Skeptic finds he now agrees global warming is real

[denverbill]

Source: AP

WASHINGTON (AP) - A prominent physicist and skeptic of global warming spent two years trying to find out if mainstream climate scientists were wrong. In the end, he determined they were right: Temperatures really are rising rapidly.

...

One-quarter of the $600,000 to do the research came from the Charles Koch Foundation, whose founder is a major funder of skeptic groups and the tea party. The Koch brothers, Charles and David, run a large privately held company involved in oil and other industries, producing sizable greenhouse gas emissions.

...


Read more: http://www.9news.com/news/article/227154/188/Skeptic-finds-he-now-agrees-global-warming-is-real-

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Ha-ha! (pointing at the Koch).

Wonder if he'll demand a refund.

As for the scientist, I found it a bit arrogant of him to declare everyone else should have been more skeptical, but that now the HE has investigated it, it's real.

[existentialist]

1. This was also covered, I think in somewhat more depth, by

The Christian Science Monitor, although I don't have the cite handy.

[Boojatta]

2. Does the Charles Koch Foundation own any books by Popper?

According to Popper, a theory is scientific if it can in principle be shown to be false. If in practice a variety of ingenious efforts to show that the theory is false are failed efforts, then the theory has been supported, not knocked down a peg.

If you want to spread misinformation about a scientific question, then the only scientific research that will help you is research into some kind of psychological science of deception.

[caraher]

4. Does the Charles Koch Foundation own any books period?

Besides perhaps stacks of RW "bestsellers" by the ghostwriters for the likes of Palin, the Swift Boat crew, etc.?

[caraher]

3. It's weird how Muller has been proclaimed skeptic-in-chief

His Physics for Future Presidents textbook on balance said warming was real and that much of it was likely human-caused. It's biggest flaw on climate is a false equivalency he draws between "deniers" and "exaggerators."

What I think really happened with Muller was that he thought "ClimateGate" revealed genuine bad conduct and, as a consequence, he declared that he would no longer trust the work of those involved. He also felt that a lot of skeptical arguments deserved their day in court (such as Anthony Watts' work on substandard weather stations in the US and attempts to write off warming as an artifact of the urban "heat island" effect). I think from the start he planned to go only where the data took him, but he became a darling of the denier crowd because he publicly declared some skeptical ideas as worthy of investigation rather than summary dismissal.

I disagree with his judgment on the climate scientists, who are I think rightly pissed off at him for implying their work was compromised by politics. Last March I was at a meeting where one of the authors of the first IPCC report onloaded on Muller over the last five minutes of his talk with a bunch of media quotes, some of whose accuracy Muller (also present) denied. But misquotes or not, Muller has clearly implied that his work is uniquely clean of the taint of politics, which I think is awfully presumptuous of him.

Still, I'm glad he gained the confidence of many leading skeptics and did a data-driven re-analysis, if only because it forced many of those skeptics to either to change their tune (I'm aware of none) or eat their words (the dominant reaction being to retract their earlier support for Muller's project). Yes, we knew most "skepticism" was insincere and politically-motivated, but every piece of additional evidence for that is useful.

I think Muller is just a natural contrarian, which isn't all bad. It's interesting that the fallback position of some deniers is to point out that these are just land surface temperatures Muller has re-examined, when if anything looking at ocean temperatures is actually better proof of warming in the first place. I do think that the more Muller is cast as a "prominent skeptic" the better; I just don't think it was every very accurate based on his textbook and my brief conversations with him.

[ejbr]

5. k & r n/t