Muller Confirms Climate Change

Berkeley Physicist Richard Muller and his BEST team (Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature Study) have finished their analysis of global temperature studies and have come to a startling conclusion: the Earth is warming substantially, it is largely man-made warming, and the temperature factors cited by the climate skeptics, including Anthony Watts, have at best only a marginal effect on global warming. And this is coming from a KOCH BROS. FUNDED STUDY on climate change, which was undertaken for the purpose of REFUTING the climate change thesis. Furthermore, Muller and his team found that some of the temperature data reported thus far has UNDER-reported the amount of warming that has already taken place.

from Climate Progress:

"Climate Progress actually broke this story back in March — see Exclusive: Berkeley temperature study results “confirm the reality of global warming and support in all essential respects the historical temperature analyses of the NOAA, NASA, and HadCRU.” That was based on an email Climatologist Ken Caldeira sent me after seeing their preliminary results and a public talk by Muller confirming:

• “We are seeing substantial global warming”
• “None of the effects raised by the [skeptics] is going to have anything more than a marginal effect on the amount of global warming.”

But now the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature Study have completed their “independent” analysis of all of the temperature stations and found a rate of warming since the 1950s as high NOAA and NASA and faster than the (much maligned) UK Hadley/CRU data:

I had posted on this story back in March myself on this EcoSoc blog. My money was on Muller, who I believed was a scientist with integrity who wanted to rigorously test the climate change thesis. The kicker was that he took money from the Koch Brothers to finance the project. My hunch was that he would end up proving that the climate change deniers were wrong, that the climate really was warming, and that this would be the ultimate kick in the skeptics' crotch: using Koch Bros. money to refute their own campaign of lies and disinformation. Bravo, Dr. Muller.

See his initial video report here:

Ironically, Muller even discusses the reality of peak oil, as a liquid fuel shortage, but which he believes can be replaced by compressed natural gas.

Global Warming and 'Over-Resonance'

11.16.2010 - Dire messages about global warming can backfire, new study shows

A study from UC Berkeley appears to prove the systems theory of Niklas Luhmann: that dire warnings about ecological disasters, such as global warming, can cause "over-resonance", i.e. a reactive state that actually backfires and undermines an adequate response to the crisis.

Luhmann's Ecological Communication (1989) proposes that social systems lack the capacity to accurately perceive environmental conditions. The usual response of society to environment is "under-resonance," i.e. the social system does not recognize problems in the environment, or just barely. However, when economic, political and scientific systems present information about ecological crisis in an alarming way, it causes social "over-resonance," an "effect-explosion" in which paradoxically, social systems become paralyzed and unable to respond effectively to the problem.

The study from U. C. Berkeley found that when facts about global warming were reported in an alarming way to subjects, they indicated that they doubted the veracity of the report, even among those whose ideals of a "just world" were fairly high. Furthermore, the overwhelmed subjects were less likely to take corrective action to address the problem.

Conversely, when subjects were presented with the same facts on global warming but provided with possible solutions, subjects were more likely to indicate that they believed in the veracity of the report and that they would modify their behaviour to address the problem.