The Incidence of Solipsism Among Physicists

The incidence of solipsism  among physicists is high.  In Richard Muller it is ginormous.  Writing in the NY Times (as rumor had it.  Rumor was right as they say), Muller does a full reverse Lomborg,  "I used to be an X, but now, I am a Y and proud of it.

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. 

My total turnaround, in such a short time, is the result of careful and objective analysis by the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature project, which I founded with my daughter Elizabeth. 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. 

 Muller's doubts were, of course, what a bunny reads everyday at numerous blogs, urban heating, it's the sun, surface stations ain't perfect and so on.  And, of course, Muller and Ralph Robert Rohde [update:  Sincere apologies and thanks to the Weasel for pointing this faux pas out, but the initials are good anyway RR] (who did the heavy lifting) found what everyone else has found, that none of this makes a dime's worth of difference, but, of course, since Muller showed it, it must be right.

This ain't saying that the BEST project was useless, they have developed some interesting methods, and  pushed the surface temperature instrumental record back somewhat.  It wasn't that others were unaware of such records, but the level of trust was, let us say, about where Michael Mann stands in Steve McIntyre's mind.  Eli remembers a talk Drew Shindell gave about 10-15 years ago asking "Who should we trust about 19th century temperatures:  Models or data"  and the answer was, well, who knows.

To give an idea about how the records stand, take a peek at the Eli Rabett Mann Muller curves with MBH98 on the top scaled to MR2012 on the bottom.  FWIW, the proxy's show less uncertainty compared to the BEST surface temperature record

The news, such as it is, is that the Berkeley group has posted its manuscripts

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.

The language is interesting.  Sure sounds like, well, you need to think about some of this stuff more clearly.  The language at the BEST Blog

The Berkeley Earth team has already started to benefit from feedback from our peers, so these figures are more up-to-date than the figures in our papers submitted for peer review (see below). 

and

Submitted for publication in JGR Atmospheres

Has the hint of them being slam dunked at Science, Nature and GRL, but JGR is an excellent journal.  Eli, being the suspicious type would bet that the referees reports were the equivalent of did you think we fell off the turnip truck? Other people figured this out years ago, your data set is interesting, but just because something is new to you, don't mean it is new to the world.

OTOH, since it ain't Tuesday (the deadline) these papers can be considered by the IPCC under their gray literature rules.  Eli has been known to publish in arXiv.