Ah, irony.
A team of UC Berkeley physicists and statisticians that set out to challenge the scientific consensus on global warming is finding that its data-crunching effort is producing results nearly identical to those underlying the prevailing view.
The Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature project was launched by physics professor Richard Muller, a longtime critic of government-led climate studies, to address what he called “the legitimate concerns” of skeptics who believe that global warming is exaggerated.
But Muller unexpectedly told a congressional hearing last week that the work of the three principal groups that have analyzed the temperature trends underlying climate science is “excellent…. We see a global warming trend that is very similar to that previously reported by the other groups.” … Muller said his group was surprised by its findings, but he cautioned that the initial assessment is based on only 2% of the 1.6 billion measurements that will eventually be examined.
And the best part:
The Berkeley project’s biggest private backer, at $150,000, is the Charles G. Koch Charitable Foundation. Oil billionaires Charles and David Koch are the nation’s most prominent funders of efforts to prevent curbs on the burning of fossil fuels, the largest contributor to planet-warming greenhouse gases.
I love stuff like that. đŸ˜€
It is morally, logically, and ethically untenable to continue to deny what is happening, and the problem will only get worse and worse. No one is going to care about anything that American Conservatives and Republicans of this era did if they succeed in blocking any meaningful effort to cut greenhouse gas emissions.
to start to be very concerned about global warming now.
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p>Or for them to kick Muller, Berkeley et al to the curb and find another hack.
in the next few weeks by both liberals and conservatives. Will he reverse his position among these groups as their official whipping boy or patron saint respectively?
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p>See my post about this interesting sidelight on the climate change debate, on the CredoMatrix blogsite. By way of disclosure, I’m providing some initial content to CredoMatrix, which is intended to provide political analysis on scientific issues. Hope to say more about that soon on BMG.
No–you don’t get to be a ‘patron saint’ simply for confirming what all experts who actually work in the field already recognize. What is remarkable is the number of allegedly respectable people who have decided that they can get away with attacking science and blocking any attempt to curb the environmental devastation that we are causing.