Cranky Watts was wrong - again

Big news in the world of climate science - physicist Richard Muller's much ballyhooed independent re-assessment of the temperature record over the last hundred years or so is finished.

And guess what:

They say their results line up with previously published studies and suggest that the average global land temperature has risen by roughly 0.9 °C since the 1950s.

Muller says he is surprised at how well the findings line up with previous analyses, which he takes as evidence that the various scientific teams working on these data did indeed go about their work "in a truly unbiased manner". 

Anthony Watts, who early on pinned much hope on this effort showing that silly old climate scientists had stuffed this all up, is very annoyed.   It's not peer reviewed yet, you see.

Somehow, I would be surprised if that makes much of a difference.

Watts puts up the familiar meme we hear all the time from skeptics now: 

And, The Economist still doesn’t get it. The issue of “the world is warming” is not one that climate skeptics question, it is the magnitude and causes.

But remember folks, it was in the last year or so that Watts was on Andrew Bolt's radio show claiming that maybe .5 of a degree of the US temperature record increases of about .7 degree was due to poor siting of temperature stations.  Only problem was, within months of that claim, it was disproved by his own surfacestations project published paper.  Watts wanted people to believe the real temperature rise was so small it was ridiculous to worry about it.

Hey, maybe that's why Watts is so keen on  peer review: it helped prove his own estimates were completely wrong.   But actually, I think it was getting a real climatologist on board - John Neilsen-Gammon - to check the stats that showed up Watts' error even before it went into peer review. This is why I doubt peer review is going to show anything especially wrong with Muller's results.   (Of course, Muller himself is a self promoting show pony who was making big, populist claims about how outrageous the Climategate emails were.   I don't particularly hold him in much regard either, but if he and his team have taken some more wind out of the sails of the likes of Watts, he has done something useful.)

Watts has never apologised for those claims on Australian radio.  He has never explained how he got his own estimate, made so close to the paper being finished, wrong.

Andrew Bolt has never corrected Watts' estimate on his blog. 

The AGW skeptic movement is a sham, and should get out of the way and let real science guide policy response to a (likely) dangerously warming world.