BEST study; Global Warming is Real.

For those who don't know about this, Climate Skeptic physicist Richard Muller, with the blessing of Anthony Watts of climate denier website Wattsupwiththat and partial funding by the Koch Brothers, set up a study with independent scientists to review the temperature record to determine if global warming is real:http://berkeleyearth.org/index.php

Berkeley Earth Team

Berkeley Earth team members include:

Richard Muller, Founder and Scientific Director
Robert Rohde, Lead Scientist

David Brillinger, Statistical Scientist
Judith Curry, Climatologist
Don Groom, Physicist
Robert Jacobsen, Professor of Physics
Saul Perlmutter, Professor of Physics
Arthur Rosenfeld, Professor of Physics, Former California Energy Commissioner
Charlotte Wickham, Statistical Scientist
Jonathan Wurtele, Professor of Physics

Elizabeth Muller, Founder and Executive Director

Anthony Watts has agreed to accept their results. Well they've published four papers and guess what? They drew several conclusions:

The earth is indeed getting warmer. Global average land temperatures have risen 0.91 degrees Celsius over the past 50 years. This is "on the high end of the existing range of reconstructions."
The rate of increase on land is accelerating. Warming for the entire 20th century clocks in at 0.73 degrees C per century. But over the most recent 40 years, the globe has warmedat a rate of 2.76 degrees C per century.
Warming has not abated since 1998. The rise in average temperature over the period 1998-2010 is 2.84 degrees C per century.
The BEST data significantly reduces the uncertainty of the temperature reconstructions. Their estimate of the temperature increase over the past 50 years has an uncertainty of only 0.04 degrees C, compared to a reported uncertainty of 0.13 degrees C in the most recent Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report.
Although many of the temperature measuring stations around the world have large individual uncertainties, taken as a whole the data is quite reliable. The difference in reported averages between stations ranked "okay" and stations ranked "poor" is very small.
The urban heat island effect—i.e., the theory that rising temperatures around cities might be corrupting the global data—is very small.

Van: Anthony Watts is Hillbillys god, so it will be interesting to see what he has to say, although Watts is already waffling on his pledge to accept their results,

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Permalink Reply by Charles Lane on February 10, 2012 at 4:08pm

And another scientist changes his mind...

http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/0,1518,813814,00.html

Very good interview. I guess the Koch brother tentacles extend all the way to Germany.

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Permalink Reply by Van on February 10, 2012 at 4:52pm

It is a decent interview. Especially the part where they basically point out that his views are mostly speculation and not based on hard science. He's a chemist who works for a utility company, not a climate scientist. I guess when Charles needs his car repaired he goes to a plumber.

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Permalink Reply by can i change this later? on February 10, 2012 at 5:30pm

And Charles looks to plumbers when he wants a Congressman. ... MC Cain endorsed!

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Permalink Reply by Charles Lane on February 11, 2012 at 12:17pm

Chemistry is the science of matter, especially its chemical reactions, but also its composition, structure and properties.^[1]^[2] Chemistry is concerned with atoms and their interactions with other atoms, and particularly with the properties of chemical bonds.

Chemistry is sometimes called "the central science" because it connects physics with other natural sciences such as geology and biology.^[3]^[4] Chemistry is a branch of physical science but distinct from physics.^[5]

Yep, he is a scientist.

Two of my favorite quotes...

Vahrenholt: No. I mean it very seriously, and I know that dozens of solar researchers agree with me. I am perfectly aware of the defamation I will have to listen to in the near future. The climate debate also has some of the trappings of an inquisition. I'm curious to see which truth ministry will now initiate proceedings against me. Perhaps it'll be the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, which is headed by Hans Joachim Schellnhuber, an adviser to the chancellor.

Vahrenholt: The fear mongers are still shaping the political debate. According to the German Advisory Council on Global Change, environmentally minded countries should forcibly bring about reduced consumption for the sake of protecting the climate. This takes us in the direction of an environmental dictatorship. And the fearmongering is also beginning to take effect. When I was in a restaurant recently, I overheard a woman at the next table telling her children that it's wrong to eat an Argentine steak -- because of the climate. That's when I ask myself: How could we have come to this point?

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Permalink Reply by can i change this later? on February 11, 2012 at 2:29pm

40 points for ... suggesting that a modern-day Inquisition is hard at work on your case, and so on.

http://greenfyre.wordpress.com/2008/10/16/climate-denier-crackpot-i...

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Permalink Reply by Van on February 11, 2012 at 5:32pm

All I can say is he must be a piss poor chemist if he doesn't understand the thermodynamic properties of CO2. This is Chemistry 101 and he flunks it. What deniers can't answer is that if the earth is not warming then what is happening to the extra heat that basic physics and chemistry tell us should be accumulating due to extra CO2 in the atmosphere? Scientist first started realizing this 200 years ago:

Like many Victorian natural philosophers, John Tyndall was fascinated by a great variety of questions. While he was preparing an important treatise on "Heat as a Mode of Motion" he took time to consider geology. Tyndall had hands-on knowledge of the subject, for he was an ardent Alpinist (in 1861 he made the first ascent of the Weisshorn). Familiar with glaciers, he had been convinced by the evidence — hotly debated among scientists of his day — that tens of thousands of years ago, colossal layers of ice had covered all of northern Europe. How could climate possibly change so radically?

- LINKS -

For full discussion see
<=Climate cycles

One possible answer was a change in the composition of the Earth's atmosphere. Beginning with work by Joseph Fourier in the 1820s, scientists had understood that gases in the atmosphere might trap the heat received from the Sun. As Fourier put it, energy in the form of visible light from the Sun easily penetrates the atmosphere to reach the surface and heat it up, but heat cannot so easily escape back into space. For the air absorbs invisible heat rays (“infrared radiation”) rising from the surface. The warmed air radiates some of the energy back down to the surface, helping it stay warm. This was the effect that would later be called, by an inaccurate analogy, the "greenhouse effect." The equations and data available to 19th-century scientists were far too poor to allow an accurate calculation. Yet the physics was straightforward enough to show that a bare, airless rock at the Earth's distance from the Sun should be far colder than the Earth actually is.

<=Simple models

Tyndall set out to find whether there was in fact any gas in the atmosphere that could trap heat rays. In 1859, his careful laboratory work identified several gases that did just that. The most important was simple water vapor (H2O). Also effective was carbon dioxide (CO2), although in the atmosphere the gas is only a few parts in ten thousand. Just as a sheet of paper will block more light than an entire pool of clear water, so the trace of CO2 altered the balance of heat radiation through the entire atmosphere.

http://www.aip.org/history/climate/co2.htm

Van: Yes solar cycles do have an effect, but the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere at present dwarfs this. And Varenholt says he knows lots of Solar scientists who agree with him. Really. But he can't name one. This guy is just trying to get rich selling his book to a bunch of idiot deniers.