Climate Bombshell: Koch-Funded Study Finds ‘Global Warming Is Real’, ‘On The High End’ And ‘Essentially All’ Due To Carbon Pollution 
 
 “The decadal land-surface average temperature using a 10-year moving average of surface temperatures over land. Anomalies are relative to the Jan 1950 – December 1979 mean. The grey band indicates 95% statistical and spatial uncertainty interval.” A Koch-funded reanalysis of 1.6 billion temperature reports finds that “essentially all of this increase results from the human emission of greenhouse gases.” Via BEST. 
 
 The Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature Study (BEST) is poised to release its findings next week on the cause of recent global warming. 
 
 UPDATE (9 pm, 7/28): A NY Times op-ed by Richard Muller, BEST’s Founder and Scientific Director, has been published, “The Conversion of a Climate-Change Skeptic.” 
 
 Here is the money graf: 
 
 CALL me a converted skeptic. Three years ago I identified problems in previous climate studies that, in my mind, threw doubt on the very existence of global warming. Last year, following an intensive research effort involving a dozen scientists, I concluded that global warming was real and that the prior estimates of the rate of warming were correct. I’m now going a step further: Humans are almost entirely the cause. 
 
 Yes, yes, I know, the finding itself is “dog bites man.” What makes this “man bites dog” is that Muller has been a skeptic of climate science, and the single biggest funder of this study is the “Charles G. Koch Charitable Foundation ($150,000).” The Kochs are the leading funder of climate disinformation in the world! 
 
 It gets better: 
 
 Our results show that the average temperature of the earth’s land has risen by two and a half degrees Fahrenheit over the past 250 years, including an increase of one and a half degrees over the most recent 50 years. Moreover, it appears likely that essentially all of this increase results from the human emission of greenhouse gases. These findings are stronger than those of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the United Nations group that defines the scientific and diplomatic consensus on global warming. 
 
 In short, a Koch-funded study has found that the IPCC “consensus” underestimated both the rate of surface warming and how much could be attributed to human emissions! 
 
 UPDATE (9 AM, 7/29): The UK Guardian has a good story up, “Climate change study forces sceptical scientists to change minds: Earth’s land shown to have warmed by 1.5C over past 250 years, with humans being almost entirely responsible.” 
 
 And here’s an amusing tweet from a top U.S. climatologist, Michael Mann: 
 
 Below is some background on BEST followed by a longer excerpt of the op-ed. 
 
 A group of scientists led by one well-known skeptic, Muller — and whose only climatologist listed is Judith Curry, a well-known confusionist [see Schmidt and Annan and Steig andVerheggen, and CP] — decided to reexamine all of the temperature data they could get their hands on. I broke the story of their initial findings in March 2011 (with the help of climatologist Ken Caldeira) — 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.” 
 
 The top figure is an updated chart of their findings from March of this year. They found a lot of warming. 
 
 Indeed, their key paper from 2011 found: 
 
 … our analysis suggests a degree of global land-surface warming during the anthropogenic era that is consistent with prior work (e.g. NOAA) but on the high end of the existing range of reconstructions. 
 
 So the only remaining question for BEST was: What is the cause of that warming? Of course, those who read ClimateProgress or the scientific literature already knew the answer to that question (see the 12/11 post, It’s “Extremely Likely That at Least 74% of Observed Warming Since 1950″ Was Manmade; It’s Highly Likely All of It Was). 
 
 BEST is set to release those findings this week. The excellent UK Guardian reporter, Leo Hickman, tweeted earlier today that “Significant climate-related news will be breaking on Guardian website in next 24-36 hours” and then he tweeted an hour ago the link to the excerpt of Muller’s op-ed. 
 
 Here is more of the op-ed: 
 
 How definite is the attribution to humans? The carbon dioxide curve gives a better match than anything else we’ve tried. Its magnitude is consistent with the calculated greenhouse effect — extra warming from trapped heat radiation. These facts don’t prove causality and they shouldn’t end skepticism, but they raise the bar: to be considered seriously, an alternative explanation must match the data at least as well as carbon dioxide does. 
 
 Well, in fact, to be seriously considered, an alternative explanation must match the data at least as well as does CO2 — and it must offer some mechanism that counteracts the well-known warming effect of CO2. Not bloody likely. 
 
