Bombshell 2: BEST’s Project Chair Richard Muller confirms ClimateProgress reporting, contradicts WattsUpWithThat

The key conclusions from Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature (BEST) project have been made public by its project chair, Richard Muller.  In a talk Saturday (near the end), Muller explained that BEST has been analyzing large quantities of data, they have started writing a draft report, and what he can say now is:

• “We are seeing substantial global warming”
• “None of the effects raised by the [skeptics] is going to have anything more than a marginal effect on the amount of global warming.”

None of that should be a surprise (except to a few deniers).  If you listen to the entire video (which I don’t recommend without multiple head vises), it’s clear the Muller himself is a volcano of long-debunked denier talking points and misinformation (which I’ll re-debunk later).  So when Muller says the data show “substantial global warming” and the effects raised by the skeptics are “marginal,” you know he’s not overstating things.

Now I hadn’t watched that video when climatologist Ken Caldeira emailed me essentially the same exact set of conclusions, which he asked me to post (see Exclusive: Berkeley temperature study results “confirm the reality of global warming and support in all essential respects the historical temperature analyses of the NOAA, NASA, and HadCRU”).

Again, I thought the conclusions were obvious, but I published his email in part because I wanted to smoke out the deniers.  A number of climate scientists had told me they believed the deniers were working feverishly to change and/or spin the main results.  What I didn’t know — what few people knew — was that the hard-core deniers in fact had unprecedented access to the BEST work-product.  That gives the lie to BEST somehow being a transparent effort to work the data independently and restore “credibility” to the global temperature record, something the record didn’t actually need.

My post was far more successful than I ever imagined.  The deniers — Steven Mosher and Anthony Watts — went ballistic, since they obviously thought they were going to be able to control how the final product was shaped and spun.  As we’ll see, they publicly admitted some astonishing things that truly call into question the objectivity and transparency of BEST WORST [Worst "Objective" Reanalysis of Surface Temperatures].

For instance, although Watts claims to have intimate knowledge of BEST’s work product and claims he’ll abide by their results, his latest blog post is utterly at odds with them.  Also, it seems like the deniers got BEST to post a response to Caldeira on their website saying “The Berkeley Earth team feels very strongly that no conclusions can yet be drawn from this preliminary analysis” — without even realizing that Muller had already drawn the exact same conclusions and publicly announced them!  But I’m getting ahead of myself now.

UPDATE:  The eye-opening transparency blurts from the deniers continue.  As a commenter points out, Mosher now states that he is actively working with BEST.  Guess they’ll have to change the FAQ again!

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UPDATE: NY Times replies to this post

NOTE:  The NY Times has responded to this post (see below).  I have updated two phrases for clarity and posted their response and my reply at the end. Now if I could only get them to post my critiques of their climate coverage!

Robert Brulle:  The NY Times is, at best, oblivious to a blatant conflict of interest. How can we rely on the objectivity of this paper when they are co-sponsoring private conversations among an invited elite in league with the oil industry?

What is the New York Times thinking?  The one-time paper of record has partnered with a major oil company to sponsor a private, elite conversation whereby Shell gets to leverage the credibility of the New York Times brand to attract an elite audience to peddle its greenwashing.

You can find that screenshot and full details at www.2011energysummit.com.  Don’t you just love the wind turbines on a grassy field!  How green Shell is!  My favorite part of the website is the constant loop of favicons (website icons) for Shell and NYT, as if they were almost interchangeable.

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Oil slick near Grand Isle, LA.

Yesterday, as the Obama administration “approved the first deepwater oil and gas exploration plan since last year’s Macondo oil well blowout,” “emulsified oil, oil mousse and tar balls from an unknown source were washing up on beaches from Grand Isle to West Timbalier Island along the Gulf of Mexico, a stretch of about 30 miles.” This new oil spill may be related to an offshore well plug and abandonment project conducted on Saturday. Meanwhile, Shell Offshore won approval to “seek drilling permits for three new wells 130 miles off the Louisiana coast”:

The announcement by Interior Secretary Ken Salazar and Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, Regulation and Enforcement Director Michael Bromwich won praise from the industry and from Louisiana lawmakers who have been pressing the administration to reopen drilling in the Gulf.

