You might have read in the last month that America is dying amid severe drought and unprecedented heat, and the world will flood from Greenland’s repeated bouts of “unprecedented” melting ice.

As Mark Twain said, “If you do not read the newspaper you’re uninformed. If you do read the newspaper you’re misinformed.” Such is the case with these stories.

In October 2011 Richard Muller announced in an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal that, based on preliminary measurements from Berkley Earth Surface Temperature (BEST) study, “global warming is real.”

Of course. Few deny that. The question was how much warming had happened and whether and how much man contributed to it.

In a second op-ed, released July 28, 2012, Muller stated that in the last 250 years the globe has warmed 2.5 degrees Fahrenheit (about 1.4 degrees Centigrade, which is within the limits of natural variability), and cites humans as the primary cause. Muller referred to himself as a converted skeptic.

Uh huh.

First, Muller’s claim to be a converted skeptic is false—at least if “skeptic” means someone who thinks climate change is largely natural, human contribution to it is comparatively slight, and the effort to reduce it will do more harm than good.

Muller himself wrote in 2011,

“It is ironic if some people treat me as a traitor, since I was never a skeptic — only a scientific skeptic,” he said in a recent email exchange with The Huffington Post. “Some people called me a skeptic because in my best-seller ‘Physics for Future Presidents’ I had drawn attention to the numerous scientific errors in the movie ‘An Inconvenient Truth.’ But I never felt that pointing out mistakes qualified me to be called a climate skeptic.”

Second, Muller’s colleagues were not quite so enthusiastic. Judith Curry, a scientist working with BEST, states she “strongly disagrees with their interpretation of attribution [to anthropogenic greenhouse gases]…. In my opinion, their analysis is way over simplistic and not at all convincing.”

Not so prominently announced in the newspapers were two earth-shattering studies by climate scientists Anthony Watts and John Christy. The first shows an over-estimation of warming reports in the U.S., and the second shows that this summer’s weather has been well within normal statistical bounds.

Watts’s study, released July 29, showed, by using a more precise method of evaluating sites farther from urban centers, that the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) spuriously doubled temperature increase in the United States since 1978. So half the warming reported in the U.S. only exists statistically, confirming what Muller denied, the Urban Heat Island effect.

John Christy, climate scientist at the University of Alabama at Huntsville, who jointly runs the satellite temperature record program with Cornwall Alliance Senior Fellow Roy Spencer, released a study of the statistical numbers of severities of weather events for the last 150 years. On August 3 Christy testified before the Senate Environment and Public Works committee (summary here; video here) citing his own data demonstrating that U.S. flooding, droughts (such as the one this summer), and other severe weather events were not statistically unusual and that other decades in the twentieth century have eclipsed this one.

To compound these inconsistencies further, the BEST study hasn’t even passed peer-review stage.

This whole situation seems to demonstrate a serious departure from pure scientific enquiry by some climate scientists who more concerned with making headlines than ensuring academic quality.

What is the reason for this rush to publish, unless premature publishing is an attempt to involve your report in social, political, economic, or other battles?

The Cornwall Alliance stands for truth and logic. Science that trips on fallacies is no science at all. And when it comes to the interpretation of the scientific debate and its application to other areas of life, we strive to follow the precepts of God’s Word: Biblical Earth stewardship, and care for the poor.

 

Image courtesy of hyena reality / FreeDigitalPhotos.net