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The Case for Global Warming Skepticism

October 31st, 2011 No comments

If you weren’t asleep last week, you were inundated by the mainstream media’s coverage of Professor Richard Muller and the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperatures (BEST) group. BEST has conducted an in-depth analysis of surface temperature data spanning the last two centuries, and is releasing four papers regarding temperature data for public and peer review. Muller, in an op-ed piece in the Wall Street Journal, wrote,

…let me explain why you should not be a skeptic, at least not any longer.

and concluded

Global warming is real. Perhaps our results will help cool this portion of the climate debate.

The reaction from the left was swift. The debate is over. Anyone who still disputes anthropogenic global warming is a “denier”—morally likening skeptics to the cretins who deny the truth of the Holocaust. Yada, yada, yada. A rehash of the same tired ad hominem attacks that have been lobbed by the left for years. In one of the most blatant attacks, the Washington Post’s Eugene Robinson blasted,

For the clueless or cynical diehards who deny global warming, it’s getting awfully cold out there.

Not so fast, there, spanky. You see, one of BEST’s own members—Judith Curry, chair of the Dept. of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at no less than Georgia Tech—countered Muller directly in the U.K.’s Daily Mail:

“There is no scientific basis for saying that warming hasn’t stopped,” she said. “To say that there is detracts from the credibility of the data, which is very unfortunate.”

Curry further discusses the issue in her own blog. She notes that the data set as analyzed by BEST is, well, the best set currently available and acknowledges that the way the data has been presented hides the truth about global temperatures. (She claims that was “teased” out of her, but does not contradict its accuracy.) To wit, even though CO2 emissions have risen drastically over the last decade, temperatures haven’t—a fact which contradicts the computer models being hyped to scare the general public.

Professor Curry again:

“This is nowhere near what the climate models were predicting,” Prof Curry said. “Whatever it is that’s going on here, it doesn’t look like it’s being dominated by CO2.”

[The graph to which she refers.]

http://i.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2011/10/30/article-2055191-0E974B4300000578-6_634x639.jpg

Despite their best efforts to demonize skeptics, warming alarmists still have a lot of convincing to do. When two notable, respected scientists working on the same team with the same data can draw such disparate conclusions, the scientific debate is far from over.