Why Do They Keep Lying? Because They're Scientists, Dammit!

Last week scientists from the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperatures project (BEST) at Berkeley, California (where else, of course), published their study claiming that once again the science was all settled--global warming is real, the planet has warmed one degree centigrade since 1950, and that warming is continuing. 

Professor Richard Muller, of Berkeley University in California, and his colleagues from the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperatures project team (BEST) claimed to have shown that the planet has warmed by almost a degree  centigrade since 1950 and is warming continually. Published last week ahead of a major United Nations climate summit in Durban, South Africa, next month, their work was cited around the world as irrefutable evidence that only the most stringent measures to reduce carbon dioxide emissions can save civilisation as we know it.

In other words, all of you unbelieving climate skeptics need to shut the hell up and get out of the way of right minded people trying to save the planet.

Of course, what they didn't mention is that one of the study's co-authors threw the bullshit flag and said that's not what the study showed.

Prof Judith Curry, who chairs the Department of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at America’s prestigious Georgia Institute of Technology, said that Prof Muller’s claim that he has proven global warming sceptics wrong was also a ‘huge mistake’, with no  scientific basis.  Prof Curry is a distinguished climate researcher with more than 30 years experience and the second named co-author of the BEST project’s four research papers.

It seems that Prof Muller published the studies before they were peer reviewed, and the graph he submitted with his press release was inaccurate, hiding the fact that global temperatures have not increased for 13 years despite rising CO2 levels.

Prof Muller defended his  behaviour yesterday, saying that all he was doing was ‘returning to traditional peer review’, issuing draft papers to give the whole ‘climate community’ a chance to comment.  As for the press release, he claimed he was ‘not seeking  publicity’, adding: ‘This is simply a way of getting the media to report this more accurately.’  He said his decision to publish was completely unrelated to the forthcoming United Nations  climate conference.  This, he said, was ‘irrelevant’, insisting that nothing could have been further from his mind than trying to influence it.

 Oh really? Nothing could have been further from your mind while you sabotaged the peer review process and published a misleading graph conveniently leaving out the halt in global warming?  Why should anyone complain--you were only emulating the lying con men at East Anglia University who conveniently lost all of the data behind their claims to keep others from duplicating their analysis because it was all for the morally superior crusade against man-caused global warming.  (And no one has yet to explain why global warming is a bad thing--think of all the new agricultural growing areas we'd gain in Siberia and Canada... maybe we could even grow grapes again in Greenland like they did several hundred years ago.)

Thank God there are still scientists out there with the integrity of Prof Curry.  The rest should be treated like the con men they are.

Hat tip: Small Dead Animals