Shameless

Have they no shame? Of course not, when hundreds of billions of dollars and careers are on the line global warming alarmists pull out all the stops. Fortunately there are scientists with integrity to expose the frauds. The Daily Mail has the story:

It was hailed as the scientific study that ended the global warming debate once and for all – the research that, in the words of its director, ‘proved you should not be a sceptic, at least not any longer’.

Professor Richard Muller, of Berkeley University in California, and his colleagues from the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperatures project team (BEST) claimed to have shown that the planet has warmed by almost a degree  centigrade since 1950 and is warming continually.

Published last week ahead of a major United Nations climate summit in Durban, South Africa, next month, their work was cited around the world as irrefutable evidence that only the most stringent measures to reduce carbon dioxide emissions can save civilisation as we know it.

It was cited uncritically by, among others, reporters and commentators from the BBC, The Independent, The Guardian, The Economist and numerous media outlets in America.

The Washington Post said the BEST study had ‘settled the climate change debate’ and showed that anyone who remained a sceptic was committing a ‘cynical fraud’.

But today The Mail on Sunday can reveal that a leading member of Prof Muller’s team has accused him of  trying to mislead the public by hiding the fact that BEST’s research shows global warming has stopped.

Prof Judith Curry, who chairs the Department of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at America’s prestigious Georgia Institute of Technology, said that Prof Muller’s claim that he has proven global warming sceptics wrong was also a ‘huge mistake’, with no  scientific basis.

Prof Curry is a distinguished climate researcher with more than 30 years experience and the second named co-author of the BEST project’s four research papers.

Read the whole thing here.

UPDATE: Charlie Martin over at PJ Media discusses this and surrounding controversies and links to Dr. Curry's blog posting on the subject [here]. It appears that the WSJ article cites Dr. Curry accurately, but couches her comments in terms that are more inflammatory than those with which she is comfortable. The essential point is that the data set is good, but that the interpretation placed on it by the lead investigator is not supportable. The published interpretation does indeed "hide" the recent decline in temperatures, but she in no way attributes that to a conspiracy. Such attributions, she suggests, are due to journalistic excess.