Richard Muller: I Was Wrong on Climate Change

[JDDavis]

Published on Jan 26, 2015
Richard Muller founded the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature Project after declaring himself skeptical about climate change. He was funded in part by the Koch Brothers.
He found out what other scientists have known for decades. The Earth is warming, and we're doing it.

[merrily]

1. What happened, Muller? Checks stopped coming?

You know that you can't undo the damage you and others like you have already done, right?

[Enthusiast]

3. Checks stopped coming? Good guess.

[xocet]

7. Did you happen to watch the entire video?

It has some very important statements in it.

Also, what did you think of his group's ability to exclude certain causes and of his group's expanded data set?

[Enthusiast]

9. I did watch and was surprised to hear of his methodology.

[xocet]

10. Here is a link to a list of interviews (Muller included) conducted at the Fall 2014 AGU meeting....

http://www.realsceptic.com/2014/12/30/historic-series-interviews-agu-2014-fall-meeting/

I have not found the producer's link to his actual interviews yet, but hopefully the interviews will be available soon.

Out of curiosity, what part of the methodology surprised you?

[xocet]

6. If you did not watch the entire video, it should be watched....

The results that he mentions are both very interesting and very important.

What do you think about the expanded data set that his group was able to utilize?

[Cassidy]

4. R. Muller also discovers: Fire is hot! The earth is round!

Last edited Mon Jan 26, 2015, 05:02 PM - Edit history (1)

Instead of claiming that everyone else did things wrong, "... they just used 20% of the data...", yet somehow came up with the right answer, and continuing to pat himself on the back, Muller should be on his knees apologizing to all the experts and regular people who recognized climate change and whose work and understanding he slandered for all those years. This clown is beneath contempt.

"80 percent or 90 percent of what's in Inconvenient Truth is wrong or exaggerated or cherry picked."
Richard Muller, 19 March 2011, http://www.ustream.tv/recorded/13429263
https://www.skepticalscience.com/skeptic_Richard_Muller.htm

"A quote came out of the emails, these leaked {hacked and stolen - not leaked} emails, that said "let's use Mike's trick to hide the decline". That's the words, "let's use Mike's trick to hide the decline". Mike is Michael Mann, said "hey, trick just means mathematical trick. That's all." My {Richard Muller's} response is I'm not worried about the word trick. I'm worried about the decline."
http://www.skepticalscience.com/Muller-Misinformation-1-confusing-Mikes-trick-with-hide-the-decline.html

"Some additional thoughts about Muller and 'BEST': Muller's announcement last year that the Earth is indeed warming brought him up to date w/ where the scientific community was in the the 1980s. His announcement this week that the warming can only be explained by human influences, brings him up to date with where the science was in the mid 1990s. At this rate, Muller should be caught up to the current state of climate science within a matter of a few years!" Michael Mann, July 28, 2012, Facebook.com https://www.facebook.com/MichaelMannScientist/.../404262676296607

"I think what we could learn from the case study that Muller did," says Powell {James Powell}, "is that {Muller} should have trusted the other scientists and the peer review process which had produced the data that he was questioning."
http://bigthink.com/re-envision-toyota-blog/the-curious-case-of-richard-muller-former-climate-change-skeptic

“We quickly realized that natural gas could be a very big player,” he {Richard Muller} said. “The reasons had to do with China and the goal of the paper is to get the environmentalists to recognize that they need to support responsible fracking.”
http://www.desmogblog.com/2013/12/16/new-major-frackademia-report-co-written-converted-climate-skeptic-richard-muller

[bananas]

15. Those are great quotes, they really expose what he was saying. nt

Last edited Tue Jan 27, 2015, 05:37 AM - Edit history (1)

[Jack Rabbit]

5. This needs to go viral on the intertubes, because we're not going to see it on TeeVee

Please don't ridicule this man. He did everything he was supposed to do, and he started it from a vantage point of healthy skepticism. He did this by researching the matter with no preset conclusion. Now, that's a scientist.

His conclusion is that climate is real and man made.

The Koch brothers may have thought that they were buying a crooked scientist who would play by their rules. Instead, he took their money and didn't close his mind like he was supposed to do and didn't propagate denialist nonsense like they wanted. He confirmed the prevailing view that what is happening to the Earth is exactly what the Koch brothers, for reasons that have nothing to do with science, do not want the public at large to believe.

Now, let's get on with the business of doing what is necessary to save the planet. Let's ignore the fossil fuel barons, let' ignore their pet politicians, let's ignore Rush Windbag (speaking of hot air). Let's get on with the business of supplementing and in the next 35 years supplanting fossil fuel with clean, renewable energy.

[xocet]

8. Exactly. n/t

[navarth]

11. kick for visibilty

[Nitram]

12. Muller comes off as arrogant and egotistic

His study was soooo much better than the thousands of different studies that have been published, building a powerful edifice of evidence and corroboration. He is soooo surprised that carbon dioxide turns out to be the culprit. What an ass.

[padruig]

14. I understand ... he was wrong ...

I understand, he was wrong, but I cannot 'grok' the character or the duration of his 'skepticism'.

Anyone who does research knows that where the research topic may start is with a question where it immediately should lead to is the library.

If Muller had gone to the library he could have read John Tyndall's 1861 paper in which Tyndall builds the first IR spectrometer (ironically using a principle that I would find in the IR spectrometers I studied with and trained on in the 1970s) and how he then analyzed all the known gases in our atmosphere.

Tyndall discovered quickly that CO2 had a huge capacity for long wave infrared absorption, basically trapping heat energy.

Tyndall mentions out loud in his paper asking the question whether or not CO2 was in any way related to the "mutations" in the weather alluding to the glacial periods we call ice ages.

He might have read Svante Arrhenius's paper published in 1896, a few short years after Tyndall's death, where using a simple heat model for the earth (today we call it a EBM or Energy Balance Model). Without the aid of super computers or advanced mathematical techniques, Arrhenius would estimate that if you doubled the CO2 in our atmosphere, that the planets average temperature would go up by two to four degrees Celsius.

The 'skeptics' in this story are not really skeptics but basically denying the mechanisms of physics on a planetary scale.

Even today, after the money and time spent, the deniers actually use the results of BEST to show that the Earth isn't really warming.

So Dr. Muller, welcome to a warmer world, in climate parlance we are moving from an inter-glacial to a hot-house. The result is much more water vapor in the atmosphere, more precipitation and snowfall. Because of shifts in the amount of energy our oceans are storing, weather has become more dramatic, more ruthless and much more unpredictable.

(don't forget to say goodbye to the glacial system on the way out the door!)