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BEST reiterates ‘no solar forcing’ claim

Chooses unknown journal for peer-reviewed publication

Richard Muller, whose Koch Foundation-funded Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature project has sparked an ongoing controversy since 2011, has hit the news again with the publication of his paper in a peer-reviewed journal.

In the paper, BEST reiterates its claim that including solar forcing doesn’t improve measurement of warming, and that since 1950 temperatures have risen 0.9°C plus or minus 0.05°C.

The good news is that the release should put to rest criticisms that BEST was publishing its science by press release, since its paper is now available in full, here.

The bad news is that Geoinformatics and Geostatistics: An Overview hasn’t been seen before: Muller’s paper is published in “Issue 1, Volume 1” of the journal, which has been kicked off by publisher SciTechnol.

In fact, the selection of publisher appears to be designed to attract criticism: only a small number of SciTechnol’s mastheads seems to have reached a second volume.

BEST ten-year record

BEST (grey line) compared with NOAA (green), NASA GISS (blue) and HadCRU (red). Source: BEST.

In the paper, the BEST team reiterates the findings it has previously discussed: “for this very simple model, solar forcing does not appear to contribute to the observed global warming of the past 250 years; the entire change can be modeled by a sum of volcanism and a single anthropogenic proxy. The residual variations include interannual and multi-decadal variability very similar to that of the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation (AMO),” it states.

The analysis used records from 36,866 stations, and the paper notes that the total of 179,928 record fragments was analysed in Matlab.

The paper also validates BEST’s previous endorsement of other studies (from NOAA, NASA GISS and HadCRU): “Since the 1950s, we observe a rise in the average land surface temperature of 0.90 ± 0.05°C (95% confidence). This value is in the middle of the comparable values reported by other groups, but with an estimated uncertainty approximately twice as tight as those of prior reports.”

In an e-mail to The Register, BEST's Liz Muller (Richard Muller's daughter) stated:

"SciTechnol is relatively new, I think their very first publication was only a few years ago. They do have a good and growing reputation in the scientific community, and are part of the new generation of journals that have totally open access and quick turn around times. I expect most important articles will be published in similar open online journals in the not-too-distant future. We chose GiGS because we liked their emphasis on statistics, their quick turn around, and their open and free access." ®

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