 The careful analysis by our team is laid out in five scientific papers now online at BerkeleyEarth.org. That site also shows our chart of temperature from 1753 to the present, with its clear fingerprint of volcanoes and carbon dioxide, but containing no component that matches solar activity. Four of our papers have undergone extensive scrutiny by the scientific community, and the newest, a paper with the analysis of the human component, is now posted, along with the data and computer programs used. Such transparency is the heart of the scientific method; if you find our conclusions implausible, tell us of any errors of data or analysis. What about the future? As carbon dioxide emissions increase, the temperature should continue to rise. I expect the rate of warming to proceed at a steady pace, about one and a half degrees over land in the next 50 years, less if the oceans are included. But if China continues its rapid economic growth (it has averaged 10 percent per year over the last 20 years) and its vast use of coal (it typically adds one new gigawatt per month), then that same warming could take place in less than 20 years. Science is that narrow realm of knowledge that, in principle, is universally accepted. I embarked on this analysis to answer questions that, to my mind, had not been answered. I hope that the Berkeley Earth analysis will help settle the scientific debate regarding global warming and its human causes. 
 
 Hope springs eternal. Unless, you’re a denier. Then the expression is “nope springs eternal.” 
 
 I asked Caldeira for a comment on Muller’s op-ed. He writes: 
 
 I am glad that Muller et al have taken a look at the data and have come to essentially the same conclusion that nearly everyone else had come to more than a decade ago. The basic scientific results have been established for a long time now, so I do not see the results of Muller et al as being scientifically important. However, their result may be politically important. It shows that even people who suspect climate scientists of being charlatans, when they take a hard look at the data, see that the climate scientists have been right all along. 
 
 Who’d have thunk it? Not the Kochs…. ||||| Climatologist Michael Mann has sued two organizations that have accused him of improperly manipulating data 
 
 Michael Mann, an influential climatologist who has spent years in the center of the debate over climate science, has sued two organizations that have accused him of academic fraud and of improperly manipulating data. 
 
 Mann, director of Pennsylvania State University's Earth System Science Center, on Monday sued the National Review and the Competitive Enterprise Institute, along with two of their authors, Rand Simberg and Mark Steyn. 
 
 The lawsuit, Mann's lawyer said in a statement, was based upon their "false and defamatory statements" accusing him of academic fraud and comparing him to a convicted child molester, former Penn State assistant football coach Jerry Sandusky. 
 
 Neither Mann nor his lawyer, John B. Williams of the Washington, D.C.-based law firm Cozen O'Connor, were available for comment Tuesday afternoon. But on Facebook, where news of the lawsuit was initially posted Tuesday, Mann said the lawsuit was part of "a battle" to assist climate scientists in the fight against those who attack their work. 
 
 "There is a larger context for this latest development," he wrote, "namely the onslaught of dishonest and libelous attacks that climate scientists have endured for years by dishonest front groups seeking to discredit the case for concern over climate change." 
 
 But he faces a high bar: Mann has played a key role in climate science for decades, and the law generally requires a much higher burden of proof from public figures, said CEI general counsel Sam Kazman. 
 
 "I don't think he's got a shot at reaching it," Kazman said in an interview. "Our stuff may have been debatable, but it was solidly based and we had a perfect right to say what we did." 
 
 "We plan to defend the suit vigorously but we think it is a totally unfounded lawsuit." 
 
 In 1999 Mann published a timeline of global temperatures stretching back almost 1,000 years. The graph showed a fairly stable trend until 1900, when temperatures spiked sharply upward. That so-called "hockey stick" diagram became a lightning rod in the debate on whether humans were influencing the climate. 
 
 In 2007 he shared the Nobel Peace Prize with former Vice President Al Gore and authors of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report for work connecting human activities to global warming. 
 
 $500,000 and two years 
 
 Two years later a cache of emails illegally obtained from University of East Anglia in the United Kingdom purported to show climate scientists manipulating data. Many of the emails were to or from Michael Mann. 
 
 Upwards of seven organizations, from the National Science Foundation to Penn State, conducted investigations into Mann's work. All declared baseless allegations of academic fraud. 
 
 Yet the attacks persisted: Virginia Attorney General spent $500,000 and two years unsuccessfully suing to obtain email correspondence from the University of Virginia, where Mann worked from 1999 to 2005. ||||| Advertisement Continue reading the main story 
 
 An American scientist accused of manipulating research findings on climate science was cleared of that charge by his university on Thursday, the latest in a string of reports to find little substance in the allegations known as Climategate. 
 
 An investigative panel at Pennsylvania State University, weighing the question of whether the scientist, Michael E. Mann, had “seriously deviated from accepted practices within the academic community for proposing, conducting or reporting research or other scholarly activities,” declared that he had not. 
 
 Dr. Mann said he was gratified by the findings, the second report from Penn State to clear him. An earlier report had exonerated him of related charges that he suppressed or falsified data, destroyed e-mail and misused confidential information. 
 
 The new report did criticize him on a minor point, saying that he had occasionally forwarded to colleagues copies of unpublished manuscripts without the explicit permission of their authors. 
 
