Republicans favorite climate skeptic and head of the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature project (BEST), University of California-Berkeley physicist Richard Muller, has already been forced to concede that his preliminary analysis of 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. Yesterday, BEST confirmed these results and others in its first set of published papers about land temperatures. Conclusions:
BEST data significantly reduced uncertainty of IPCC report. Earth is indeed getting warmer. Rate of increase is accelerating. Warming has not abated since 1998. Temperature measuring stations' data are quite reliable. The urban heat island effect--i.e., the theory that rising temperatures around cities might be corrupting the global data--is very small. |