It's official: Muller's NYT Op-Ed is out

He has, as was rumored, caught up to 1988:

CALL me a converted skeptic. Three years ago I identified problems in previous climate studies that, in my mind, threw doubt on the very existence of global warming. Last year, following an intensive research effort involving a dozen scientists, I concluded that global warming was real and that the prior estimates of the rate of warming were correct. I’m now going a step further: Humans are almost entirely the cause.

It's nothing spectacular, as conversion experiences go, more of a dry reciting of of the basic points of the IPCC assessment, with more confidence that the earlier warming, from 1850 to 1970, was probably human-caused as well.

He even touched upon the Great Heresy:

Science is that narrow realm of knowledge that, in principle, is universally accepted. I embarked on this analysis to answer questions that, to my mind, had not been answered. I hope that the Berkeley Earth analysis will help settle the scientific debate regarding global warming and its human causes. Then comes the difficult part: agreeing across the political and diplomatic spectrum about what can and should be done.

 This is why the denial machine tolerates the hits to its credibility when its fake "experts" are outed. Actual scientists bring gravitas to the enterprise, but they are a little . . . politically unreliable.

Another successful prediction for Hansen

  From “Global warming study finds no grounds for climate sceptics' concerns,” The Guardian (UK), Oct 20, 2011 , H/t John Hartz:

Jim Hansen, head of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies, said he had not read the research papers but was glad Muller was looking at the issue, describing him as "a top-notch physicist". "It should help inform those who have honest scepticism about global warming.

"Of course, presuming that he basically confirms what we have been reporting, the deniers will then decide that he is a crook or has some ulterior motive.

"As I have discussed in the past, the deniers, or contrarians, if you will, do not act as scientists, but rather as lawyers."

“As soon as they see evidence against their client (the fossil fuel industry and those people making money off business-as-usual), they trash that evidence and bring forth whatever tidbits they can find to confuse the judge and jury."

Why BEST matters.

Confirming earlier results that had already been repeatedly confirmed is nice, but that's not why BEST matters. BEST matters because, as great as it would be in a perfect world to confirm all facts through direct personal observation and replace all expert opinion with each individual's perfect mastery of every field of science and human endeavor, until that blessed day we will have to rely on the expertise of others in fields in which we are not experts ourselves. And while this does not ask us to surrender our own reasoning and common sense, the loudest demand of common sense when confronted with a complex and technical issue is to find people with good credentials and a good track record and let them explain things. So who has a good track record on climate change?

BEST is another reminder that it is the mainstream scientists of the "consensus" that have the track record. They said they had controlled for UHI and that station dropout was not notably altering the trend. They were right. "Skeptics" that pushed these issues as discrediting the temperature record were wrong. They said that siting issues might affect individual sites, but would not distort the global trend. They were right. "Skeptics" were wrong.

As with the temperature record, so with predictions of warming. The real scientists got it mostly right:

Kellogg, no cookie for you

The "skeptics," when they have made predictions, have been consistently wrong:

And so it goes with CO2 levels, ice loss, sea level rise and pretty much any other parameter you can name. Where you can compare the projections of real scientists to "skeptics," science wins, every time.

So who are you going to trust?

BEST reports: News roundup & LOL

Should it be spiking upwards like that?

The BEST group's draft papers: here. From the press release:

COOLING THE WARMING DEBATE Berkeley Earth Releases Global Land Warming Analysis 20 October, 2011 Global warming is real according to a major study released today. Despite issues raised by climate change skeptics, the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature study finds reliable evidence of a rise in average world land temperature of approximately 1˚C since the mid-1950s… On the basis of its analysis… the group concluded that earlier studies based on more limited data by teams in the United States and Britain had accurately estimated the extent of land surface warming.

News roundup:

WashPo -- A skeptical physicist ends up confirming climate data 

The Economist -- The heat is on

The New York Times -- Climate Skeptics Stay Unswayed

Peter Gleick at Forbes -- Breaking News: The Earth Still Goes Around the Sun, and It's Still Warming Up

Richard Mueller describes the BEST findings in the WSJ -- The Case Against Global-Warming Skepticism

Science Daily -- Cooling the Warming Debate: Major New Analysis Confirms That Global Warming Is Real


The Independent is impressed by Dr. Mueller's about face -- Ex-climate sceptic now backs global warming

The Christian Science Monitor has my favorite headline so far -- Koch brothers accidentally fund study that proves global warming

Blogger reaction is going to be inescapable for the next few days, so for that, just galance at the blogroll.


The bottom line: