ClimateGate Critic Says Initial Re-Survey Of Temperature Changes Matches Warmists' Numbers Very Closely

A little disappointing.

Remember this guy?

He's not a climate-change-skeptic so much as a ClimateGate critic -- the distinction being he's calling what was done during ClimateGate ("hide the decline") anti-scientific, but that doesn't mean he's actually a skeptic of their claims. His gripe is proceduralist. (An important proceduralist critique but still about process.)

He slammed the ClimateGate temperature-finagelers but also notes, at the end, he's part of a special project to revisit the numbers with independent, uncompromised eyes and see if the temperature record really is as the warmists say.

Well, he's looked at 2% of the data and says that so far it's very close to what had previously been claimed.

The Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature project was launched by physics professor Richard Muller, a longtime critic of government-led climate studies, to address what he called "the legitimate concerns" of skeptics who believe that global warming is exaggerated.

But 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."

...

Muller said his group was surprised by its findings, but he cautioned that the initial assessment is based on only 2% of the 1.6 billion measurements that will eventually be examined.

Couple of notes:

It is one of the least disputed parts of global warming theory that the earth has warmed this much during this century. That does come up for dispute, yes -- but the bigger objection is that there is no sound evidence to demonstrate this minor variation in temperature is anything abnormal or unprecedented.

Still, disappointing -- I'd like to hear these numbers are false too. We'll see what his own adjustments and and assumptions and fudge-factors turn out to be.

posted by Ace at 04:11 PM

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