It’s getting harder and harder for Climate Change skeptics to keep up their attack on science. The Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature project (BEST), which became the ‘darling’ of Republicans when denier-friendly Richard Muller founded the group, now confirms in a new study what we all knew – the earth is getting warmer.
In the past, Muller had endeared himself to deniers when he blasted Al Gore and praised skeptic Allen Watts, the latter who said in anticipation of the BEST study, “I’m prepared to accept whatever result they produce, even if it proves my premise wrong.”
In the press release announcing the results, Muller said, “Our biggest surprise was that the new results agreed so closely with the warming values published previously by other teams in the US and the UK.” In other words, climate scientists know what they’re doing after all.
The BEST report is purely an estimate of planetary warming, and it makes no estimate of how much this warming is due to human activity. So in one sense, its impact is limited since the smarter skeptics have already abandoned the idea that warming is a hoax and now focus their fire solely on the contention that it’s man-made. (And the even smarter ones have given up on that, too, and now merely argue that it’s economically pointless to try to stop it.) Still, the fact that climate scientists turned out to be careful and thorough in their basic estimates of temperature rise surely enhances their credibility in general. Climategate was always a ridiculous sideshow, and this is just one more nail in its coffin. Climate scientists got the basic data right, and they’ve almost certainly gotten the human causes right too.
As for Watts, his head is exploding and he is not taking the study as he promised. No surprise there.
But now Watts has exploded because BEST has released its results before completing peer review! Talk about the pot calling the kettle unscientific. Why should peer review matter to Watts? The peer reviewed literature has disproved everything he has ever written.
Watts laughably titles his post, “The Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature project puts PR before peer review” failing to get that this headline eviscerates his entire climate career. He has always put PR before peer review. Indeed, he has made a career out of attacking the peer review process, publishing numerous posts this year attacking it directly!