Further underscoring the environmental costs of oil, a shipwreck on Nightingale Island in the South Atlantic, is leaking 1,500 tons of heavy crude oil, threatening half of the world’s population of rockhopper penguins.

Oiled rockhopper penguins rescued by Britain’s Royal Society for the Protection of Birds.

Reports of nuclear Renaissance were greatly exaggerated; efficiency is 10 times cheaper today, renewables “costs are dropping fast”

… there is no renaissance.

Even before the earthquake-tsunami one-two punch, the endlessly hyped U.S. nuclear revival was stumbling, pummeled by skyrocketing costs, stagnant demand and skittish investors, not to mention the defeat of restrictions on carbon that could have mitigated nuclear energy’s economic insanity. Obama has offered unprecedented aid to an industry that already enjoyed cradle-to-grave subsidies, and the antispending GOP has clamored for even more largesse. But Wall Street hates nukes as much as K Street loves them, which is why there’s no new reactor construction to freeze. Once hailed as “too cheap to meter,” nuclear fission turns out to be an outlandishly expensive method of generating juice for our Xboxes.

Since 2008, proposed reactors have been quietly scrapped or suspended in at least nine states “” not by safety concerns or hippie sit-ins but by financial realities. Other projects have been delayed as cost estimates have tripled toward $10 billion a reactor, and ratings agencies have downgraded utilities with atomic ambitions. Nuclear Energy Institute vice president Richard Myers notes that the “unrealistic” renaissance hype has come from the industry’s friends, not the industry itself. “Even before this happened, short-term market conditions were bleak,” he tells TIME.

I’ve been arguing for a long time that there was no nuclear Renaissance, that the industry ad failed to get its act in order and had priced itself out of the market (see my 2008 analysis, “The Self-Limiting Future of Nuclear Power“).  Then back in October, Exelon CEO John Rowe explained that Low gas prices and no carbon price push back nuclear renaissance a “decade, maybe two.”

In short, nuclear power has gone from “too cheap to meter” to “too costly to matter” (see Exclusive analysis, Part 1: The staggering cost of new nuclear power).

The meltdown in Japan pulled back the veil on the grim underlying economics of nuclear power and certainly killed the myth that we can afford to skimp on review, oversight, and safety in an effort to save money.

In a must-read piece, “The Real Cost of Nuclear Power” (quoted above), Time explains what CP readers have known for years:

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In December I wrote about a must-read paper, “Climate Change: The Evidence and Our Options” by the great cryo-scientist Lonnie Thompson.  He explained:

… there is now a very clear pattern in the scientific evidence documenting that the earth is warming, that warming is due largely to human activity, that warming is causing important changes in climate, and that rapid and potentially catastrophic changes in the near future are very possible. This pattern emerges not, as is so often suggested, simply from computer simulations, but from the weight and balance of the empirical evidence as well.

While this statement about the science is true — see A stunning year in climate science reveals that human civilization is on the precipice — it was of course widely attacked by the pro-pollution, anti-science crowd.

The Ohio State Alumni Association has published a long follow-up story, “Climate change: Clear and present danger,” that I repost with permission.

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Source of 30-mile oil spill in Gulf puzzles officials

Emulsified oil, oil mousse and tar balls from an unknown source were washing up on beaches from Grand Isle to West Timbalier Island along the Gulf of Mexico, a stretch of about 30 miles, and it was still heading west Monday afternoon, a Louisiana official said. The state is testing the material to see if it matches oil from last April’s BP Deepwater Horizon disaster.

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I’ve focused the food insecurity series on impacts in developing countries.  Food is such a large fraction of their spending — up to 40% in Egypt — that a price spike can be devastating, which is why it often leads to political instability.

We’re not only the richest country in the world but its breakbasket, so price spikes only have a limited impact at a national level.  That said, many of the poor in America are living on the edge, so even moderate price spikes for necessities create hardship.  Corn prices, for instance, have nearly doubled from last year at this time — and corn is indeed now in everything.

The following TP repost looks at U.S. food insecurity — and the GOP reponse.

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