Debunking Sunday Part I: Climate Change
So Republicans have been paying people to “cloud” the issue of Climate Change for decades now. University of California-Berkeley physicist is one of those people. But when he actually tried to disprove climate change, the results he reached were not to the liking of his benefactors.
[I]n 2010 he started up the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature project (BEST) to show the world how to do climate analysis right. Who better, after all? “Muller’s views on climate have made him a darling of skeptics,” said Scientific American, “and newly elected Republicans in the House of Representatives, who invited him to testify to the Committee on Science, Space and Technology about his preliminary results.” The Koch Foundation, founded by the billionaire oil brothers who have been major funders of the climate-denial machine, gave BEST a $150,000 grant.
But Muller’s congressional testimony last March didn’t go according to plan. He told them a preliminary analysis suggested that the three main climate models in use today—each of which uses a different estimating technique, and each of which has potential flaws—are all pretty accurate: Global temperatures have gone up considerably over the past century, and the increase has accelerated over the past few decades. Yesterday, BEST confirmed these results and others in its first set of published papers about land temperatures. (Ocean studies will come later.) […]
In the press release announcing the results, Muller said, “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.” In other words, climate scientists know what they’re doing after all.
Republican efforts to cloud the debate has prevented the human race from dealing with climate change. And so when the consequences of their lies and obstruction devastate the Earth, I only hope only Republicans suffer from it. Unfortunately, that won’t happen.
I couldn’t agree more about the importance of the Berkeley Earth results, and I’m hoping we can move this issue into actual science-based discussions of impact and amelioration.
The only place I differ is
Republican efforts to cloud the debate has prevented the human race from dealing with climate change.
Not that I think you’re wrong about the GOPers, but that I think you’re overstating our impact on the rest of the world. We’re way too egocentric.
Much of Europe has been moving to deal with this issue with or without US leadership.
And I don’t think the old men in Bejing are being influenced to ignore climate change by the GOP. They are ignoring it from cold calculation, and they would be able to ignore it even if we were lock stock and barrel onboard with it because they own such a large chunk of our economy.
There is much to love about this story — not the least of which is that it reinforces the point that the dissension about climate change is a political conversation — not a scientific one. So when a scientist got the money to fight science with more science, the science won. As in there are more objective facts in this climate change business than those opposed to what it means want you to know about.
There’s lots of effort worldwide to ameliorate the effects of climate change or to do some work to turn back the clock. The Europeans have agreed to aggressive goals (work towards those goals have been adding to the economy there). US leadership has been lacking, and is needed (whether China goes or not) because the US can reset the value for alternate and cleaner energy because the size of our markets. The Chinese are already better positioned in terms of technology — even though they are building plenty of dirty energy sources, they are investing heavily in plant and installation of alternate sources. So while the GOP and their Dem enablers keep fighting the battles of dirty energy, the Chinese are at least investing in being able to sell us alternative technologies whenever we get there. But the US making large reductions in consumption of fossil fuels would be a global markets game-changer — whether the Chinese do it or not. And could force them into more reductions than they’ve been ready to do.
You do know that the Koch brothers provided funding for the BEST studies. Thanks for proving global warming, Koch brothers!