The LA Times interviews Richard Muller about BEST, his new project to measure the Earth's temperature. Santer and Trenberth pop up with a spectacular display of the kind of grubby behaviour normally associated with the worst kind of political spin doctor.
"I am highly skeptical of the hype and claims," said Kevin Trenberth, who heads the Climate Analysis Section of the National Center for Atmospheric Research, a university consortium. "The team has some good people but not the expertise required in certain areas, and purely statistical approaches are naive. I suspect they have an agenda."
The Koch donation, to many, confirms those suspicions. "Why would a scientist accept funding from an organization with no interest in advancing the science?" asked Benjamin Santer, an atmospheric scientist at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.