Good science reconfirms its results

[drwex]

Another group of climate-change skeptics has done even more extensive analyses and re-analyses of temperature measurement data and come to the same conclusion: http://arstechnica.com/science/news/2011/10/climate-skeptics-perform-independent-analysis-finally-convinced-earth-is-getting-warmer.ars

"Our biggest surprise was that the new results agreed so closely with the warming values published previously by other teams in the US and the UK," said Richard Muller. "This confirms that these studies were done carefully and the potential biases identified by climate change skeptics did not seriously affect their conclusions."

As I've said before, the majority of people who doubt that man-made global warming is happening are like the people who still think cigarettes don't cause cancer. But it's good to see earlier results re-confirmed. The group appears to have been testing two of the more rational skeptical challenges - urbanization as a bias in temperature records, and confusion with short-term reversals and local trends. Both factors were shown not to be significant in the overall picture.

Comments

[feste-sylvain.livejournal.com]

They also showed an increase in global temperature since 1980 to be 1.0 degrees Celsius, which lines up with several studies but is significantly less than many popular claims.

If only as much science were applied to the counter-warming proposals as is being applied to a description of the problem...

Not to mention bad politics

[drwex]

Most of the counter-warming proposals scare the pants off of me. They seem to range from the outright whacky ("Let's re-terraform the planet!") to the greedy grabby ("Let's create a cap-and-trade system where we give away rights at a predetermined price so people can pollute even more!")

There are plenty of societies on the planet right now where people enjoy good standards of living and produce way less greenhouse gases than the U.S. proposes. But everyone seems to dismiss them more or less out of hand, as if simply asserting "it can't work here" was evidence of anything other than the speaker's pig-headedness.