Muller on MSNBC – what he didn't say was interesting

Ohhhhh, now I see. He’s in the pocket of the natural gas industry.
(sarc)

OK, now I’ve seen the video. I caught your blank post before the link was there. The other thing not mentioned was nuclear energy. Why should we have to endure a short nasty life with less energy per capita? Automatically assuming consuming less energy per capita is a good thing is in fact quite dangerous.

I don’t watch Maddow. Not even in YouTube clips. Makes my brain barf.

“Former Climate Change Denier”
If anything the man had to say was legitimate, he wouldn’t have to lie about who he is.

the part about his testimony last year was pretty creepy to me. Maddow getting thrills about a skeptic confessing his sins in front of a tribunal kind of feel…but that’s just me
Why the fear of nuclear? I mean really, here you have a genius who’s afraid to talk about what to do 50 years from now? Clean fracking? Are you kidding? That’s the future? I guess the age of visionary physicists is over….so sad.

The resurrection of Lysenkoism, the perversion of science to serve wholly political ends, the exploitation of science to further political objectives, the false claim of a unanimity that never in fact existed, the suppression of facts that contradict and disprove the supposed consensus and the smearing of sceptical scientists and free thinkers. History tells us that those forces that try to pervert science to serve political ends always fail, it is the damage they do in the attempt that defines their ultimate failure.
Sound familiar? It should because history is littered with such examples and it never ended well, the real deniers are those that choose to deny observed reality in favour of made up political make believe. If the facts dont fit the narrative then change the facts and while changing them attack with utmost vigour those who dare to expose the facts. This isnt science it is a quasi religious cult and it is going to end in tears. History will not be kind to the supposed consensus, those who support it now will be widely mocked and rightly so.

Looking at lecture on Youtube he made at Berkley it becomes clear that it is more of a spectacle than lecture. Students attending them don’t learn much.
BTW. Why is he listed as a visitor to the Bohemian Grove?

Something else Dr Muller forgot to mention: his paper failed peer review and has been rejected.
From http://www.rossmckitrick.com/:

Update July 30: JGR told me “This paper was rejected and the editor recommended that the author resubmit it as a new paper.”

“To my surprise, when questioned on the issue, he didn’t list station quality as one of the things he ruled out. I think my message was delivered.”
The man is in trouble, and he knows it.

I rarely bother to comment about people’s appearance, but this guy is pretty much everybody’s caricature of the mad scientist. Staring eyes, unkempt hair and tash, dishevelled clothing…if he approached me in the street I’d pass by on the other side. And I’m sure that I’0m not alone.
He does himself – nor his message – no favours by not spending just a few minutes sprucing himself up. Rightly or wrongly, people really do make up their mind on first impressions. And his is not good.

A: Sorry you had to sit through Maddow’s show, and B: the ‘Weather’ Channel is harping about this every hour or so. (We have to have it up in the office 24/7.)

MSNBC is so partisan on this there was no journalistic objectivity at all.

Deception!
Hi!
To map out who is who and why in the CAGWpropaganda circus. Who made Muller a “Voice” in the debate? Who appointed him as a speaker of “scpticism” in the kongressional hearings and put him on the stage and gave him a role? who is orcestrating this deceptive fars? Any leads?
Are you awere that we are dealing with strategies controlled by experts on information/desinformation an exact copy of how the Sovjet orcestrated thier propaganda. many “defectors” where programmed to leave desinformation and make it believeble. Muller has played his part extremely clumsy, bit the set up is beutiful.. Pretend to be a sceptic, use the allready destroyed credability of M Mann as a collateral to gain confidence and trust to give teh CAGWalarmism a reptuational clean voice.
So who made him sit in the kongressional hearing and who first introduced Muller as a “voice” in the debate. Today he has eggs floating all ower his face. Better performed it would have been a beutiful deception but the final made us all laugh. No more reaalstic than this filmclip.
Muller in action:

Pensionable age, book out, needs the money I guess! Consensus science? What’s that all about? They still keep carping back to consensus, that is the stuff of politics, NOT science! Apart from a couple of Greeks in the 4th century BC, they general scientific consensus was that the world was a flat disc, & that if you sailed too far in any direction you would fall off the edge to oblivion or be eaten by sea-monsters. The scientific consensus up until the 16th & 17th centuries, (endorsed with savage brutality by the IPCC of the time, the Holy Roman Catholic Church) was that the Earth was at the centre of the universe, & that the Sun, known planets, & stars revolved around it, & that sins could be forgicen for a Papal indulgence (slipping a few notes to the local priest in real terms). Then came the age of enlightenment via Copernicus & Gallileo in turn, the consensus changed. “Heavier than air flying machines are impossible!”………Lord Kelvin, President of the Royal Society (they know best, their members couldn’t see what all the fuss was about with this silly television machine of John Logie-Baird’s in the 1920s, who would want one, what is it for?) in 1895! The list is endless but they don’t want to see it, it hurts too much! 🙂

Funny how these Meeedddiiiaaa types never reverse the caption – ‘Former CAGW\Climate change\climate disruption believer’?

Richard Muller with full head of dark hair in 2008 before he crossed Anthony Watts.
http://probaway.wordpress.com/2008/09/30/physics-for-future-presidents-by-richard-muller-review/
Richard Muller four years later after he crossed Anthony Watts.
http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2012/07/30/richard-muller-get-rid-of-coal-power-to-halt-global-warming/
Moral of the story: HOLY RAPID AGING BATMAN! DO NOT CROSS ANTHONY WATTS!

