More on that Global Warming "Convert" and his paper proving Global Warming.

Like I noted yesterday, there is solid research that the temperature data for ground warming is systematically biased in favor of the "warmist" conclusion.

But - wait! - there's more:

I’ve reached Dr. Judith Curry of Georgia Tech, who was a co-author of the first four BEST papers but who declined to be listed as an author of this one. She was in an airport, and has promised me more tomorrow, but in the meantime she referred me to the New York Times Dot Earth blog and her quote:

The BEST team has produced the best land surface temperature data set that we currently have. It is best in the sense of including the most data and extending further back in time. The data quality control and processing use objective, statistically robust techniques. That said, the scientific analyses that the BEST team has done with the new data set are controversial, including the impact of station quality on interpreting temperature trends and the urban heat island effect.

Their latest paper on the 250-year record concludes that the best explanation for the observed warming is greenhouse gas emissions. Their analysis is way oversimplistic and not at all convincing in my opinion.

There is broad agreement that greenhouse gas emissions have contributed to the warming in the latter half of the 20th century; the big question is how much of this warming can we attribute to greenhouse gas emissions. I don’t think this question can be answered by the simple curve fitting used in this paper, and I don’t see that their paper adds anything to our understanding of the causes of the recent warming. That said, I think there are two interesting results in this paper, regarding their analysis of 19th century volcanoes and the impact on climate, and also the changes to the diurnal temperature range.

As usual, you have to look carefully at this. Curry strongly disagreed with the conclusions of the paper, and needs to be taken seriously: she is, after all, a co-author of the previous studies. Her point is simply that:

(1) the paper does say there has been warming, but well, everyone knew that. The question is the magnitude of the warming, the part of that which is anthropogenic, i.e., human-caused, and then what part of that part is caused by CO2. They have done a lot to clean up the data set, but as Watts et. al. note, that dataset may be subject to a systematic error.

(2) the strength of the conclusion that essentially all of that is both anthropogenic and caused by CO2 is being overstated. (My own choice of words would be “wildly overstated.”)

Again, isn't it weird that journalists can't do this kind of background fact checking?

Blogs - doing the work that journalists refuse to do, and for free.