(((Knowledge Ecology)))

Not that this is news to any informed person or climate scientist, but Richard Muller (Berkeley scientist and climate skeptic) initiated the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature (“BEST”) project to critically review climate data. BEST is an organization funded by the Koch foundation of all things (perhaps the nation’s high water mark in terms of organized of climate obfuscation). The Washington Post has the story on Muller’s findings HERE. I give you the following noteworthy sound bite below:

Muller’s stated aims were simple. He and his team would scour and re-analyze the climate data, putting all their calculations and methods online. Skeptics cheered the effort. “I’m prepared to accept whatever result they produce, even if it proves my premise wrong,” wrote Anthony Watts, a blogger who has criticized the quality of the weather stations in the United Statse that provide temperature data. The Charles G. Koch Foundation even gave Muller’s project $150,000 — and the Koch brothers, recall, are hardly fans of mainstream climate science.

So what are the end results? Muller’s team appears to have confirmed the basic tenets of climate science. Back in March, Muller told the House Science and Technology Committee that, contrary to what he expected, the existing temperature data was “excellent.” He went on: “We see a global warming trend that is very similar to that previously reported by the other groups.” And, today, the BEST team has released a flurry of new papers that confirm that the planet is getting hotter. As the team’s two-page summary flatly concludes, “Global warming is real.”