Breaking News: The Earth Still Goes Around the Sun, and It's Still Warming Up
by Peter Gleick, Forbes, October 20, 2011
Oh, we already knew that.
That’s what crossed my mind today when I read the news release and then the actual scientific papers and then the Wall Street Journal opinion piece about the new conclusions of the study of the Earth’s surface temperature records from the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature (BEST) group.
The scientific community has known — and been saying for decades — that the earth is warming up. Except for a small cadre of highly vocal, ideologically stuck, but increasing marginalized people, there is no dispute about this among scientists. The data are extensive – covering the globe – and they have been vetted, reanalyzed, corrected for error, compared with satellite data, and subjected to every known criticism. And independent group after independent group has found the same thing: the earth is warming. The fact that this is actually old news can be seen in the latest poll (from Stanford University with Ipsos and Reuters) that, despite the inability of all the leading Republican presidential candidates to publicly acknowledge this, even 83% of the American people believe the earth is warming. And there probably isn’t much that 83% of the American people will agree on these days.
Indeed, even most remaining climate change skeptics and deniers have moved away from saying there is no warming. Now, their major talking points are that it isn’t caused by humans, or only a little bit, or it won’t be bad, or we can’t afford to fix it, or… Denial is a moving target.
Nevertheless, among a small group of skeptics there has been a lot of noise denying warming, ostensibly on the grounds that there are problems with the temperature measurements, thermometers, long-term records, methods of analysis, and more. The leading proponent of this view is Anthony Watts, a meteorologist who runs a popular blog site for climate skeptics. Watts has argued for a long time that our temperature records or analyses stink and that we cannot, therefore, believe the scientists who have shown over and over that it is warming. It has always been hard to take Watts seriously, given the massive amounts of evidence for warming, even beyond the clear temperature records themselves: the disappearing glaciers, the disappearing Arctic ice, the changes in migratory patterns for birds, the faster blooming of plants, the more extreme heat waves, the high ratio of record high temperatures to record low temperatures, the movement of plant and pest species toward the poles, the disappearing permafrost, the rising sea levels… I could go on and on. None of this convinces the diehards, though.
Enter the BEST team. Led by a self-proclaimed climate science critic, partly funded by the notorious anti-climate science Koch family (and other less-ideological funders), but joined by some serious highly-regarded scientists such as the 2011 physics Nobel Laureate Saul Perlmutter, statistician Professor Robert Rohde and Dr. Arthur Rosenfeld, the BEST group announced some time ago that they would, once again review millions of temperature records with new eyes, new analysis, new thinking, and new sophisticated tools. Anthony Watts and his fans were thrilled, certain that the results would support their anti-warming beliefs. Watts even said he would accept the BEST findings, whatever they were.
Well, the BEST results are out. And it turns out that the Earth still goes around the Sun, and it is still warming. As the BEST research summary states:
“Global warming is real according to a major study released today. Despite issues raised by climate change skeptics, the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature study finds reliable evidence of a rise in average world land temperature of approximately 1˚C since the mid-1950s…“On the basis of its analysis… the group concluded that earlier studies based on more limited data by teams in the United States and Britain had accurately estimated the extent of land surface warming.”
In other words, the Earth is still warming and at just the rate determined by earlier study after study. The scientific papers from BEST must still undergo final independent peer-review and publication in the scientific literature – and they are now in that process.
To the scientific community, this is not news, but another confirmation of a well-understood fact. Watts, however, as so clearly described by Thomas Kuhn in his groundbreaking 1962 book “The Structure of Scientific Revolutions,” is stuck in his failed paradigm, and has launched a blistering and sorry attack on BEST, now that the science once again contradicts his ideological beliefs. As Kuhn pointed out, some in our society are simply never able to accept new science when it contradicts their core beliefs.
I do not expect the new BEST results to change the minds of the remaining 17% who are unsure or don’t believe the Earth is warming. If all of the previous, massive, compelling evidence failed to convince them, this new test won’t help either. Indeed, climate change is a scary prospect. And there is still plenty to argue about – especially what to do about these increasingly severe climate changes. But perhaps the new results will make it easier for the media and policy makers to stop paying attention to the diminishing, illogical, and unsupportable (albeit loud) voices that continue to deny warming and help them focus on the real question facing us: What do we do about it?
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