Climate Change Critics Produce Surprising Results
A story by the Los Angeles Times has revealed the surprising preliminary assessments by a group of scientists formerly critical of climate change projections. The U.C. Berkeley team of scientists and researchers, in an attempt to address the “legitimate concerns” of climate change skeptics, has actually revealed that the scientific basis for climate change and claims of a warming globe are accurate.
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.”
Of course, this study is not without its own set of criticism and controversy. Critics of climate change science, who had originally supported Muller, are now attacking his study as it enters the public sphere; findings as they are were not what they expected. For example:
Anthony Watts, a former TV weatherman who runs the skeptic blog WattsUpWithThat.com, wrote that the Berkeley group is releasing results that are not “fully working and debugged yet…. But, post normal science political theater is like that.”
But supporters of this, and similar climate change studies, reject these claims:
“For those who wish to discredit the science, this [temperature] record is the holy grail,” said Peter Thorne, a leading expert at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration‘s National Climatic Data Center in Asheville, N.C. “They figure if they can discredit this, then society would have significant doubts about all of climate science.”
While only 2% of the intended 1.6 billion measurements of localized weather station climate data have been analyzed, the outcome has come as a surprise to Muller and his colleagues. Once completed, the research will be peer reviewed and published, likely further strengthening the scientific consensus on climate change.
Moving forward, this study will be significant for the climate change community, providing another confirmation of a warming global climate. And, perhaps even more importantly, this confirmation comes from scientists and researchers previously skeptical of climate change science.
