Year 2, Month 10, Day 28: Muller’s Earth

I grew up reading Popular Science (thanks to my Aunt Virginia, who gave me a gift subscription one Christmas and kept renewing it year after year). It was good to see them carry a clearly presented explanation of the UC/Muller study:

Last year, as climate change deniers were up in arms over the so-called “Climategate” controversy involving alleged manipulation of climate data, one skeptical scientist proposed taking a fresh look. Richard Muller, a physicist at the University of California-Berkeley and a self-described climate skeptic, undertook to review the temperature data underlying most global warming studies. Now his team has wrapped up their work, and it apparently solidifies the other studies’ findings.

Actually, the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature project found the Earth is getting even warmer than other climate scientists claim.

The findings have neither been peer-reviewed nor published, so some skeptics and deniers are as yet unsatisfied, but Muller says the group has submitted the papers for publication. Meanwhile, the data is all online for anyone’s review.

I’ve never written to them before. This was fun. Sent October 24:

Now that the data on global warming has been confirmed once again, this time by a denialist-funded study led by prominent “skeptic” Richard Muller, the petro-funded anti-science talking points will have to change. We can say goodbye to “it isn’t happening, therefore it makes no sense to do anything about it,” and say hello to “nobody knows why it’s happening, therefore it makes no sense to do anything about it.”

While Dr. Muller and his colleagues made no attempt to attribute causality, this doesn’t mean that “nobody knows why it’s happening.” The scientific consensus on the primary drivers of global climate change is quite robust: it’s us — human beings, and our relentless consumption of carbon fuels.

Given the grave sociopolitical and environmental consequences of our fossil-fuel addiction, a shift to renewable energy is an absolute necessity even if we ignore global warming. All that is lacking is the will.

Warren Senders