Results from the Berkeley Earth project data fits existing NASA and NOAA temperature records like a glove
Anthony Watts announced he’s taking the weekend off. But TPM has the back story up on their front page with the header “Climate Change Deniers Abandon ‘Befuddled Warmist’ Physicist Who Came Around On Global Warming”. Specifically that’s Richard Muller, a UC Berkeley physicist who now seems to accept the consensus that the earth is indeed warming:
Muller didn’t reject climate science per se, but he was a skeptic, and a convenient one for big polluters and conservative anti-environmentalists — until Muller put their money where his mouth was, and launched the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature project, in part with a grant from the Charles G. Koch foundation. After extensive study, he’s concluded that the existing science was right all along — that the earth’s surface is warming, at an accelerating rate.
It struck me reading some of the comments on Watts’ site that he may feel he’s in a real bind. That he has to stick by his guns, even when they run dry, because accepting the facts will deprive him of traffic and threaten his livelihood. As a veteran professional blogger I sympathize, but I also challenge that premise. I can think of at least two big successful blogs, Balloon Juice and Little Green Footballs, where the blogger switched gears dramatically based on evidence, and not only did they both survive, they both prospered. Maybe Watts should give his readers some credit, maybe they actually value honesty? More on this later.
Can you point me to specific posts where BJuice and LGF did such a thing? I don’t normally read them. But I’m always saddened by the tendency of the discourse to stick to positions even in the face of evidence, and I’d like to examine a couple of situations in which that was dramatically not the case.
You had to be reading them pretty regularly to see the change, but every now and then Charles or John will make mention to how much they’ve changed. I believe John did something like that a few days ago when the end of the Iraq War was announced if memory serves.