Political Animal
Blog
I’ve been meaning all week to mention the climate science research from Richard Muller, which has generated as much attention as the trumped-up “Climategate” nonsense, but which deserves far more.
The “Climategate” story, you’ll recall, relied on stolen emails to allege that climate scientists fudged research to produce results pointing to global warming. Several international investigations followed, and all found the charges baseless.
But the resolution of the so-called “controversy” wasn’t nearly as entertaining as Muller’s research, which looked into the same data that the right alleged had been manipulated.
Back in 2010, Richard Muller, a Berkeley physicist and self-proclaimed climate skeptic, decided to launch the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature (BEST) project to review the temperature data that underpinned global-warming claims. […]
Muller’s stated aims were simple. He and his team would scour and re-analyze the climate data, putting all their calculations and methods online. Skeptics cheered the effort. “I’m prepared to accept whatever result they produce, even if it proves my premise wrong,” wrote Anthony Watts, a blogger who has criticized the quality of the weather stations in the United Statse that provide temperature data. The Charles G. Koch Foundation even gave Muller’s project $150,000 — and the Koch brothers, recall, are hardly fans of mainstream climate science.
I’m going to go out on a limb here and guess that the Koch brothers funded the research because they thought they were buying proof that climate change is a fraud.
Except, they ended up financing the opposite. Muller and his team conducted a thorough review of all of the available information and discovered — wouldn’t you know it — that the scientific consensus is accurate. “Global warming,” Muller concluded, “is real.”
Remember, this research intended to prove the opposite. Muller and his team even took the most common arguments raised by climate deniers, putting them to the test to see if skeptics’ claims had merit.
But they still found that the scientists were right and the skeptics were wrong. “Our biggest surprise was that the new results agreed so closely with the warming values published previously by other teams in the US and the UK,” Muller and his team said.
The right, not surprisingly, isn’t pleased, especially after so many conservatives agreed to accept the results of Muller’s research.
But reality is stubborn, and doesn’t much care about the right’s preferences.
Facebook
Twitter
c u n d gulag on October 29, 2011 10:21 AM:
Koch Brothers:
"He said WHAT?
If he's drunk, sober him up, tell him to try again.
And if he's sober, just shoot the SOB!
Jesus, what's this country coming to? You can't even pay for good lackey's anymore!"
Oh my on October 29, 2011 10:25 AM:
The right, not surprisingly, isn't pleased, especially after so many conservatives agreed to accept the results of Muller's research.
That's no better than a 2 year old's promise. These people have a conviction born of a religious fervor, and only death can cure them of it now.
Lotharsson on October 29, 2011 10:25 AM:
And predictably Anthony Watts is not accepting results, instead branding the pre-publication paper as fatally flawed, and whining that one shouldn't attract press attention before peer review is completed. That's pretty rich, given that it's rather common for him to promote papers (and other "works") that haven't made it through peer review yet.
Other denialists are now laughably attempting to shift the goalposts by claiming that the fact that it's warming was never in dispute; only how much of it is due to humans.
BEST is also covered by Tamino (including follow-on posts) and at Deltoid, amongst others.
berttheclock on October 29, 2011 10:28 AM:
So, all I have to do is to keep watching the scrolls of this at FOX News? I can barely wait until "Fox and Friends" spends hours deciphering the meaning of this report.
Geez, the major papers must be ordering thousands of gallons of black ink for their Extra Extra additions.
stormskies on October 29, 2011 10:33 AM:
Yep, and we can all wait for Senator Inofe from the blisteringly stupid state of Oklahoma to hold a press conference and admit that he has been wrong ...
Anonymous on October 29, 2011 10:33 AM:
Although it's possible that the Kochs' are kind of stupid, they most likely aren't, at least in the sense that they manage to run their businesses without falling prey to a lot of irrational beliefs. Yet, if they sincerely believed that an honest account of climate change would come out in their favor, they are deluded. I can see why the Kochs want to spread disinformation about global warming - that's not irrational for them, even though it is immoral. But, if they truly believed that the whole thing is a crock they have a real problem separating convenient fantasy from inconvenient, well let's say, truth, they simply do not know how to critically evaluate information. I guess the bottom line is that we knew they were corrupt, but it's still surprising that they are also dumb.
hells littlest angel on October 29, 2011 10:37 AM:
No doubt Muller is being Photoshopped out of every picture he's ever appeared in in any Koch Industries publications.
SYSPROG on October 29, 2011 10:44 AM:
What selfish bastards. They are willing to denigrate true FACTS because after all, they'll be dead so who cares if the country goes down the tubes. 'Children and grandchildren' indeed.
Texas Aggie on October 29, 2011 10:46 AM:
This is what happens when someone is more dedicated to truth than to a particular position. It happened in Dover, PA, when the creationists thought that having a right wing judge assured them of a favorable decision, but the judge happened to believe in facts and integrity more than faith based dogma.
