley, was launched by physics professor Richard Muller, a
longtime critic of government-led climate studies, to address what he
called “the legitimate concerns” of skeptics who believe global warming is
exaggerated.

But Muller unexpectedly told a congressional hearing last week that the
work of the three principal groups that have analyzed the temperature
trends underlying climate science is “excellent. 
 We see a global warming
trend that is very similar to that previously reported by the other
groups.”

The hearing was called by GOP leaders of the House Science and Technology
committee, who have expressed doubts about the integrity of climate
science. It was one of several inquiries in recent weeks as the
Environmental Protection Agency’s efforts to curb planet-heating emissions
from industrial plants and motor vehicles have come under attack in
Congress.

Muller said his group was surprised by its findings, but he cautioned that
the initial assessment is based on only 2 percent of the 1.6 billion
measurements that will eventually be examined.

The Berkeley project’s biggest private backer, at $150,000, is the Charles
G. Koch Charitable Foundation. Oil billionaires Charles and David Koch are
the nation’s most prominent funders of efforts to prevent curbs on the
burning of fossil fuels, the largest contributor to planet-warming
greenhouse gases.

The $620,000 project is also partly funded by the federal Lawrence
Berkeley National Laboratory, where Muller is a senior scientist. Muller
said the Koch foundation and other contributors will have no influence
over the results, which he plans to submit to peer-reviewed scientific
journals.

Ken Caldeira, an atmospheric scientist at the Carnegie Institution for
Science, which contributed some funding to the Berkeley effort, said
Muller’s statement to Congress was “honorable” in recognizing that
“previous temperature reconstructions basically got it right. 

Willingness to revise views in the face of empirical data is the hallmark
of the good scientific process.”

But conservative critics who had expected Muller’s group to demonstrate a
bias among climate scientists reacted with disappointment.

Anthony Watts, a former TV weatherman who runs the skeptic blog
WattsUpWithThat.com, wrote that the Berkeley group is releasing results
that are not “fully working and debugged yet. 
 But, post normal science
political theater is like that.”

-------------------------------------------------------

Seeya round town, Moscow.

Tom Hansen
Moscow, Idaho

"The Pessimist complains about the wind, the Optimist expects it to change
and the Realist adjusts his sails."

- Unknown