There are a few honest alarmist scientist including Dr Richard Muller of Berkley who has said he will NEVER read a paper written by any member of the hide-the-decline "hockey team".

And the hockey team's excuse keeps doesn't add up.
They claimed they weren't hiding anything and that everyone knew about the thermometer data being fused onto their graph after 1960. But there actions tell a different story. They rebuffed requests for the raw data. Former alarmists Dr Judith Curry said she and many others were fooled by their deception. Part of me should be angry at the "hockey team's" dishonesty but it has been a boon for sceptics. The worst enemy of the Global Warming alarmist movement is the alarmist scientists themselves...

True success will occur when scientists conclude that using tree ring proxies to predict past temps is a bigger scandal than Lysenko scandal and when Michael Mann, Keith Briffa, and Phil Jones are treated as the dishonest lepers that they truly are.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trofim_Lysenko

So, a new group at Berkley is looking into the surface temperature record,and is doing so with funding from oil companies:

http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la...,2472031.story

Before anyone gets too excited, the chances of this new study producing a result much different from the other 3 major surface temperature data sets are extremely low. I'm a bit worried about Muller's objectivity given his funding and his past, though. He's got some videos on You Tube about "Climategate" that are just wrong on the facts, but he also doesn't appear to be crazy like some of the other scientific skeptics.

So if his analysis confirms the trend, will warming skeptics stop complaining about the surface record? I'm going to gamble and say they'll ignore it.

Is this conversation still going on? It's so 2010.

Most of the world has blown it off now and might start thinking it's a cause again in another 10 years if the evidence firms up and is presented honestly. Until then it's almost become stigmatized to be a warmer nowadays. That's how bad the political damage has been the past couple of years.

It is still widely considered the most likely explanation in the scientific community, where things usually are presented as "honestly" as possible since lies and even honest mistakes are easier to find than in any other field. I don't know how much misinformation the "political damage" has spread amongst people too incompetent to determine scientific truths based on science so I'll defer to your expertise on that.

I'm not quite sure what's going on here.... I don't think the shortfalls of the surface temp record are whether or not a trend exists there, it's the fact that many of the data collection points suck.

A video I think you would like Max:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K94jUSCqtbU

Why do you care who funds him, given his obvious belief that climate change is happening/is a problem? Should skeptics be allowed to be skeptical of studies that are funded by environmentalists or left wing ideologues?

Pretty much. Global warming might not be correct but the chances the hide the decline skeptics are correct is 0. It really requires a "natural conspiracy" for the global warming idea to be as wrong as they are claiming in the sense that many different factors randomly pointed to the same thing but by chance rather than the obvious reason. Possible but horribly unlucky.

Well, that's one question Muller's team is trying to answer. In fact I just found his congressional testimony here.

He finds what Menne 2010 found: the best stations in the US actually have a higher trend than the poorer stations. His results are preliminary, however.

The source of funding has been shown to skew results in a lot of areas of study, the best example being studies funded by tobacco companies. So, yeah, I think it's legitimate to worry about funding from left wing or environmental sources. At the end of the day, however, it's the science that counts.

And someone can certainly say global warming is real and a problem and still underestimate the size of the problem.

1)They specifically say the preliminary result is not to be taken seriously

2) Kinda confused that he stated different temp changes from specific records. Too small of a change from 1950s on and too large of a change from 1900s... maybe they're using slightly different numbers.

Whatever, it'll be another data point.

If it's not to be taken seriously, why present it to congress?

Muller seems pretty sloppy so far: getting facts wrong on climategate, eyeballing graphs instead of reporting trends, releasing preliminary results then telling people to ignore them. Not a good start.

No one should care.
The results of the study should stand or die based on their own validity.

I promise you most environmentalists don't work for free...

A quack doctor asks a regular doctor how many patients he has come to him who actually understand the science of medicine and treatment. The regular doctor replies: "Oh I don't know - maybe 1 in 10'