 The allegations arose after private e-mail messages between Dr. Mann and other scientists were purloined from a computer at the University of East Anglia, in Britain, and posted on the Internet. In one, a British researcher called a data-adjustment procedure Dr. Mann used a “trick.” 
 
 The e-mail messages led climate-change skeptics to accuse mainstream researchers, including Dr. Mann, of deliberately manipulating the findings of climate science in order to strengthen their case that human activity is causing the earth to warm up. 
 
 “I’m aware, and many researchers now are keenly aware, of the depths to which the climate-change disinformation movement is willing to sink, to the point where they’re willing to criminally break into a university server and steal people’s personal e-mail messages,” Dr. Mann said in an interview. 
 
 Like the earlier report from Penn State, the new one was assailed Thursday by advocacy groups skeptical of the case for human-induced climate change. 
 
 “It’s no surprise that it’s a whitewash of Dr. Mann’s misconduct, because it was designed to be a whitewash,” said Myron Ebell, director of energy and global warming policy at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, a Washington advocacy group. He accused the panel of failing to interview important witnesses. 
 
 The panel did not try to vet the accuracy of the science published by Dr. Mann, including a famous finding that the temperature of the earth had jumped recently, compared with past climate inferred from indicators like tree rings. Instead, it examined his methodology — his analytical techniques, his willingness to share data with those skeptical of his findings and the like. The panel unanimously found his approach “well within the range of accepted practices.” 
 
 Two inquiries in Britain have largely exonerated the scientists there who were caught up in Climategate, though one report did offer minor criticism of statistical techniques. 
 
 Dr. Mann remains under investigation by the attorney general of Virginia for research he did at the University of Virginia. ||||| Mitt Romney is still trying to plant himself in the global warming skeptic camp. 
 
 "My view is that we don’t know what’s causing climate change on this planet," the GOP presidential front-runner said Thursday during a fundraiser in Pittsburgh. "And the idea of spending trillions and trillions of dollars to try to reduce CO2 emissions is not the right course for us." 
 
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 The liberal blog Think Progress released a video and a transcript of the exchange Friday. 
 
 Romney’s doubts about climate science — countering the widespread understanding that human activity and greenhouse gas emissions are a contributing factor to rises in global temperatures — have become a regular feature in his presidential campaign and represent a gradual rightward shift for someone who once considered putting a limit on power plant emissions. 
 
 In late August, as conservative lawmakers questioned his stance on the topic, Romney tried to align himself with those who dispute global warming science by questioning the role that humans play. 
 
 "Do I think the world's getting hotter? Yeah, I don't know that, but I think that it is," Romney said in New Hampshire, according to Reuters. "I don't know if it's mostly caused by humans." 
 
 Romney aides argued then that he wasn’t changing his position, noting that he’d made a similar case in his book "No Apology." 
 
 "I believe that climate change is occurring — the reduction in the size of global ice caps is hard to ignore,” he wrote. “I also believe that human activity is a contributing factor. I am uncertain how much of the warming, however, is attributable to man and how much is attributable to factors out of our control." 
 
 But in June, Romney ignited a conservative firestorm when he seemed to walk a bit too close to the line. 
 
 "I don't speak for the scientific community, of course, but I believe the world is getting warmer, and I believe that humans have contributed to that," he said. "I can't prove that, but I believe based on what I read that the world is getting warmer. 
 
 "No. 2, I believe that humans contribute to that," Romney continued. "I don't know how much our contribution is to that, because I know there's been periods of greater heat and warmth than in the past, but I believe we contribute to that. And so I think it's important for us to reduce our emissions of pollutants and greenhouse gases that may well be significant contributors to the climate change and global warming that you're seeing." 
 
 As Massachusetts governor, Romney in 2005 considered signing onto the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative, a multistate cap-and-trade compact for power plant emissions. But he backed away from the program, citing a lack of economic safeguards. 
 
 This article first appeared on POLITICO Pro at 11:25 a.m. on October 28, 2011.
– Physicist Richard Muller co-founded the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature project three years ago to debunk global warming fears, even getting a hefty grant from the conservative Koch brothers for his work. Last fall, he backtracked a bit, admitting the evidence for global warming was solid, but denying you could prove humanity was the cause. Today, however, even that last caveat is gone, he writes in the New York Times. "Call me a converted skeptic," Muller writes. "Humans are almost entirely the cause." Muller is still skeptical about alarmists, though, and thinks there is no connection between global warming and Hurricane Katrina or dying polar bears or anything like that. But he is certain that people are causing the world to heat up, a process that will go much faster in the future as China continues to develop. Not everyone is so impressed by Muller's conversion. "I am glad that Muller et al. have taken a look at the data and have come to essentially the same conclusion that nearly everyone else had come to more than a decade ago," one climatologist tells Think Progress. Click for Muller's full column.