Wall Street Journal Downplays Study Confirming Global Warming
Posted in Main Blog (All Posts) on November 9th, 2011 5:42 am by HL
Wall Street Journal Downplays Study Confirming Global Warming
After ignoring for weeks a new study confirming the accuracy of previous global temperature records, the U.S. print edition of the Wall Street Journal covered the study in an article focusing on the “uncertain nature” of the temperature records.
WSJ Eventually Prints Article About Study — Only To Downplay It
Journal Published Op-Ed Announcing Results Of Study In Its European Paper. The Wall Street Journal only published an op-ed by American physicist Richard Muller, who conducted the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature project, in its European edition and on its website. The op-ed was published on the same day the preliminary reports from the BEST study were released and stated that “Our results turned out to be close to those published by prior groups. We think that means that those groups had truly been very careful in their work, despite their inability to convince some skeptics of that.” [Wall Street Journal,
[Climate4you.com, accessed 11/8/11]
Satellite Temperature Expert: Trends In Surface Data “Are In General Agreement With Satellite Measurements.” Dr. Carl Mears, senior scientist at Remote Sensing Systems, stated in July:
I have carried out a number of comparisons of the various surface datasets (GISS, CRU, and NOAA) with satellite estimates of the lower tropospheric temperature. These led to two basic findings. First, the various surface datasets are in excellent agreement with each other, suggesting that what we call the “structural uncertainty”, i.e. the uncertainty that arises from different choices of analysis method, is relatively small for the surface datasets, which increases our confidence in these datasets.
Second, the both the overall amount of warming and the spatial patterns of warming in the surface datasets are in general agreement with satellite measurements of atmospheric temperature (in this case I am talking about the lower tropopsheric temperature, sometimes called TLT) made by the Microwave Sounding Units (MSUs) and Advanced Microwave Sounding Units (AMSUs). I am the creator of one of these satellite datasets, the Remote Sensing Systems, or RSS, dataset. [Email to Media Matters, via the Climate Science Rapid Response Team, 7/21/11]
Journal Falsely Claims Study Has Been Corrected
Journal: “Feedback Has Led To Updates And Corrections To The Research.” From the November 5 article:
This sort of messy hashing-out of the global climate record is happening in the open because the Berkeley Earth team chose to release its data, and its papers, before undergoing peer review by scientific journals. Already some feedback has led to updates and corrections to the research. Berkeley Earth plans other work, including adding ocean temperature trends to the land records and fixing errors in its database. [Wall Street Journal, 11/5/11]
Muller: “I Can’t Imagine What He Is Referring To.” In response to that passage, Richard Muller wrote “I can’t imagine what he is referring to.” Muller noted that his team had updated data from NASA in a chart, not their own results. [Email to Media Matters, 11/7/11]
