Reposting from Tamino’s blog.
And there still are intelligent people out there, including statistician colleagues, who don’t buy the facts of warming. Generally speaking, they have a look at a few time series and get quickly skeptical, failing to realize that obtaining the warming result, as the BEST project discovered, is a non-trivial business. But, if pursued, in the end, you get the result that Tamino, NASA, NCAR, and the Met Office, Professor Hansen, and others obtain. BEST’s work, by the way, uses some great statistics, including applications of kriging, otherwise known as Best Linear Unbiased Estimation (“BLUE”) applied to spatial fields.
I guess the result will need to be confirmed and reconfirmed in different ways, using different techniques, as is typical in science, and maybe, just maybe, these lingering doubters will be convinced.
As for me, I never needed an observational record to accept the reality of climate disruption: It’s all just basic Physics, people.
Back when Richard Muller announced the formation of the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature project, those who deny the danger from global warming were thrilled. They thought the Berkeley project would prove once and for all just how Earth’s temperature had really changed. More to the point, Muller was skeptical about Earth’s reported temperature history, so they expected it to show that all those other guys — NASA, NOAA, HadCRU — got it wrong. Anthony Watts welcomed it, praised it, and announced that he would accept the results, whatever they were.
When the Berkeley project announced their results, deniers changed their tune. Instead of “showing the love” to Richard Muller and the gang, they turned on them like a pack of wolves. That’s because the Berkeley project showed that all those other guys — NASA, NOAA, HadCRU — got it right.
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ecoquant
667 per centimeter : climate science, quantitative biology, statistics, and energy policy 