By Joe Romm on Mar 22, 2011 at 8:06 pm
Bombshell 2: BEST’s Project Chair Richard Muller confirms ClimateProgress reporting, contradicts WattsUpWithThat
The key conclusions from Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature (BEST) project have been made public by its project chair, Richard Muller. In a talk Saturday (near the end), Muller explained that BEST has been analyzing large quantities of data, they have started writing a draft report, and what he can say now is:
- “We are seeing substantial global warming”
- “None of the effects raised by the [skeptics] is going to have anything more than a marginal effect on the amount of global warming.”
None of that should be a surprise (except to a few deniers). If you listen to the entire video (which I don’t recommend without multiple head vises), it’s clear the Muller himself is a volcano of long-debunked denier talking points and misinformation (which I’ll re-debunk later). So when Muller says the data show “substantial global warming” and the effects raised by the skeptics are “marginal,” you know he’s not overstating things.
Now I hadn’t watched that video when climatologist Ken Caldeira emailed me essentially the same exact set of conclusions, which he asked me to post (see Exclusive: Berkeley temperature study results “confirm the reality of global warming and support in all essential respects the historical temperature analyses of the NOAA, NASA, and HadCRU”).
Again, I thought the conclusions were obvious, but I published his email in part because I wanted to smoke out the deniers. A number of climate scientists had told me they believed the deniers were working feverishly to change and/or spin the main results. What I didn’t know — what few people knew — was that the hard-core deniers in fact had unprecedented access to the BEST work-product. That gives the lie to BEST somehow being a transparent effort to work the data independently and restore “credibility” to the global temperature record, something the record didn’t actually need.
My post was far more successful than I ever imagined. The deniers — Steven Mosher and Anthony Watts — went ballistic, since they obviously thought they were going to be able to control how the final product was shaped and spun. As we’ll see, they publicly admitted some astonishing things that truly call into question the objectivity and transparency of BEST WORST [Worst “Objective” Reanalysis of Surface Temperatures]. ….(more).
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