Global Warming Skeptics Take a Nasty Punch

Earth Surface Temperature analyzed from 32,000 worldwide collection sites

By Dave Kent

I'll start by admitting that, before this week, I'd never heard of Physics Professor Richard Muller of Berkeley.  But I decided to look into his background when the New York Times and the notoriously conservative Wall Street Journal Opinion Page each featured articles describing his new climate change study this week (the WSJ article is authored by Muller).

I found that Muller is a much respected scientist, an extremely independent thinker and that he's been a leading Global Warming Skeptic.  To characterize Muller's brand of skepticism, I'll describe one of the questions that he's posed in recent years:

Apparently, there's been controversy over the placement and quality of observation sites used to collect world temperature data.  The primary criticism has been that many of the sites are located in urban areas where sensors are surrounded by ever growing amounts of pavement, building materials and other heat sources.  The argument goes this way:  "The growth of urban heat sources near collection stations, not general global warming, could be causing the rise in recorded temperature over time".

As a result of this skepticism, Muller launched a new project in 2010 called the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature project  to analyze the data from 32,000 worldwide collection sites.  While the methods used in this project are highly technical and beyond this writer to describe, the response of the scientific community seems to be that Muller's group has taken a solid new approach to analyzing land temperature data.

And what are Muller's results?  To the surprise of nearly everyone, Muller states that the world's temperature really has been risen rapidly in recent decades.  Here are a few quotes from Muller's WSJ article:

• When we began our study, we felt that skeptics had raised legitimate issues, and we didn't know what we'd find.
• Our results turned out to be close to those published by prior groups. We think that means that those groups had truly been very careful in their work, despite their inability to convince some skeptics of that. They managed to avoid bias in their data selection, homogenization and other corrections.
• Global warming is real. Perhaps our results will help cool this portion of the climate debate.

By the way, this opinion appears to have come as quite a shock to House Republicans who recently called Muller to testify before them on Global Warming.  It seems that this was decidedly not what they hoped to hear from a previously dependable Global Warming skeptic.

Muller has submitted four papers for peer review.  He has also published a great deal of information on his methods and assumptions online for other researchers to review in hopes of achieving unprecedented transparency.

To the Global Warming Deniers out there:  While the jury will be out until peer review is complete, this still looks like a tough one for you.  One of the very best of your own has flown the coop!  Muller's own words will serve as a fitting conclusion here:

"Global warming is real".

Dave Kent is a resident of Falmouth who has been deeply involved in the Cape Wind debate for several years.  While he has no professional experience in the energy industry, he has performed a great deal of research on Cape Wind, the New England grid/power market, and renewable energy and has had numerous letters printed on those subjects in local newspapers.  His goal in this blog is to facilitate civil, balanced and detailed discussion of Cape Wind.  He hopes to attract the opinions of professionals from the energy industry. Read his other columns here.