Posted on 10/30/2011 4:02:00 PM PDT by Starman417
It was hailed as the scientific study that ended the global warming debate once and for all – the research that, in the words of its director, ‘proved you should not be a sceptic, at least not any longer’.Professor Richard Muller, of Berkeley University in California, and his colleagues from the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperatures project team (BEST) claimed to have shown that the planet has warmed by almost a degree centigrade since 1950 and is warming continually.
Published last week ahead of a major United Nations climate summit in Durban, South Africa, next month, their work was cited around the world as irrefutable evidence that only the most stringent measures to reduce carbon dioxide emissions can save civilisation as we know it.
It was cited uncritically by, among others, reporters and commentators from the BBC, The Independent, The Guardian, The Economist and numerous media outlets in America.
The Washington Post said the BEST study had ‘settled the climate change debate’ and showed that anyone who remained a sceptic was committing a ‘cynical fraud’.
But today The Mail on Sunday can reveal that a leading member of Prof Muller’s team has accused him of trying to mislead the public by hiding the fact that BEST’s research shows global warming has stopped.
Prof Judith Curry, who chairs the Department of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at America’s prestigious Georgia Institute of Technology, said that Prof Muller’s claim that he has proven global warming sceptics wrong was also a ‘huge mistake’, with no scientific basis.
...She said this affair had to be compared to the notorious ‘Climategate’ scandal two years ago.
Like the scientists exposed then by leaked emails from East Anglia University’s Climatic Research Unit, her colleagues from the BEST project seem to be trying to ‘hide the decline’ in rates of global warming.
In fact, Prof Curry said, the project’s research data show there has been no increase in world temperatures since the end of the Nineties – a fact confirmed by a new analysis that The Mail on Sunday has obtained.
‘There is no scientific basis for saying that warming hasn’t stopped,’ she said. ‘To say that there is detracts from the credibility of the data, which is very unfortunate.’
Of course the BEST group put out a graph that hid the fact that warming has stopped:
Stopped in the face of ever increasing evvvvvviiiiiil CO2.
...‘Of course this isn’t the end of scepticism,’ she said. ‘To say that is the biggest mistake he [Prof Muller] has made. When I saw he was saying that I just thought, “Oh my God”.’In fact, she added, in the wake of the unexpected global warming standstill, many climate scientists who had previously rejected sceptics’ arguments were now taking them much more seriously.
They were finally addressing questions such as the influence of clouds, natural temperature cycles and solar radiation – as they should have done, she said, a long time ago.
Yesterday Prof Muller insisted that neither his claims that there has not been a standstill, nor the graph, were misleading because the project had made its raw data available on its website, enabling others to draw their own graphs.
However, he admitted it was true that the BEST data suggested that world temperatures have not risen for about 13 years. But in his view, this might not be ‘statistically significant’, although, he added, it was equally possible that it was – a statement which left other scientists mystified.
‘I am baffled as to what he’s trying to do,’ Prof Curry said.
What he is trying to do is to form the debate. Just as Prof. Hanson before him tried to do. Any claim that "the debate is over" should immediately ring alarm bells. Hell, Muller didn't even consult the co-author on all four papers, Prof Curry, before deciding to release them to the internet instead of allowing the peer review process to carry itself out.
(Excerpt) Read more at floppingaces.net...
As someone else pointed out on another thread, we are still coming out of a very cold period (geologically).
Ergo the temperature is/should be rising, and may do so in jumps and not necessarily at a steady rate.
Second, the more we pave the Earth, the more heat is retained by those surfaces.
I notice none of these current GW scientists has bothered to compare the increase in paved surfaces with the increase in measured temperatures.
..and from a few years ago...
Notice how the article uses a reasonable picture of the "good guy" and a poor one of the "complainer"...:^)
They have not even quantified the amount of heat automobiles give off as they operate their internal combustion engines. They really do not care about the warming. Only care about the crisis and their tyrannical solutions.
That is because the amount of heat from engines is insignificant.
The only way that they get significant warming is to claim that CO2 causes a little warming which then causes a type of cloud increase which triggers a feedback loop that results in significant warming.
All the "proof" is in computer models that cannot be validated, by their very nature.
Yes, there is global warming. Natural fluctuations.
It is NOT anthropogenic.
This is a really big deal. The AGW guys have grossly overreached and misrepresented their own data profoundly, in public, and in a way that can be disproved easily and with easy charts.
Take a look at http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/10/29/uh-oh-it-was-the-best-of-times-it-was-the-worst-of-times/#more-50286 which goes into this scandal in a lot of depth.
We need to be waving our arms and shouting about this because the old media will kill it and the Durbin conference is coming up.
This could be bigger than climategate.
The total energy received by the Earth from the Sun is equivalent to 131,400 billion tons of oil per year.
The total heat output of all of man's works is less than .00008 of the solar input. There is no way that we can measure the temperature that closely. The variability of the clouds on a single day may be more than that. It is less than 1/10,000 of the heat input to the planet.
I believe that to be insignificant in the overall heat budget. Here is where I found the numbers.
http://www.mpoweruk.com/solar_power.htm
This is not to indicate that there is no “heat island” effect in urban centers. That effect is real, but is different from the heat input into the total Earth heat budget, and includes a lot of energy streams going in and out of urban heat islands due to the large presence of so much asphalt and concrete, and so few trees, more than anything else.
Whaaa? Statistically speaking this is a nonsense statement. He is stating the null hypothesis and saying it may not be significant. Statistical significance is to disprove the null hypothesis. Or am I missing something.
The Earth is giving up solar derived energy and only retains a specific amount. Is that net energy retained ? Minus what is given back out to space at night ? Without radiating solar energy back into space in the short term, the Earth would over heat. Without retaining some of the solar energy long term, the Earth would freeze.
I agree however that what we are looking at are the causes of the Urban Heat Island effect and not the causes of Global Climate Change. My guess would be excess heat retention from concrete and excess heat release from burning fossil fuels within the urban areas.
An easy way to measure remove the urban heat island effect would be to only rely on stations that have stayed in relatively undisturbed rural areas and to ignore urban areas altogether. No one seems willing to do that.
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