Old Rocks
Diamond Member
Hey Walleyes, did you miss Muller's recent work?
Experts Heat Up Over Berkeley Lab Scientist's Quest to 'Calm' Climate Change Debate - NYTimes.com
The scientist heading up a controversial review of land-surface temperature records has a simple goal.
"What I really hope to do is calm the debate" over climate change, said Richard Muller, a physicist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and the director of the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature study (BEST).
But that appears to be a tall order, judging by reaction yesterday to the group's preliminary findings, which drew suspicion from climate skeptics and mainstream climate scientists alike.
BEST's preliminary results show a warming trend of 0.7 degrees Celsius since 1957. That result, which Muller called "unexpected," is similar to the findings of independent analyses by NASA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the U.K. Hadley Centre.
"The world temperature data has sufficient integrity to be used to determine temperature trends," Muller told the House Science, Space and Technology Committee.
That contradicts arguments made by climate skeptics -- including blogger Anthony Watts of "Watts Up With That?" -- who allege that many of the weather stations are located in areas that would bias their observations. A station might be placed in a rural area that is eventually enveloped by development, creating a situation where the urban heat island effect could influence the observations it collects, for example.
Experts Heat Up Over Berkeley Lab Scientist's Quest to 'Calm' Climate Change Debate - NYTimes.com
The scientist heading up a controversial review of land-surface temperature records has a simple goal.
"What I really hope to do is calm the debate" over climate change, said Richard Muller, a physicist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and the director of the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature study (BEST).
But that appears to be a tall order, judging by reaction yesterday to the group's preliminary findings, which drew suspicion from climate skeptics and mainstream climate scientists alike.
BEST's preliminary results show a warming trend of 0.7 degrees Celsius since 1957. That result, which Muller called "unexpected," is similar to the findings of independent analyses by NASA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the U.K. Hadley Centre.
"The world temperature data has sufficient integrity to be used to determine temperature trends," Muller told the House Science, Space and Technology Committee.
That contradicts arguments made by climate skeptics -- including blogger Anthony Watts of "Watts Up With That?" -- who allege that many of the weather stations are located in areas that would bias their observations. A station might be placed in a rural area that is eventually enveloped by development, creating a situation where the urban heat island effect could influence the observations it collects, for example.