Do you know what this means?

Michael Mann on Richard Muller, in an observation with heady implications:

"Muller's announcement last year that the Earth is indeed warming brought him up to date w/ where the scientific community was in the 1980s. His announcement this week that the warming can only be explained by human influences, brings him up to date with where the science was in the mid 1990s."

Obviously Muller is a scientific genius -- his understanding has advanced by an entire decade in just under a year.

We should check back with him in 2016 when, by the iron laws of linear extrapolation, his science will be the equivalent of the consensus of the 2030s.

Quote of the Day: Watts on BEST

I’m prepared to accept whatever result they produce, even if it proves my premise wrong.

-- Anthony Watts on BEST, March 6th, 2011

He didn't stop there, but went on to effusively praise the entire operation at BEST and the people involved:

Brillinger, another affable Canadian from Toronto, with an office covered in posters to remind him of his roots, has not even a hint of the arrogance and advance certainty that we’ve seen from people like Dr. Kevin Trenberth. He’s much more like Steve McIntyre in his demeanor and approach. In fact, the entire team seems dedicated to providing an open source, fully transparent, and replicable method no matter whether their new metric shows a trend of warming, cooling, or no trend at all, which is how it should be. I’ve seen some of the methodology, and I’m pleased to say that their design handles many of the issues skeptics have raised and has done so in ways that are unique to the problem.

Mind you, these scientists at LBNL (Lawrence Berkeley National Labs) are used to working with huge particle accelerator datasets to find minute signals in the midst of seas of noise. Another person on the team, Dr. Robert Jacobsen, is an expert in analysis of large data sets. His expertise in managing reams of noisy data is being applied to the problem of the very noisy and very sporadic station data. The approaches that I’ve seen during my visit give me far more confidence than the “homogenization solves all” claims from NOAA and NASA GISS, and that the BEST result will be closer to the ground truth that anything we’ve seen.

Now we have the results:

 
. . . and Tony's planning a big announcement. We'll see if he plans to live by those words, or eat them.

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.