Rabbler on October 29, 2011 10:48 AM:
Hasn't the majority of the right conceded that the Earth is warming for several years now?
worcestergirl on October 29, 2011 10:59 AM:
In today's Wapo column, he rues that Romney is like Dukakis, another Massachusetts technocrat that relies on "data".
Yes, he puts "data" in quotes, like there is really no such thing. And Will is considered one of the "sensible" conservatives.
Yes, Virginia, the Republican party has officially jumped the shark.
trex on October 29, 2011 11:06 AM:
Hasn't the majority of the right conceded that the Earth is warming for several years now?
No.
martin on October 29, 2011 11:18 AM:
Proving, once again, that reality has a liberal bias.
sick -n-effin-tired on October 29, 2011 11:23 AM:
What berttheclock said - soon to be on page c-13 below the 2 for one tire ads. MSM not so much, you know yesterdays news and it doesn't play to their narrative.
Earth Flat?
We present two opposing sides , you decide.
We can't possibly have a conservative side agree with a crazy LIBRUL point of view, the talking heads won't be able to argue.
Peter C on October 29, 2011 11:25 AM:
The Republicans don't want scientists - they want sycophants. My favorite scene from the live-action 101 Dalmations:
Frederick: I thought we liked stripes this year.
Cruella De Vil: What kind of sycophant are you?
Frederick: Uh... what kind of sycophant would you like me to be?
Hedda Peraz on October 29, 2011 11:27 AM:
Have any of you Northeast Liberals looked out the window this morning?
Peter C on October 29, 2011 11:30 AM:
'Sycophant' is a sophisticated word. When sophistication is not desired, use 'lickspittle'.
emjayay on October 29, 2011 11:42 AM:
I get "Hedda Lettuce" (well known NYC drag queen) but I was just gonna say I don't get "Hedda Peraz." Then I said it one more time. Oh.
yumi on October 29, 2011 11:47 AM:
Jon Stewart mentioned this also, about lack of this report after media made a big deal out of climate gate.
why aren't ABC, NBC or CNN making a lot of noise about this?
it's actually kind of the news people love to hear, i think.
"the Koch brothers' inherited money accidently prove what they were trying to deny to the public".
we want an apology!
a few years of set back in environmental management actually cost a lot of money to everyone in the world.
troglodyte on October 29, 2011 12:02 PM:
Dear Hedda,
The connection between winter storminess and the loss of Arctic Sea ice in late summer has been discussed by climate scientists for the last several years. The connection seems a paradox, but the weather models bear it out. Before 2000, the solid ice cover in the arctic kept the far north so cold that most of its cold air remained up by Santa's Village. With heat now coming out of the Arctic Sea for as long as it takes for the surface to re-freeze, surface pressures are lower and the barriers to storm circulation are weaker. And then the US Northeast gets more storms. Last winter the last big snowstorm to hit the NYC region occurred at the end of January, right when the last of the Arctic froze over.
Francis, J.A., W. Chan, D.J. Leathers, J.R. Miller, and D.E. Veron (2009): Winter Northern Hemisphere weather patterns remember summer Arctic sea-ice extent. Geophys. Res. Lett., 36, L07503, doi:10.1029/2009GL037274.
Honda, M., J. Inoue, and S. Yamane (2009): Influence of low Arctic sea-ice minima on anomalously cold Eurasian winters. Geophys. Res. Lett., 36, L08707, doi:10.1029/2008GL037079.
Overland, J.E., and M. Wang (2010): Large-scale atmospheric circulation changes associated with the recent loss of Arctic sea ice. Tellus, 62A, 1–9.
Petoukhov, V., and V. Semenov (2010): A link between reduced Barents-Kara sea ice and cold winter extremes over northern continents. J. Geophys. Res.-Atmos., ISSN 0148-0227.
Steve P on October 29, 2011 12:02 PM:
Thank God the McRib is back to save us all.
http://mediamatters.org/blog/201110270005
And who knew that Nathan Thurm had a daughter?
http://www.thedailyshow.com/watch/wed-october-26-2011/weathering-fights---science---what-s-it-up-to-
zandru on October 29, 2011 12:52 PM:
Dear Troglodyte
You didn't get it either. Say it again: "Hedda Peraz" "Heada Perazz" "Head Up ..."
You know - kind of like "RepublicanPointOfView". Satire. HUMOR.
Geeze, maybe the reactionary right is correct when they insist that lefties have no sense of humor...
troglodyte on October 29, 2011 1:22 PM:
Dear Zandru,
Its OK, I got the Hedda pun. However, the eastern snowstorm meme will come up again and again with the real trolls, if the connection between an ice-free Arctic and winter storminess works its magic again this year. For all the snow and cold that the US Northeast got last winter, the global-average temperature stayed warm.
