LIAR! Scientist Who Claims to Have "Proved" Global Warming- Accused of "Fudging" Truth By Colleague

It was supposed to be the "missing link." The study that would shut up all of the global warming skeptics.  Professor Richard Muller, of Berkeley University in California, and his colleagues from the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperatures project team (BEST) claimed to have shown that the planet has warmed by almost a degree centigrade (1.8 degrees Fahrenheit) since 1950 and is warming continually. 

The study was published last week and was expected to receive major accolades during next month's major United Nations climate summit in Durban, South Africa (you ever notice the UN holds its most evil summits in Durban?)

In the short time since it was released, the study was  hailed as irrefutable evidence that only the most stringent Al Gore-type measures to reduce carbon dioxide emissions can save civilization as we know it  

The Washington Post said the BEST study had ‘settled the climate change debate’ and showed that anyone who remained a skeptic was committing a ‘cynical fraud’.

But a colleague of Prof Muller and fellow BEST researcher Prof Judith Curry has a message for those newspapers hailing the end of climate skepticism, "Not so fast newsprint breath!"


Curry who was part Prof Muller's team told the UK Daily Mail that Muller was trying mislead the public by hiding the fact that BEST’s research shows global warming has stopped and Prof Muller’s claim that he has proven global warming sceptics wrong was also a ‘huge mistake’, with no scientific basis.

Prof Curry is a distinguished climate researcher with more than 30 years experience and the second named co-author of the BEST project’s four research papers.

Her comments, in an exclusive interview with The Mail on Sunday, seem certain to ignite a furious academic row. She said this affair had to be compared to the notorious ‘Climategate’ scandal two years ago.

Like the scientists exposed then by leaked emails from East Anglia University’s Climatic Research Unit, her colleagues from the BEST project seem to be trying to ‘hide the decline’ in rates of global warming.

In fact, Prof Curry said, the project’s research data show there has been no increase in world temperatures since the end of the Nineties – a fact confirmed by a new analysis that The Mail on Sunday has obtained.

‘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.’

Take a look at the two graphs below, the top one was issued by BEST as part of the study, it shows temperatures rising.  The bottom graph published today by the Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF) shows global temperatures over the past ten years, using the data from the  BEST project. It shows that during the last decade, temperatures have been absolutely flat, with no increase at all, even though CO2 continues to be released into the atmosphere.

‘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.’

Prof Muller also wrote an article for the Wall Street Journal. It was here, under the headline ‘The case against global warming skepticism’, that he proclaimed ‘there were good reasons for doubt until now’.

This, too, went around the world, with The Economist, among many others, stating there was now ‘little room for doubt’.

Such claims left Prof Curry horrified.

‘Of course this isn’t the end of skepticism,’ she said. ‘To say that is the biggest mistake he [Prof Muller] has made. When I saw he was saying that I just thought, “Oh my God”.’

In fact, she added, in the wake of the unexpected global warming standstill, many climate scientists who had previously rejected skeptics’ arguments were now taking them much more seriously.

Professor Muller says that he wasn't being misleading because he published all the data so people could draw their own data (I kid you not).

However, he admitted it was true that the BEST data suggested that world temperatures have not risen for about 13 years. But in his view, this might not be ‘statistically significant’, although, he added, it was equally possible that it was – a statement which left other scientists mystified.

...Prof Ross McKittrick, a climate statistics expert from Guelph University in Ontario, added: ‘You don’t look for statistically significant evidence of a standstill.

‘You look for statistically significant evidence of change.’

Dr. David Whitehouse of the (GWPF)  believes that Muller was trying to cover up the facts.

Could it really be the case that Professor Muller has not looked at the data in an appropriate way to see the last ten years clearly?

Indeed Best seems to have worked hard to obscure it. They present data covering more almost 200 years is presented with a short x-axis and a stretched y-axis to accentuate the increase. The data is then smoothed using a ten year average which is ideally suited to removing the past five years of the past decade and mix the earlier standstill years with years when there was an increase. This is an ideal formula for suppressing the past decade’s data.

Dr. Whitehouse concludes with

Only a few years ago many scientists and commentators would not acknowledge the global temperature standstill of the past decade. Now that it has become unarguable there has emerged more explanations for it than can possibly be the case.

To explain the combined sea-land temperature hiatus some have suggested that the oceans are sucking up the heat, as professor Muller outlines in his radio interview. This explanation is strained in my view if the land temperature stays constant. Could we really have the very special situation whereby the oceans sequester just enough heat at just the right time to keep the land temperature flat? Aerosols, postulated by some to be coming from China, don’t provide an explanation for the land temperature hiatus either. In fact, the constant land temperature puts a strain on all of the explanations offered for why the land-sea combination hasn’t warmed in the past decade or so.

We make a big deal of the temperature going up. In my view we should make a bigger scientific deal about temperature flatlining for a decade or more in the face of rising CO2 levels. If further scrutiny of the Best dataset confirms this finding we will have new questions about the nature and balance of oceanic and land warming.

The fact that Best confirms the global temperature hiatus and shows that it is apparent in land only data is significant, and in my view its major scientific finding, so far. It is puzzling that they missed it.

Sorry Dr. Whitehouse I disagree, it isn't puzzling at all. The reason Muller missed the hiatus is that it did not agree with the result he wanted to report. Like many of the global warming hoaxers his intention was not to find the real truth, but to create a truth that satisfies their bogus theory.