Media downplay climate-debate development
DOI: 10.1063/PT.4.0602
[Original post appears below revisions.]
Second Revision 10/25/11: RealClimate.org has posted “ Berkeley earthquake called off ,” an analysis of the Muller effort and findings. It begins as follows:
Anybody expecting earthshaking news from Berkeley, now that the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature group being led by Richard Muller has released its results, had to be content with a barely perceptible quiver. As far as the basic science goes, the results could not have been less surprising if the press release had said “Man Finds Sun Rises At Dawn.” This must have been something of a disappointment for anyone hoping for something else.
The somewhat lengthy analysis also includes this: "[W]e remain greatly disappointed by Muller’s public communications (e.g. his WSJ op-ed) which appear far more focused on raising his profile than enlightening the public about the state of the science.”
Revised 10/25/11: Eugene Robinson’s 25 October Washington Post column trumpets the Berkeley affirmation of global temperature rise. Robinson begins, “For the clueless or cynical diehards who deny global warming, it’s getting awfully cold out there.”
At first Robinson argues for more than does physicist and former climate skeptic Richard A. Muller, who led the Berkeley study and wrote about it in the Wall Street Journal online. Robinson asserts that “the deniers’ claims about the alleged sloppiness or fraudulence of climate science are wrong.” But in fact, Muller and colleagues have actually affirmed only the reality of warming, and nothing about any anthropogenic cause. Robinson does eventually get to that distinction:
But Muller’s plain-spoken admonition that “you should not be a skeptic, at least not any longer” has reduced many deniers to incoherent grumbling or stunned silence.
Not so, I predict, with the blowhards such as [Republican presidential candidates] Perry, Cain and Bachmann, who, out of ignorance or perceived self-interest, are willing to play politics with the Earth’s future. They may concede that warming is taking place, but they call it a natural phenomenon and deny that human activity is the cause.
It is true that Muller made no attempt to ascertain “how much of the warming is due to humans.” Still, the Berkeley group’s work should help lead all but the dimmest policymakers to the overwhelmingly probable answer.
The headline in the online version, posted on the evening of 24 October, also overstates what Muller did and did not affirm: “The scientific finding that settles the climate-change debate.” But when the morning paper came out the next day, its more modest headline said instead: “Warming to the obvious.”
Robinson closes with another roundhouse swing at presidential candidates:
Nobody’s fudging the numbers. Nobody’s manipulating data to win research grants, as Perry claims, or making an undue fuss over a “naturally occurring” warm-up, as Bachmann alleges. Contrary to what Cain says, the science is real.
It is the know-nothing politicians — not scientists — who are committing an unforgivable fraud.
Original post 10/24/2011: Among the reasons to recognize the name Richard A. Muller — a physics professor at the University of California, Berkeley, and a climate skeptic — is that he published Physics for Future Presidents (W. W. Norton) in 2008. Now online in the Wall Street Journal‘s “Opinion Europe” section — but nowhere else in print or online at the WSJ — Muller has published the op-ed “ The case against global-warming skepticism: There were good reasons for doubt, until now .”
It’s a documented admission that, contrary to assertions from some global-warming deniers, global temperature data really are telling an important warming story. Yet as of early Monday morning, 24 October, three national newspapers are scanting this news.
Underlying Muller’s op-ed are a simple structure and a simple message. It begins by outlining what Muller believes to be “plenty of good reasons why you might be” a global warming skeptic. Then it says, “But now let me explain why you should not be a skeptic, at least not any longer.” He continues:
Over the last two years, the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature Project has looked deeply at all the issues raised above. I chaired our group, which just submitted four detailed papers on our results to peer-reviewed journals. We have now posted these papers online at www.BerkeleyEarth.org to solicit even more scrutiny.
Our work covers only land temperature — not the oceans — but that’s where warming appears to be the greatest. Robert Rohde, our chief scientist, obtained more than 1.6 billion measurements from more than 39,000 temperature stations around the world. Many of the records were short in duration, and to use them Mr. Rohde and a team of esteemed scientists and statisticians developed a new analytical approach that let us incorporate fragments of records. By using data from virtually all the available stations, we avoided data-selection bias. Rather than try to correct for the discontinuities in the records, we simply sliced the records where the data cut off, thereby creating two records from one.
We discovered that about one-third of the world’s temperature stations have recorded cooling temperatures, and about two-thirds have recorded warming. The two-to-one ratio reflects global warming.
Ultimately, Muller’s somewhat technical op-ed closes by observing that although study participants originally had “felt that skeptics had raised legitimate issues,” the study “results turned out to be close to those published by prior groups,” and the study participants therefore “think that means that those groups had truly been very careful in their work, despite their inability to convince some skeptics of that.” Muller adds: “They managed to avoid bias in their data selection, homogenization and other corrections.”
At the very end, Muller writes, “Global warming is real. Perhaps our results will help cool this portion of the climate debate. How much of the warming is due to humans and what will be the likely effects? We made no independent assessment of that.”
Is this newsworthy stuff? If so, it’s notable that a search for “Muller” at the websites of the WSJ itself, and also the Washington Post and the New York Times, yields only a single link to a print-version article of any kind. That’s the Times‘s terse blurb “ Climate skeptics stay unswayed .”
The blogosphere, however — including blogs at the Times and the Post — is full of reports and discussion about this news from Berkeley. It may be worth appending this list of samples:
* Andrew Revkin’s Dot Earth blog posting at the Times, “ Skeptic talking point melts away as an inconvenient physicist confirms warming .”
* The physicist Joe Romm’s Climate Progress blog posting “ Hot dog bites skeptical man: Koch-funded Berkeley temperature study does ‘confirm the reality of global warming .’”
* Brad Plumer’s Washington Post blog posting “ A skeptical physicist ends up confirming climate data .”
* Paul Krugman’s Times blog posting “ More people who can’t handle the truth .”
* Item 3 at a James Fallows posting at the Atlantic, together with Atlantic postings by Kenneth Brower and Alex Eichler .
* “ Climate study does not placate skeptics ” at the Green Blog at the Times.
Steven T. Corneliussen, a media analyst for the American Institute of Physics, monitors three national newspapers, the weeklies Nature and Science, and occasionally other publications. His reports to AIP are collected each Friday for ‘Science and the media.’ He has published op-eds in the Washington Post and other newspapers, has written for NASA’s history program, and is a science writer at a particle-accelerator laboratory.