Scientific American has an interview in “Science Talk” with Dr. Richard Muller, who is spokesman for the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature (BEST) project.
I enjoyed the photograph, particularly for the poster over his left shoulder in the background.
Both Steve McIntyre and I are mentioned prominently in the article, and once again Dr. Muller thanks us for our contributions to the debate.
One quote about Mann’s hockey-stick from Dr. Muller made it past SciAm’s usual boilerplate position on the issue, and I was quite surprised to see it in print.
Muller: A few years later, McIntyre came out and, indeed, showed that the hockey-stick chart was in fact incorrect. It had been affected by a very serious bug in the way scientists calculated their principal components.
I applaud SciAm for not censoring what many consider to be an inconvenient truth about the bad science of that iconic graph.
This is also surprising to see in print in SciAm.
Q: You’ve also said more than once that nothing we do in the U.S. to reduce emissions will make any difference because emissions from coal burned by India and China
are growing so rapidly.
Muller: In fact, if we cut back and China continues to grow and India continues to grow, our cutting back will not achieve any real good. The hope is that we’ll set an example that China and India will follow. But the way it’s presented by many people, for political purposes because it sounds more compelling, is that we are responsible for terrible global warming, and we have to cut back regardless of what other people do. And that is not looking at the numbers.
Regarding Dr. Muller, whether you love him or hate him, the article is well worth reading, and has been helpfully provided by Joe Romm of Climate Progress (who is predictably upset by all this, but then again a light breeze upsets him) on his website where you can view it here (PDF).
I see Muller as a thinking person misled by fake climate information I am trying to expose. When the Lemonick interview appeared on SciAm Web site I posted two comments, one directed at Muller and one at a commentator who needed to be educated. That was on May 22nd. On May 23rd I checked and both were gone – censored. SciAm does not allow unkind words to be said about global warming. I am attaching them below.
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• 4. Arno Arrak 06:17 PM 5/22/11
Dr. Muller ends his interview this way: “Hey, scientific community, give me advice on this. What do you do when your country asks you for your best state of knowledge of the world’s climate change?” In this spirit, may I suggest that you give them the best advice possible? BEST as now conceived is not the best possible advice because you are not addressing the real temperature problem. I never thought UHI that Watts complains about would be enough to produce the amount of massive distortion that my work has uncovered. It is documented in my book What Warming? available on Amazon.com. The book has been out for a year and a half . The real temperature problem can only be understood by comparing satellite temperature curves with ground-based curves as done in the book. To start with, lets concentrate on the twenty year period from 1978 and 1997, the the period NASA, NOAA and the Met office call late twentieth century warming. Problem is that satellites cannot see this warming. What they do see is a temperature oscillation, up and down by half a degree for twenty years, but no rise. These peaks correspond to El Nino periods of ENSO (see Figure 15 in my book). The valleys in between are cool La Nina periods. They have been with us since the Isthmus of Panama rose from the sea. I plotted their data on the same graph with the satellite temperatures and found that ENSO oscillations could easily be seen in HadCRUT3 from the Met Office. The locations match but the depth of the valleys between the peaks is different. They have been reduced to approximately half of what satellites show. NOAA (my Figure 27) is worse and eliminates even the existence of the valleys from their curve. There is no natural process that can selectively raise up temperature valleys between the peaks and yet leave the peaks in place. I have no doubt that this warming has been both illegitimate and anthropogenic from the start. It continues to this day. Clearly it requires coordination to do this. This is criminal conspiracy. I personally would discontinue the use of any temperature curves from these agencies and resort to using satellite temperatures exclusively. But since these big boys are calling the tune it is not likely to happen. What must be done is to unmask the source of these distortions, using criminal investigation if necessary. This, Dr. Muller, is what BEST should be doing to answer your country s call for the best state of knowledge of the world’s climate change.
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• 5. Arno Arrak in reply to Mark F. Wrone 07:23 PM 5/22/11
Mark – you seem to be a true believer who does not want to listen to anything bad about warming. I too read Watts and I think he is honest even though he may not report your favorite parts of an article the way you would like. But have you ever considered the possibility that you might be wrong? What if all that hullabaloo about global warming turns out to be nonsense? We have all been told that the world is warming and that the greenhouse effect of carbon dioxide is responsible for it. Did you know that the actual existence of this greenhouse effect has never been directly verified by measurements of infrared absorption by the real atmosphere? What you would have to do is to periodically measure how much infrared the atmosphere absorbs and then construct a time series showing that it increases as carbon dioxide goes up. None of the labs that are supported by the billions of dollars spent on study of climate change has seen fit to do it. Fortunately Ferenc Miskolczi found a back door way to get this information anyway. Using NOAA database of weather balloon observations that goes back to 1948 he showed that the transparency of the atmosphere in the infrared where carbon dioxide absorbs had not changed for the last 61 years. During this same period of time the amount of carbon dioxide in the air increased by 21.6 percent. This means that the greenhouse absorption signature of this added carbon dioxide is totally missing. This is an empirical observation of nature, not derived from any calculations, and overrides any calculations from theory that do not agree with it. No Absorption, no greenhouse effect, case closed. This has further consequences because this non-existent greenhouse effect is what they feed into their computers to predict dangerous global warming. Putting a nonexistet entity into a computer is putting garbage into a computer. And when you put garbage in you get garbage out. GIGO, in short. Super-GIGO in fact because it comes from supercomputers they cheated out of Uncle Sam by scare tactics.
Jimbo says:
May 24, 2011 at 4:52 am
“Muller: In fact, if we cut back and China continues to grow and India continues to grow, our cutting back will not achieve any real good.
It might also mean that US industry moves to China, India and other countries with less stringent c02 reduction policies. ;O)”
US industry is doing that now, in any event. The really humorous thing is that good old Kalifonia does not want to pollute their environment with power generation but they eventually get all the smoke from China anyway.
Muller gets a few things right, and seems to have the much-sought-after (by NOAA, anyway) scientific integrity, but mostly he’s just plain wrong. Perhaps he just needs to try a bit harder.
Ed Barbar says:
May 23, 2011 at 9:39 pm
“Well, I for one applaud Dr. Muller for his integrity. At the end of his work you will know there are no “hidden declines” or anything of that nature. ”
Yes there are hidden declines. Muller already affirmed the Hockey Stick is bogus. Or didn’t you actually read the article? At the end of his work you will know that are indeed hidden declines and things of that nature. Of course you’ll happily go on denying them because that’s what real deniers do. There are more deniers of facts on the hysterical AGW side of the debate than anywhere else.
I stopped getting Sci-Am because I got tired of them ignoring the evidence against AGW theory.
It would be nice if they returned to objective reporting and analysis and only supported the unproven in their opinion columns.
Note that Romm’s new boss is George Soros.
Bruce Cobb says:
May 24, 2011 at 2:26 pm
“Muller gets a few things right, and seems to have the much-sought-after (by NOAA, anyway) scientific integrity, but mostly he’s just plain wrong. Perhaps he just needs to try a bit harder.”
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Bruce, can you cite what is plain wrong and why?