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OPINION
GLOBAL WARMING IS OVER, SAYS EXPERT
Professor Richard Muller on KGO's Dr. Bill Wattenburg Program discusses his study.
GLOBAL WARMING
IS OVER, SAYS EXPERT Professors Judith Curry and Richard Muller
don’t agree on the same set of results on climate change By Julie
Carpenter, express.co.uk - November 2,2011 IT'S one of the
hottest feuds in science - climate chance zealots insist that we're
still destroying the planet but now another scientist has warned the
cast-iron evidence just isn't there. FOR a minute there it seemed the
global warming debate had finally been resolved. While for years
scientists and sceptics have raged against each other on the crucial
topic, new research hailed “the most definitive study into temperature
data gathered by weather stations over the past half-century” seemed to
come to an authoritative conclusion. Global warming IS real it said,
strengthening the need for us all to reduce carbon emissions and boost
efforts to try to save the planet. And this research was headed by a
physicist who had previously been a sceptic of global warming and an
outspoken critic of the science underpinning it, lending the results
even greater credibility. Prof Richard Muller had spent two years
trying to discover if the mainstream scientists were wrong but
concluded they were right. Temperatures are rising and his results, he
concluded, “proved you should not be a sceptic, at least not any
longer”. Case closed. But is it? Not according to Prof Judith Curry, a
member of Prof Muller’s team, who claims the same findings have shown
that global warming has stopped – plunging the rest of us into a
quandary of what and who to believe. When Prof Curry heard that Prof
Muller was saying that the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature (BEST)
findings would put an end to climate change scepticism for good she was
horrified. “This isn’t the end of scepticism,” she exclaimed.
Prof Muller, of Berkeley University in California, and Prof Curry, who
chairs the Department Of Earth And Atmospheric Sciences at America’s
Georgia Institute of Technology, were part of the BEST project that
carried out analysis of more than 1.6 billion temperature recordings
collected from more than 39,000 weather stations around the world. Prof
Muller appeared on Radio 4’s Today Programme last Friday where he
described how BEST’s findings showed that since the Fifties global
temperatures had risen by about 1 degree Celsius, a figure which is in
line with estimates from Nasa and the Met Office. When asked whether
the rate had stopped over the last 10 years he said they had not. “We
see no evidence of it having slowed down,” he replied and a graph
issued by the BEST project suggests a continuing and steep increase.
But this last point is one which Prof Curry has furiously rebutted. In
a serious clash of scientific experts Prof Curry has accused Prof
Muller of trying to “hide the decline in rates of global warming”. She
says that BEST’s research actually shows that there has been no
increase in world temperatures for 13 years. She has called Prof
Muller’s comments “a huge mistake” and has said that she now plans to
discuss her future on the project with him. “There is no scientific
basis for saying that global warming hasn’t stopped,” she says.
“To say that there is detracts from the credibility of the data, which
is very unfortunate.” New research also seems to back up Prof Curry
rather than Prof Muller. A report published by the Global Warming
Foundation, which is based on BEST’s findings, includes a graph of
world average temperatures over the past 10 years and it is absolutely
flat, suggesting that temperatures have remained constant. This issue
is crucial because the levels of carbon dioxide in the air have
continued to rise rapidly over the last decade and if temperatures have
remained constant during that period it would suggest there is no
direct link between carbon gas emissions and global warming. Previously
carbon dioxide emissions – from the burning of fossil fuels and from
deforestation – have been considered one of the biggest causes of
climate change, the most damaging effects of which are thought to be
the melting of the polar ice caps and the rise in sea levels as well as
an increase in extreme weather events such as floods and droughts.
“Whatever it is that is going on here it doesn’t look like it’s being
dominated by carbon dioxide,” says Prof Curry. Prof Muller has made it
clear that the BEST study was not conducted in order to gauge the
causes of global warming, saying the study “made no assessment on how
much of this is due to humans and how much is natural”. He and his
scientists – who also included this year’s physics Nobel winner Saul
Perlmutter – set out purely to determine once and for all whether
climate change had occurred. The group had been suspicious of previous
results which confirmed a rise in global temperatures , believing that
their work may have been skewed by the “urban heat island effect” where
increasing urbanisation around weather stations was causing the
temperature increases recorded over the past 50 years. But their
exhaustive research discovered that the urban heat effect could not
explain the global temperature increase of about one degree Celsius
since 1950. IT IS well to point out that Prof Curry is not
disputing the one degree Celsius increase. She is disputing Prof
Muller’s suggestion that temperatures haven’t leveled off in the last
decade. Indeed she says this global warming standstill since the end of
the Nineties – which has been completely unexpected – has wide-reaching
consequences for the causes of climate change and has already led many
climate scientists to start looking at alternative factors that may
have contributed to global warming, other than carbon gas emissions. In
particular she has mentioned the influence of clouds, natural
temperature cycles and solar radiation. What she also seems furious
about is the way that Prof Muller went about publishing BEST’s results
without consulting her and before a proper peer review could be carried
out. “It is not how I would have played it,” she has said. “I was
informed only when I got a group email. I think they have made errors
and I distance myself from what they did. It would have been smart to
consult me.” This is, you can be sure, not the last we will hear on the
debate.
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