All is not for the BEST

Remember that BEST study(non-peer reviewed if I might add, as if that matters to the Warmists) that was supposed to blow up the AGW skeptics' case to outer space?

Turns out that the BEST is not good enough-

The skeptics have now counter-attacked Muller and BEST, in a controversy that could swell to Hockey-Stick dimensions.

On October 30, the UK’s Daily Mail interviewed Judith Curry, Muller's second-named co-author of the four Berkeley study papers. Professor Curry chairs the Department of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at the Georgia Institute of Technology.

She said that Muller's claim that he had proved warming skeptics wrong was a 'huge mistake' with no scientific basis. She said the Berkeley data showed that there has been no increase in world temperatures since the end of the Nineties. "This is nowhere near what the climate models were predicting," she said.  In fact the standstill in warming  was making many non-skeptic scientists take the skeptic arguments more seriously, she said.

Curry was not consulted by Muller before Muller published his results to the media. "I think they have made errors and I distance myself from what they did," she said.
She said two of the four papers were not publication-ready and a graph given to the press by Muller involved a 'hide the decline' subterfuge. It was also misleading of Muller to claim that the urban heat island issue had been settled.

-- snip --


High-profile anti-BEST scientist, Fred Singer, is an atmospheric and space physicist. He was, among other things, founding director of the US Weather Satellite Service.  He wrote in the Wall Street Journal (November 3)  that  the BEST study merely re-works the same contaminated temperature data used by the Climategate team, covering less than 30% of the earth’s surface. Even so, a third of the BEST data series show cooling, while the absence of warming in the marine atmosphere suggest solar variability, not CO2, is the main climate driver.

Singer says global warming theory and modeling predict atmospheric warming but weather satellites and weather balloon radiosondes (two independent measures), show no atmospheric warming over the 1987-97 period. He concludes:

The Berkeley team's research paper comments: ‘The human component of global warming may be somewhat overestimated.’ I commend Mr. Muller and his team for their honesty and skepticism. 

Catch it all here.