Remember when physicist Richard Muller was called to testify in the House by denialist Republicans who thought he'd debunk global warming, and he ended up supporting it instead? That was fun! And it just happened again on a grander scale. Muller's group at Berkeley, which was funded in part by the Charles G. Koch foundation, has reexamined (with a skeptical eye, of course) a metric crapload of climate information — including data from the University of East Anglia, i.e. Climategate Central. Their conclusion? "Global warming is real." Direct quote.
"Our biggest surprise was that the new results agreed so closely with the warming values published previously by other teams in the US and the UK," said Professor Muller.
"This confirms that these studies were done carefully and that potential biases identified by climate change sceptics did not seriously affect their conclusions."
You don't say.
Now, the results haven't been peer-reviewed yet, so it might not be time to start demanding that Anthony Watts drink beer out of his shoe. But in fact, Watts has promised to abide by whatever results the Berkeley group came up with, "even if it proves my premise wrong," so it'll be interesting to see what he and other prominent skeptics do once the paper is published. Probably just click their tongues and say "so sad — another good scientist corrupted by the Conspiracy."
