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In reply to the discussion: Bombshell: Koch-Funded Study Finds ‘Global Warming Is Real’ (...and the cause is human.) [View all]caraher
(6,276 posts)Muller said he felt that the grafting of actual temperature records onto tree ring proxy data for a cover illustration was scientific misconduct and he would therefore no longer trust the work of those researchers. He also felt that certain challenges such as the "urban heat island effect" and the claims about NOAA weather station sites not being up to snuff were being given short shrift by established climate scientists.
It's worth noting that the BEST study had many funders, not just Koch. While Muller was the great hope of the denier crowd, I don't think he ever had any intention of doing anything other than going where his data and results took him. Which, of course, was basically exactly where everyone else who'd studied the question in depth went (hardly surprising, when they're looking at essentially the same temperature records).
I think Romm has a tendency to see things in black and white and sort people who aren't 100% with him into the "enemies" category. Muller was never as "skeptical" as Romm and, at times, Muller himself would have us believe.
Meanwhile, bringing up ocean temperatures is just a desperate attempt to change the subject. First, the denier talking point is that the claims of climate change are based on a flawed surface temperature record; when that blows up, they somewhat irrelevantly point out that firmly establishing the validity of surface temperature trends doesn't prove the oceans are warming.