Year 2, Month 10, Day 25: But They Say There’s A Hell. What The Hell. What The Hell Do They Think This Is? Do They Think About That?

The October 21 Irish Times also reports on the Richard Muller study:

An analysis of 1.6 billion temperature records dating as far back as 1800 gave results that are similar to data series by the British Met Office, the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature said in a report published today.

“Our biggest surprise was that the new results agreed so closely with the warming values published previously,” the project’s founder, Richard Muller, said in a statement. “This confirms that these studies were done carefully and that potential biases identified by climate change sceptics did not seriously affect their conclusions.”

The project was established to try to produce a definitive temperature series after climate sceptics – including US senator James Inhofe – said leaked e-mails from the University of East Anglia showed data were manipulated. The British school helps compile the Met Office temperature series.

Three inquiries into the contents of the leaked e-mails found scientists hadn’t manipulated data, though they had tried to avoid disclosing data.

Wonder what Inhofe will say about this? Sent October 21:

We can be glad that the team of scientists from the University of California has verified the data on Earth’s rising temperature, but if the best news we’ve got is that some formerly doubting researchers are now convinced that important data on climate change really and truly wasn’t fabricated, things have gotten pretty grim. Those scientific skeptics may have been well-intentioned, but their stance has been adopted by conservative ideologues in American politics as an excuse for inaction — and by the complacent American news media as a way to avoid doing actual journalistic work. The UC study was commissioned by the ultra-conservative Koch brothers, who have been supporting climate-change denialists for many years, and who must be terribly disappointed by these results.

This is a crisis of the utmost urgency; only a commitment to genuine action from the world’s political leaders would constitute genuinely good news.

I will award one free Internet to anyone who can identify the provenance of this post’s title.