Koch Brothers Accidentally Prove The Earth Is Warming

If you ever dig deep into the world of climate change deniers, you’ll find that it’s a pretty small group. There are professional deniers, generally scientists who are cited by politicians. The deniers come in different flavors: there are the “world is actually cooling ones,” there are “God wouldn’t do that” ones, there are “the world is warming but that’s good” ones, there are the “it’s natural – sunspots or volcanoes” types and there are the ones who think that the data is exaggerated.

Richard Muller is a physicist and well-known critic of global warming science. He believes that the temperature data that is widely cited is inaccurate, so he began a study, funded by the Koch brothers, to re-examine the temperature record. He presented his preliminary data at a Congressional hearing as a witness called by the Republicans.

Back to Muller for a second: He’s a physics professor at Berkeley, and he’s known for butting heads with passionate members of the world-is-warming crowd. (For the sake of clarity, and because it bears repeating: virtually every scientist on Earth is a member of the world-is-warming crowd.) Muller believes the world is warming, too–but not as much as some people say it is. He’s called Al Gore an “extremist” and an “alarmist,” and he thinks the climate data that the U.N. works from has some major holes in it.

That’s how this latest study came about–it’s Muller’s attempt to patch up those holes. “There are all kinds of things that can bias temperature readings, making them cooler or warmer than they should be,” explains Ian Sample at The Guardian. “An oft-cited example is that a temperature station that was in a rural environment fifty years ago might today be on the fringes of a city, and feel more heat as a result.”

Muller’s team collected a bunch of data with the aim of correcting for those biases. Today, the team released a preliminary verson of their findings, and Muller himself testified before the House Science Committee. He told them that according to the Berkeley team’s research, they found “a global warming trend that is very similar to that previously reported by the other groups.”

Yup! So far, Muller’s numbers hew pretty closely to those of the other groups he’d set out to improve upon. You can see a chart of Muller’s data at The New York Times, where Andrew Revkin notes, with a hint of an air of victory, that “if the lawmakers, and/or Charles Koch… hoped it would undercut the credibility of climate science, they must be disappointed.”

Here’s the graph Muller presented. Not only did he find a trend “similar” to other groups – well, judge for yourself. (Muller’s data is the black line on the graph.)

It looks exactly like the data found by other groups. So, thanks Koch brothers! We can now cite you as a source of temperature data.