MsJoanne on October 29, 2011 1:26 PM:
Sycophants? More like Psychophants.
exlibra on October 29, 2011 2:27 PM:
Other denialists are now laughably attempting to shift the goalposts by claiming that the fact that it's warming was never in dispute; only how much of it is due to humans. -- Lotharsson, @10:25
Also (too) they say it's cyclical and we haven't been measuring it long enough to be sure and act on it. I've heard a "pro-oiler" say that there were vineyards in England in Roman times, proving that it had been as warm or warmer then. The vineyards got wiped out by the Little Ice Age in the Middle Ages. All cyclical, so we shouldn't do anything, especially anything expensive, to counteract it. It'll right itself up, eventually.
CK MacLeod on October 29, 2011 2:29 PM:
I guess Muller deserves it a little for ever getting in bed, or part of the way in bed, with the Kochs, but, as "self-proclaimed climate skeptics" go, he was never what that term might lead you to believe. I wonder if he ever really used it to describe himself, but, no matter, if you read his excellent book Physics for Future Presidents, you'll see that he was skeptical of some of the scientifically unsupported, or weakly supported, claims of some "Global Warming" activists. He virtually predicted that something like "Climate-Gate" and the "Hockey Stick" doubts would occur, but he didn't cast doubted on the science of anthropogenic warming. He simply pointed out that going beyond the science risked having the entire case undermined. He also noted that other macro-ecological problems, such as the effects of carbon capture on the ocean's PH, might have even more devastating and far-reaching effects than warming, but that focus on temperature might - again MIGHT - distort the needed discussion.
It's actually to the credit of the Kochs that they would fund an authentic scientist of, as we can see, great integrity - or maybe they never read his work.
Tom Hamill on October 29, 2011 2:41 PM:
I hope folks recognize that climate scientists base their conclusions on climate change on a lot more than a reconstruction of the temperature record, as in the BEST analysis. There's a lot more supporting evidence, such as (a) the correlation between the earth's temperature and greenhouse gas concentration in the past; (b) rather simple 1-dimensional models of the radiative balance of the atmosphere show that if you increase concentration of greenhouse gases, it gets warmer (and those effects are greatly multiplied when water vapor feedback is included). (c) the ability of current generation climate models to do a decent job, when including volcanic aerosol forcing, to reproduce the trends in global warming in the 20th century, and (d) those same models, when run for the 21st century, showing massive warming under most emissions scenarios, with more warming noted in the more recent simulations with improved models than in past simulations.
There's a LOT we don't yet know about climate change, however. There's no consensus on regional effects, e.g., whether the US west coast will warm more than the central US or eastern US. The jury is still out on whether tornadoes and hurricanes and winter storms will increase in frequency and/or destructive potential. We know (thanks to my colleagues at NOAA) that if you don't model El Nino well, you won't be able to predict mid-latitude variations in climate well (and we don't yet predict El Nino variability well in climate models).
We shouldn't make the mistake of over-interpreting one piece of evidence, the time series of global temperatures from the recent past. We should consider all the evidence holistically (and it supports global warming in all cases) and work on understanding the things we don't know. There's still a lot to work on!
Tom Hamill
(NOAA, though these comments should be interpreted as my own understanding and not NOAA policy).
John on October 29, 2011 4:49 PM:
Minor quibble:
"Remember, this research intended to prove the opposite."
Although Muller may have been skeptical of AGW before running the analysis he is a scientist which means performing an unbiased analysis not intended to prove anything but to reveal reality, as best as it can be perceived.
Lightning Joe on October 29, 2011 7:00 PM:
Note that the Koch's "hero" was a scientist NOT affiliated with the science of Climate Studies. This scientist (thank god) WAS in fact of a truly scientific frame of mind, but ask yourself: what was the issue being evaluated, here?
Wasn't it in fact the very "question" that the Reich has been trying to raise in the American mind -- the idea that Climate Science is somehow culpable, that it responds to forces NOT scientific, NOT data-driven, in coming up with it's conclusions and recommendations?
They were in fact trying to use this "issue" to increase the public's scepticism of Climate Scientists in particular. NOT all scientists, note: their odum did not extend to Dr. Muller, the physicist, did it?
They were forced to go outside of the science to find criticism of it, just as they do in cases of science vs. religion. But in this case, the scientist they picked as their instrument proved to be (oh, horrors!) responsible as a scientist first, before he was respons"ive" as a tool of the Koch's.
And in being responsible, Dr. Muller has in effect AFFIRMED the ongoing responsibility of Climate Scientists through this whole sad mess. Now the Reich have no excuse for their disbelief of either Climate Science, or science in general.
They did it to themselves...
Shawn on October 29, 2011 7:19 PM:
Funny thing...search on foxnews.com returns:
Your Search for "Richard Muller" did not return any results.
