Climate Skeptics Confirm Global Warming

Global warming has become so politicized that many people forget there is science underlying the concept. The camps sort out like this. Climate scientists for the most part agree that the world is heating up thanks to man-made or anthropogenic global warming, largely caused by excess carbon dioxide in the atmosphere which increases the greenhouse effect and heats the planet. There are a few climate scientists who are considered skeptics of the the science.

They argue that the land surface temperatures — where the increase has been measured — are highly unreliable for a couple of reasons. First the weather stations that record the temperatures are not always accurate and the record-keeping over the years has been far from complete. Some stations have instrument problems which lead to further data problems. And second, climate skeptics think that cities, which trap heat causing what is known as the urban heat island effect, are skewing global temperature readings.

But in what is perhaps the most comprehensive land surface temperature analysis, a group of scientists at University of California Berkley gathered all the raw data from 15 separate data archives consisting of 1.6 billion temperature records. They merged the information into one, large data set, called Berkley Earth, and put the whole thing online for the world to see.

Comparison of All Major Climate Data Sets Shows Berkley Earth in Black

What makes this project significant is that the man behind the experiment is Richard Muller, a prominent physicist and self-ascribed climate skeptic. After the “climategate” e-mail hacking scandal in November 2009 he wanted to see for himself what the temperature record said.

He told the Associated Press, “The skeptics raised valid points and everybody should have been a skeptic two years ago.”

Dr. Muller and his daughter Elizabeth, who is the executive director of the Berkley Earth Surface Temperature project approached the project from a skeptical point of view. They even received a quarter of their $623,000 funding from the Charles Koch Charitable Foundation, a non-profit organization that gives money to climate skeptics and conservative political groups like the Tea Party. Some money also came from other private foundations, including $100,000 from the Fund for Innovative Climate and Energy Research created by Bill Gates.

At the completion of the project, Dr. Muller declared that climate change is real. He says, “And now we have confidence that the temperature rise that had previously been reported had been done without bias.”

Most scientists aren’t very impressed that he came to the same conclusion they did decades ago. But they do appear impressed to have converted a skeptic by letting the data speak for itself.

Science depends on the ability to reproduce results. And while science calls for dispassion and objective thinking, skeptics have been accusing many climate scientists of being alarmists and of manipulating data to show the problem is worse than it is. When it comes to climate science, politics, personal agendas and motivations have polluted the process. Now every discovery, paper published or statement made is applauded by some and denounced by others. That makes it difficult for the science to shine through the politics and even harder for the public to grasp any significance.

But Dr. Muller’s BEST project only goes so far. It analyzed all the available data and demonstrates that the climate has been warming consistently and considerably for the past 50 years. Muller and his team found that the world is 1.6 degrees F warmer now than it was in the 1960s.

This landmark study does not point any fingers at the cause of the warming. It merely points out that warming is indeed real. It carefully stays away from taking a position on whether the warming is part of a natural cycle or whether it is being exacerbated by man-made carbon dioxide emissions.

But Muller now says, “Greenhouse gases could have a disastrous impact on the world.” He doesn’t believe that case has been scientifically proven yet, however.

In March, Dr. Muller testified before Congress (PDF) saying, “I believe that the systematic biases that are the cause for most concern can be adequately handled by data analysis techniques. The world temperature data has sufficient integrity to be used to determine global temperature trends.”

Phil Jones of the University of East Anglia in Norwich, UK, is the climatologist at the heart of the “climategate” scandal. He was accused of fraud but since cleared of all charges. He helped build one of the three climate data sets that scientists around the world regularly use, the Hadley Centre Climate Research Unit. The other two are the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies and the NOAA National Climate Data Center.

Speaking of Muller and the Berkley Earth project Dr. Jones tells New Scientist magazine, “These initial findings are very encouraging and echo our own results, and our conclusion that the impact of urban heat islands on the overall global temperature is minimal.”

The BEST research also confirms the so-called hockey stick graph. First unveiled in 1998 by Penn State University paleoclimatologist, Michael Mann, the graph became an icon of global warming after it was featured in the summary of a crucial report by a United Nations climate panel in 2001. A version also appeared in the documentary An Inconvenient Truth.

Mann’s hockey stick graph also became the symbol climate change skeptics loved to use to body check scientists to keep the debate alive. Even Muller once called the graph “the poster child of the global warming community.”

Now Mann says, “I think it’s at least useful to see that even a critic like Muller, when he takes an honest look, finds that climate science is robust.”