Colleagues challenge climate change scientist
By David Rose, Daily Mail
It was hailed as the scientific study that ended the global warming debate once and for all – the research that, in the words of its director, “proved you should not be a sceptic, at least not any longer”.
Professor Richard Muller of UC Berkeley and his colleagues from the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperatures project team (BEST) claimed to have shown that the planet has warmed by almost a degree centigrade since 1950 and is warming continually.
Published last month ahead of a major United Nations climate summit in Durban, South Africa, this month, their work was cited around the world as irrefutable evidence that only the most stringent measures to reduce carbon dioxide emissions can save civilization as we know it.
It was cited uncritically by, among others, reporters and commentators from the BBC, the Independent, the Guardian, the Economist and numerous media outlets in America.
The Washington Post said the BEST study had “settled the climate change debate” and showed that anyone who remained a skeptic was committing a “cynical fraud”.
But the Mail can reveal that a leading member of Muller’s team has accused him of trying to mislead the public by hiding the fact that BEST’s research shows global warming has stopped.