New climate study deals blow to skeptics

[IDemo]

By Matthew Knight, CNN
October 21, 2011 -- Updated 1122 GMT

London (CNN) -- An independent study of global temperature records has reaffirmed previous conclusions by climate scientists that global warming is real.

The new analysis by the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature project examined 1.6 billion temperature reports from 15 data archives stretching back over 200 years in an effort to address scientific concerns raised by climate skeptics about the data used to inform reports published by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

Researchers found "reliable evidence" of a rise in average world land temperatures of one degrees Celsius since the mid-1950s.

"Our biggest surprise was that the new results agreed so closely with the warming values published previously by other teams in the United States and the UK," professor Richard A. Muller, Berkeley Earth's scientific director said in a statement.

http://edition.cnn.com/2011/10/21/world/americas/climate-study-warming-real/

[xchrom]

1. Recommend

[MoonRiver]

2. The doubters will claim it's all natural, not man made.

Why, just look at the tree rings! :crazy:

[elocs]

3. What kind of naive minds actually believe this deals a blow to skeptics?

:shrug:

[Eddie Haskell]

4. You asked for it.

http://www.climatedepot.com/

Presumably an offshoot of the Home Depot.

[IDemo]

5. A "blow" doesn't necessarily imply one that is acknowledged by the recipient

It's one more scientifically-based finding, as if one more were needed, that puts the deniers further out of the conversation. There are still flat-Earthers and probably always will be despite all of the evidence.

[OKIsItJustMe]

6. You’re missing the political factor

http://motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2011/10/climate-skepticism-takes-another-hit

Climate Skeptics Take Another Hit

—By Kevin Drum | Fri Oct. 21, 2011 3:00 AM PDT

Physicists are notorious for believing that other scientists are mathematically incompetent. And University of California-Berkeley physicist Richard Muller is notorious for believing that conventional wisdom is often wrong. For example, the conventional wisdom about climate change. Muller has criticized Al Gore in the past as an "exaggerator," has spoken warmly of climate skeptic Anthony Watts, and has said that Steve McIntyre's famous takedown of the "hockey stick" climate graph made him "uncomfortable" with the paper the hockey stick was originally based on.

So in 2010 he started up the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature project (BEST) to show the world how to do climate analysis right. Who better, after all? "Muller's views on climate have made him a darling of skeptics," said http://climateprogress.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/Muller.pdf">Scientific American, "and newly elected Republicans in the House of Representatives, who invited him to testify to the Committee on Science, Space and Technology about his preliminary results." The Koch Foundation, founded by the billionaire oil brothers who have been http://motherjones.com/blue-marble/2010/04/inside-kochs-climate-denial-machine">major funders of the climate-denial machine, gave BEST a $150,000 grant.

But Muller's congressional testimony last March didn't go according to plan. He told them a preliminary analysis suggested that the three main climate models in use today—each of which uses a different estimating technique, and each of which has potential flaws—are all pretty accurate: Global temperatures have gone up considerably over the past century, and the increase has accelerated over the past few decades. Yesterday, BEST confirmed these results and others http://berkeleyearth.org/">in its first set of published papers about land temperatures. (Ocean studies will come later.) Using a novel statistical methodology that incorporates more data than other climate models and requires less human judgment about how to handle it (summarized by the Economist http://www.economist.com/node/21533360">here), the BEST team drew several conclusions:

…

In the press release announcing the results, Muller said, "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." In other words, climate scientists know what they're doing after all.

…

[OKIsItJustMe]

7. Pretty graphs

http://www.berkeleyearth.org/analysis.php

Analysis Charts

The Berkeley Earth team has completed the analysis of the full data set, and summary charts are posted below. The Berkeley Earth team has already started to benefit from feedback from our peers, so these figures are more up-to-date than the figures in our papers submitted for peer review. In particular, the data from NASA GISS has been updated to be more directly comparable to the land-average constructed by Berkeley Earth and NOAA.

The following chart shows the annual land-surface average temperature using a 12 month moving average of surface temperatures over land. Anomalies are relative to the Jan 1950 - December 1979 mean. The grey band indicates 95% statistical and spatial uncertainty interval.

The following chart shows the decadal land-surface average temperature using a 10-year moving average of surface temperatures over land. Anomalies are relative to the Jan 1950 - December 1979 mean. The grey band indicates 95% statistical and spatial uncertainty interval.

The good thing about this study, is that its degree of agreement with the other analyses tends not only to validate them but also to suggest that it is also an honest study.