Please try the following:
Check your spelling
Try more general words
Try using acronyms or using different words
Try using fewer words. Your search might be too specific.
MF J on October 30, 2011 12:03 AM:
“Our biggest surprise was that the new results agreed so closely with the warming values published previously by other teams in the US and the UK,” Muller and his team said."
It is a "surprise" that the conclusions reached by one group and corroborated by others with expertise in the field replicate?!?!?! Proof that even Ph.D. Physicists have their heads up their asses sometimes.
PeakVT on October 30, 2011 12:05 AM:
@Shawn - awesome catch.
I took some screenshots and I will blog about them later.
Dan B on October 30, 2011 10:40 AM:
The problem isn't that Climate Change isn't "real". The problem is, "what do we do about it?" Or more specifically, "what increases the net amount of human good?"
To a first approximation,
carbon emissions is created by human energy usage,
which is caused by human economic activity,
which is massively good for humanity.
If dealing with global warming means we need to halt human economic activity, then we're better off just living with it. Further, as far as I can tell the green movement doesn't think GW is a serious problem. If they have to chose between dealing with GW and opposing hydro or nuclear power, they always choose the later.
When the Green movement finally says "the world is in danger, we need to sacrifice some fish", then we'll know they're serious. Saying "the world is in danger, but the fish are more important still" doesn't convince.
Jeff on October 31, 2011 3:42 AM:
"Woe unto them that frameth mischief by a law." Hey, Northeast, keep passing laws that anger God and He just might send you more than flooding, or an earthquake, or record snow. God has a few "rights" in case you have forgotten!
SecularAnimist on October 31, 2011 11:28 AM:
Dan B wrote: "If dealing with global warming means we need to halt human economic activity ..."
Dealing with global warming means no such thing. You are spouting Koch-funded bullshit talking points -- the same, exact, verbatim, copied-and-pasted bullshit talking points with which you pollute a number of blogs whenever the subject of global warming is discussed.
Solar energy is the fastest growing industry in America today, and the fastest growing source of new electricity generation in the world. Renewable energy will be the foundation of the New Industrial Revolution of the 21st Century -- which will of course result in the transfer of trillions of dollars in wealth from the fossil fuel corporations to other sectors of the industrial economy.
Which is exactly why the Koch Brothers and the other fossil fuel corporate oligarchs are scared to death of renewable energy, and exactly why gullible brainwashed Ditto-Heads like you spout idiotic nonsense on blogs.
jaspk on October 31, 2011 10:57 PM:
Muller is at best a publicity-seeking egoist and, at worst, a charlatan. A competent, objective scientist does not go to the press and give interviews on assumed results before they have even gone through an iota of peer review. Except for his own assertion, I find no evidence that he was ever a skeptic and his behavior belies it. To call such a complex issue "settled" is both unscientific and irresponsible. But we have heard that often before. When other equally or better qualified scientists question his behavior and conclusions they are dismissed only as deniers rather than granted the courtesy that they might be proved right, particularly when some have pointed out that his evidence is flawed and not truthfully presented. Of course, Muller's conclusions have been widely reported by the media as "the final nail". If he is ultimately shown, after a truly independent peer review, to be wrong will the media be equally interested? I think not.
d brown on October 31, 2011 11:38 PM:
The great tragedy of Science – the slaying of a beautiful hypothesis by an ugly fact. T.H. Huxley (1825-1895)
Reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled.—Richard Feynman
Dan B on November 01, 2011 5:00 AM:
"...you pollute a number of blogs..."
I think you’re confusing me with someone else. Let me guess, several people point out that the emperor has no clothes?
"Dealing with global warming means no such thing."
:Chuckle: You really believe that now don’t you? So tell me… how much *do* we need to reduce our carbon emissions to actually fix the problem? The basic answer is enough so that we’re talking about going back to before the industrial revolution. Granted, part of the issue is there’s a lot more people than back then. But the larger problem is energy goes hand in hand with economic activity.
This is why the political establishment isn’t willing to do more than make empty promises which future politicians will ignore. You're being mugged by reality, not the oil companies.
“Solar energy is the fastest growing industry in America today, and the fastest growing source of new electricity generation in the world”
Translation: Solar energy is a massive government boondoggle.
“Renewable energy will be the foundation of the New Industrial Revolution of the 21st Century …”
I'm sorry your faith isn't backed up by the facts, but separation of church and state means we shouldn't be spending my tax dollars on your religion.
“Which is exactly why the Koch Brothers and the other fossil fuel corporate oligarchs are scared to death of renewable energy, and exactly why gullible brainwashed Ditto-Heads like you spout idiotic nonsense on blogs.”
All of the rhetoric and name calling in the world doesn’t change that your religion needs massive government support and mandates. Get rid of those and solar disappears from the market.