Results from the Berkeley Earth Project fit existing NASA and NOAA temperature records like a glove.
That image spells the death of one of the most popular claims among global warming skeptics and the last gasp of integrity for any who continue to promote it. The Berkeley Earth Project was conceived so that a group of fresh, independent scientists paying special homage to media transparancy and the concerns of climate skeptics would be able to produce "clean" climate data, i.e., data free of the warming distortions skeptics assured us exist. What happened next is one for the ages:
After collecting and crunching the data, the study got results statistically identical with those produced at NOAA, NASA, CRU, and a bunch of other organizations, as shown in the graph at the top of this post. The beautiful part is the study was largely funded by the kind of money — including Koch money — usually intended to buy much more friendly results.
I bet you the usual suspects never make the mistake of using 'independent, impartial scientists' again. But before the most polished and prepared industry funded denialists could get into full damage control mode and cook up their next whopper, it turned into a feeding frenzy. Joe Romm has some
great stuff, as does
Phil Plait,
Kevin Drum, and
Paul Krugman just to name a few.
- Hawaiian astronomers catch a planet being born, and other researchers detect the next step in that development around a nearby star: heavy bombardment in the infant Eta Corvi solar system.
- A little closer to earth -- but soon on the edge of space! -- I got to visit with XCOR Aerospace CEO Jeff Greason this week. I hope to have some material from that chat posted in the near future and if anyone has any follow up questions on the future of NASA and Newspace in general, let fly in comments.
- Science picture of the week via PZ Myers: the other worldly Hydnora africana, it looks like pod-people bulbs placed too near a sleeping Martian, and reportedly smells worse than Rick Perry's flat-tax plan.
- Wall Street job destroyers and class-holes take note: A UC Irvine evolutionary biologist who made a killing in the vineyard business, shows the opposite of the cancerous greed-and-ignorance-are-good sentiment with a whopping $10 million donation to science, his community, and his adopted country:
Francisco J. Ayala, who was once a Dominican priest in his native Spain and who is known for taking on creationists in books and lectures about evolution, said the gift is a way of showing "gratitude" for his 24-year career at UCI.