WARMIST FRAUDSTERS LOSE AGAIN

"For the clueless and cynical diehards who deny global warming, it’s getting awfully cold out there," Washington Post columnist Eugene Robinson wrote Oct. 24.

It is indeed.  Here in Pennsylvania we had last month the earliest snowfall anyone can remember.  This winter will be cold and stormy, the Farmers Almanac predicts.

But that’s not what Mr. Robinson meant.  "Despite denials for political agendas, global warming at the hands of man is beyond doubt after a former skeptic’s study," said the subhed over his column in the Memphis Commercial Appeal.

Mr. Robinson was referring to the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature Project, which examined temperature measurements from 1800 to 2010 from 39,000 ground stations around the world.

About two thirds of those stations showed temperatures were rising.  A third indicated they were falling.  The average for all the stations indicated a warming of 0.7 degrees Celsius (2 degrees Fahrenheit) since 1950.

In the paper they submitted for peer review, the BEST scientists say they don’t know what caused the temperature increase they reported, so it’s quite a stretch to say their study proves "global warming at the hands of man is beyond doubt."  Especially so since the BEST scientists also say: "The human component of global warming may be somewhat overestimated."

And that’s the point.  No skeptic denies it’s gotten warmer since 1800, when we were emerging from the Little Ice Age (1550 -1850).  We argue (1) that nearly all the warming has been due to natural forces; (2) that the warming is well within the range of natural climate fluctuations for eons past, and that warming stopped around 1998.

The BEST study "is consistent with models developed by other climate researchers that posit greenhouse gas emissions — the burning of fossil fuels by humans — as the cause" of warming, Mr. Robinson said.

If Mr. Robinson actually had read the study, he’d have seen the BEST data show no correlation between carbon dioxide emissions and temperature increases, which casts doubt on the theory CO2 emissions are the principal cause of warming.

More pertinently, the BEST data show no warming for the last 13 years.  So if Mr. Robinson did read the study, he’s lying.  But I suspect Mr. Robinson is relying entirely on comments made by Richard Muller, the Berkeley physicist who chaired the BEST project.

"Global warming is real," Dr. Muller declared in an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal Oct. 21.  But all he meant was that temperatures have risen during the period BEST studied.  Since no skeptic doubts that, he was knocking down a strawman.

Mr. Robinson (and many other journalists) described Mr. Muller as a former skeptic.  That’s a curious way to describe someone who told Grist magazine in a 2008 interview he resigned from the Sierra Club in the early 1980s "over the issue of global warming."

"What I wrote them in my letter of resignation was that, if you oppose nuclear power, the U.S. will become much more heavily dependent on fossil fuels, and that this is a pollutant to the atmosphere that is very likely to lead to global warming," Mr. Muller said then.

In a 2003 paper, he wrote "carbon dioxide from the burning of fossil fuels will prove to be the greatest pollutant of human history."

Mr. Muller proved he was a true believer willing to bend the truth for his cause when he told the BBC "we see no evidence of (global warming) slowing down."

That isn’t true, said BEST co-author Judith Curry, chair of the Department of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at Georgia Tech.

"There is no scientific basis for saying that warming hasn’t stopped," Ms. Curry told the London Daily Mail.  "To say that there is detracts from the credibility of the data."

"Curry was not informed of or consulted about either the release of any study data or of Muller’s conclusions, which involved private briefings with selected media outlets," noted Investors Business Daily.  "That may be for good reason, since an analysis of the data by other respected analysts shows Muller’s conclusions to be wrong, and perhaps deliberately so."

The BEST data show global temperatures stopped rising 13 years ago, Dr. Curry said.  Temperatures in the United States have fallen in the last decade, according to the National Climatic Data Center.

So bundle up, Mr. Robinson.  It is getting awfully cold out there — but more for you fraudsters than for us skeptics.

Jack Kelly is a former Marine and Green Beret and a former deputy assistant secretary of the Air Force in the Reagan administration. He is national security writer for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.