Compelling evidence that global warming is real

Muller and his colleagues looked at five times as many temperature readings as did other researchers, a total of 1.6 billion records, and now have put that merged database online

It is the know-nothing politicians — not scientists — who are committing an unforgivable fraud

Chilling news for climate sceptics, The Age, Eugene Robinson, October 28, 2011 Research by a former poster boy for doubters makes it much harder to deny warming.

FOR the clueless or cynical diehards who deny global warming, it’s getting awfully cold out there. The latest icy blast of reality comes from an eminent scientist whom climate-change sceptics once lauded as one of their own.

Richard Muller, a respected physicist at the University of California, Berkeley, used to dismiss alarming climate research as “polluted by political and activist frenzy’’. Frustrated at what he considered shoddy science, Muller launched his own comprehensive study to set the record straight.

Instead, the record set him straight.

“Global warming is real,” he wrote last week in The Wall Street Journal.

Texas Governor Rick Perry and his rivals for the Republican presidential candidacy Herman Cain, Michele Bachmann and the rest of the neo-Luddites who are turning the Grand Ole Party into the anti-science party should pay attention.

“When we began our study, we felt that sceptics had raised legitimate issues, and we didn’t know what we’d find,” Muller wrote. “Our results turned out to be close to those published by prior groups. We think that means that those groups had truly been careful in their work, despite their inability to convince some sceptics of that.”
In other words, the deniers’ claims about the alleged sloppiness or fraudulence of climate science are wrong. Muller’s team, the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature project, rigorously explored the specific objections raised by sceptics — and found them groundless.

He and his fellow researchers examined a huge data set of observed temperatures from monitoring stations around the world and concluded the average land temperature has risen 1 degree since the mid-1950s. This agrees with the rise estimated by the United Nations-sponsored Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
Muller’s figures also conform with the estimates of the British and American researchers whose catty emails were the basis for the alleged “Climategate” scandal, which was never a scandal in the first place……

He found that sceptics are wrong to base their arguments on the fact records from some sites seem to indicate a cooling trend, since records from at least twice as many sites clearly indicate warming. And he found sceptics are wrong to accuse scientists of cherry-picking the data, since the readings that are often omitted (because they are judged unreliable) show the same warming trend.

Muller and his colleagues looked at five times as many temperature readings as did other researchers, a total of 1.6 billion records, and now have put that merged database online. The results are yet to face peer review, so technically are preliminary. But Muller’s plain-spoken admonition that “you should not be a sceptic, at least not any longer” has reduced many deniers to incoherent grumbling or stunned silence.

Not so, I predict, with the conservative political blowhards who, out of ignorance or perceived self-interest, are willing to play politics with the planet’s future. They may concede warming is taking place, but they call it a natural phenomenon and deny that human activity is the cause….

Nobody’s fudging the numbers, or manipulating data to win research grants, as Perry claims. Nor are they making an undue fuss over a “naturally occurring” warm-up, as Bachmann alleges. The science is real.

It is the know-nothing politicians — not scientists — who are committing an unforgivable fraud…http://www.theage.com.au/opinion/politics/chilling-news-for-climate-sceptics-20111027-1mm5d.html#ixzz1cDcN6v7z