Sunday, April 03, 2011

Sceptical Scientist Confirms Climate Change is Real, Climate Deniers Go Mental

I've been a bit busy of late and so not been able to blog as much as I'd like here. However this news was just too fun to miss! The background to the story is that a group of independent climate sceptics embarked on a project called 'Berkeley Earth' to re-analyse all of the temperature data so provide conclusive proof either way of global warming. The project lead, a physicist Dr. Muller, has in the past made sceptical noises about climate change and the temperature data so naturally the deniers liked him and were supportive of his work. Here's what popular deniliart climate blogger Anthony Watts had to say:

And, I’m prepared to accept whatever result they produce, even if it proves my premise wrong. I’m taking this bold step because the method has promise. So let’s not pay attention to the little yippers who want to tear it down before they even see the results. I haven’t seen the global result, nobody has, not even the home team, but the method isn’t the madness that we’ve seen from NOAA, NCDC, GISS, and CRU, and, there aren’t any monetary strings attached to the result that I can tell. If the project was terminated tomorrow, nobody loses jobs, no large government programs get shut down, and no dependent programs crash either.

He even provided them with data from his own non-peer reviewed analysis of surface temperature. Other deniers offer support too. The denier funding oil-magnate, Koch, threw them cash for the project (but so did climate realists funding groups too). Then the denier politicians invited Dr. Muller to testify before congress. It was all looking sweeeeeeeet. Problem was, this is what Muller said at the hearings:

"The Berkeley Earth agreement with the prior analysis surprised us, since our preliminary results don't yet address many of the known biases. When they do, it is possible that the corrections could bring our agreement into disagreement."

Yes, the results they prodiced agreed with the results climate sciencets prodiced. There earth is warming. Here's what it looks like:



Ooops for denialists! So how did Watts respond to the confirmation of climate change? Did he accept whatever result they produced, even if it proved his premise wrong? Did he fuck!

With his testimony, Dr. Muller has totally destroyed any credibility he might have had with me.

Denial in a nutshell! (Also see here, here and here) Now the wolves of climate denial have rounded on Dr. Muller as they mount 'Operation Shoot the Messenger'.