Media Matters, a group dedicated to bird-dogging conservative spin in the press, made a good catch last week when it pointed out that The Wall Street Journal didn’t publish a wave-making op-ed that disavowed global-warming skepticism in its US edition.

In late October, Dr. Richard A. Muller, a physicist at the University of California, Berkeley who is well known for his skepticism of the science behind climate change, made headlines when he released the results of a two-year global land temperature study, partly funded by the conservative Charles G. Koch Foundation. To Muller’s surprise, the study found that the Earth’s temperature has risen roughly 1 degree Celsius in the last fifty years, a result that is in accord with previous research. The day after the results of the study went public, the Journal published an op-ed by Muller headlined, “The Case Against Global-Warming Skepticism.”

The Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature (BEST) project quickly became big news, and many outlets mentioned Muller’s column. But there seems to have been some confusion about where it appeared. In a roundup of coverage, the Knight Science Journalism Tracker suggested it was “best to read Muller’s sly way of explaining the thing himself today on the Op-Ed page of the Wall Street Journal.” The only problem was, it didn’t run on the Journal’s op-ed page, at least not in the US. The op-ed only ran in the European and online editions.

Given the Journal’s massive online following, it would be unfair to say that the paper buried Muller’s op-ed, but given that it didn’t appear in the Journal’s flagship edition, it is fair to say that it marginalized the piece. This appears all the more true in light of the paper’s decision to publish an editorial four days after the release of the BEST analysis, which pooh-poohed efforts to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions under the headline, “The Post-Global Warming World.”

Then, on November 5, the US edition carried a “Numbers Guy” column by Carl Bialik that focused on the “uncertain nature of tracking global temperature,” and carried the headline, “Global Temperatures: All Over the Map.” The piece was essentially a feeble attempt to rebut Muller’s confidence in the temperature record.

Media Matters ably dismantled Bialik’s piece. Part of Bialik’s case hinges on the argument, popular among skeptics, that satellite measurements “show about half the amount of warming as that of land-based readings in the past three decades.” As NASA’s Gavin Schmidt explained to Media Matters, this is simply not true.

Historically, there have been problematic discrepancies between surface-station and satellite temperature records (the latter of which measures temps in the lower atmosphere—an important detail that Bialik failed to mention), but they have been largely reconciled. According to a 2006 report from the US Climate Change Science Program:

Previously reported discrepancies between the amount of warming near the surface and higher in the atmosphere have been used to challenge the reliability of climate models and the reality of human induced global warming. Specifically, surface data showed substantial global-average warming, while early versions of satellite and radiosonde data showed little or no warming above the surface. This significant discrepancy no longer exists because errors in the satellite and radiosonde data have been identified and corrected.

It remains uncertain whether or not, in the last three decades, lower atmospheric warming has exceeded warming at the surface, as models predicted it should, and scientists need to figure out why they have been unable to make that determination. Nonetheless, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, there has been very good agreement between the warming trends seen in most surface-station and satellite data.

The second part of Bialik’s case hinges on the fact that temperature research teams use different techniques to arrive at their conclusions:

Calculating a global average temperature requires extrapolating from these readings to the whole globe, adjusting for data lapses and suspect stations. And no two groups do this identically… Any statistical model produces results with some level of uncertainty. The Berkeley Earth project is no different.
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