A prominent US physicist and sceptic of global warming spent two years trying to find out if mainstream climate scientists were wrong.
In the end, he determined they were right: temperatures really are rising rapidly.
The study of the world’s surface temperatures by Richard Muller was partially bankrolled by a foundation connected to global warming deniers.
He pursued long-held sceptic theories in analysing the data. He was spurred to action because of “Climategate”, a British scandal involving hacked emails of scientists.
Yet he found that the land is 1C warmer than in the 1950s. Those numbers from Muller, who works at the University of California, Berkeley, and Lawrence Berkeley National Lab, match those by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and NASA.
He said he went even further back, studying readings from Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson. His ultimate finding of a warming world, to be presented at a conference on Monday, is no different from what mainstream climate scientists have been saying for decades.
What’s different, and why everyone from opinion columnists to the satirical The Daily Show is paying attention is who is behind the study.
A quarter of the $US600,000 ($A560,000) to do the research came from the Charles Koch Foundation, whose founder is a major funder of sceptic groups and the conservative tea party movement.
The Koch brothers, Charles and David, run a large privately held company involved in oil and other industries, producing sizable greenhouse gas emissions.
Muller’s research team carefully examined two chief criticisms by sceptics. One is that weather stations are unreliable; the other is that cities, which create heat islands, were skewing the temperature analysis.
“The sceptics raised valid points and everybody should have been a sceptic two years ago,” Muller said in a telephone interview.
“And now we have confidence that the temperature rise that had previously been reported had been done without bias.”
Muller said that he came into the study “with a proper scepticism”, something scientists “should always have. I was somewhat bothered by the fact that there was not enough scepticism” before.
There is no reason now to be a sceptic about steadily increasing temperatures, Muller wrote recently in The Wall Street Journal’s editorial pages, a place friendly to climate change sceptics.
Muller did not address in his research the cause of global warming. The overwhelming majority of climate scientists say it’s man-made from the burning of fossil fuels such as coal and oil. Nor did his study look at ocean warming, future warming and how much of a threat to mankind climate change might be.
Still, Muller said it makes sense to reduce the carbon dioxide created by fossil fuels.
“Greenhouse gases could have a disastrous impact on the world,” he said.
Still, he contends that threat is not as proven as the Nobel Prize-winning Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change says it is.
On Monday, Muller is taking his results - four separate papers that are not yet published or peer-reviewed, but will be, he says - to a conference in Santa Fe, New Mexico, expected to include many prominent sceptics as well as mainstream scientists.
“Of course he’ll be welcome,” said Petr Chylek of Los Alamos National Lab, a noted sceptic and the conference organiser.
“The purpose of our conference is to bring people with different views on climate together, so they can talk and clarify things.”
Muller’s study found that sceptics’ concerns about poor weather station quality didn’t skew the results of his analysis because temperature increases rose similarly in reliable and unreliable weather stations.
He also found that while there is an urban heat island effect making cities warmer, rural areas, which are more abundant, are warming, too.
Among many climate scientists, the reaction was somewhat of a yawn.
“After lots of work he found exactly what was already known and accepted in the climate community,” said Jerry North, a Texas A&M University atmospheric sciences professor who headed a National Academy of Sciences climate science review in 2006.
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