Watching anything on MSNBC (other than the Olympics) makes me throw up in my mouth and want to stick sharp objects in my eyeballs.

Its a real shame that we have to have this circus.
Steve Mc knows Muller and thinks he’s a good egg. Thats enough for me.
It’s a shame the way it has been spun, some will say by Muller himself. He is painted as a former CC denier, a skeptic. In reality what Muller has always been is a scientist – sceptical as a default position. I say nothing about his recent “conversion”, but do note his comments on the hockey stick work. (No doubt Mann has been waiting ages to put the boot in).
It is true that BEST might need a rejig after Watts’ paper, but isn’t that how science works?
In my opinion there is far too much here that is personal. What will we say if Muller comes out in the next few weeks and agrees with Watts and says time to go back to the drawing board and have another look? Will all of those who have insulted him apologise?

Once you’ve made an appearance as a friendly guest on Maddow (or any other MSNBC show for that matter), whatever credibility you may have once had, is completely shot. The woman is mendacious slime.

I got the impression that the Koch brothers were right up there peddling this fantasy.
Why do they accept being painted as the bad guys?
DaveE.

Here Muller says there’s a difference between being a scientific skeptic and a climate skeptic, and he makes it clear he was never a climate skeptic.

“It is ironic if some people treat me as a traitor, since I was never a skeptic — only a scientific skeptic,” he said in a recent email exchange with The Huffington Post. “Some people called me a skeptic because in my best-seller ‘Physics for Future Presidents’ I had drawn attention to the numerous scientific errors in the movie ‘An Inconvenient Truth.’ But I never felt that pointing out mistakes qualified me to be called a climate skeptic.”
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/blackberry/p.html?id=1072419

Has he walked this back, or are we just rewriting the past again to suit the present.

I would highly recomment “Dr.” (doesn’t deserve that title…sorry, intellectualy dishonest people should have their doctorates removed…) read a REAL Doctorate’s last book, i.e. Richard Feynmann. “Get your comb out Dick”…!!! (Tends to make him look foolish and a out of control.)
Max

It is curious that when so many principals of the AGW movement open their mouths, I sense that I’m in the presence of chldren.Their reasoning is childlike as are their emotional responses.
Could it be that having basically been at school continuously since the age of five, and in a protected environment insulated from the real world, some academics enter a neotenic state like human axolotls and never mature into adults? It would certainly explain the words and deeds of the likes of Mann, Hanson, Gleick, that idiot in the Superman costume, and now it seems Richard Muller.
It would actually be quite touching if it were not for the enormous harm that these geriatric brats are doing to the rest of mankind.

Forbes has a different take on AGW and the scientists who have shifted from believing CO2 is the problem to theory that suggests it is not the problem. One person shifted in favor and others went the other way so the argument continues. I personally think pollution in general contributes to the green house effect and over time the planet deals with the effects of pollution just as it did during the medieval period when temperatures were warmer than they are now due to volcanoes.
Did we make a mistake closing the Ozone Hole near the South Pole? Most likely. Why, the hole served as a chimney that allowed pollution to escape while bringing in icy cold air from outer space. Fear mongering Enviro-Facsists whined that the hole would let all the oxygen out, they were wrong. Think about like this, the icy cold air chills the trade winds that flow from the south pole to the north that aid the planet in cooling. So its time to talk about opening the hole instead of plugging the damn hole.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/larrybell/2012/07/17/that-scientific-global-warming-consensus-not/

Anthony has bested BEST and its wild-eyed pretender to the scientific method. For that I am very, very grateful and respectful. I also imagine that Anthony was delighted beyond measure that the pretender could not tout “data accurate” or “thermometer siting okey-dokey”. Kind of leaves him with his pants down.
Unfortunately, watching anything on MSMBC (or CNN or ABC or CBS) is torture. We need new institutions, free-market corporations in the media business. Let these nonsense-sellers die from their own verbal pollution. If people had a choice (Fox is not good eough by far, but at least Anthony’s new study is mentioned), we would not find intelligent bloggers with integrity criticizing by “quoting” the crony corporate media’s purposeful, political errors. Such a big dose of RM is almost beyond the pale.
(Anthony, no criticism meant here; your delight is well deserved. Instead I am trying to cheerlead for new media. The old cannot be reformed; the free market’s creative destruction is called for, as it was, and still is, with General Motors.)

This is the new tactic from the propagandists – take people who are avid AGW believers but once made a comment correcting a falsehood, and claim that they are “former deniers” who have seen the light of day.
This sort of propaganda is straight out of Stalin’s or Goebbels’ play book.

Why does Muller’s data start in 1753?
Why not 1750 which has just as much data and was about 0.0C?
Why not 1730 which was perhaps +1.0C.
Because 1753 was a nice low point to start with.
Berkeley 2012 versus HadCET going back to 1659.
http://img28.imageshack.us/img28/2005/berkeley12vshadcet12mon.png
Why not start in 1773? Of course because it looks like this.
http://img560.imageshack.us/img560/502/berkeley20121773.png

@Taphonomic: I’m still waiting for Muller to explain, in his current media blitz, why his papers haven’t been peer reviewed.
Oh, but they HAVE been peer reviewed. Repeatedly. The papers just have not PASSED peer review.

@Bill Illis
I enjoy your posts and graphs, but could you change the background to a lighter color?

Your interview on “Red-Eye” radio last night reached a sympathetic audience. R-E is becoming the nightly “show of choice”, judging by the number of stations which have switched to it. Great idea!
Especially, the concept of temperature increase proportional to the logarithm of CO2 concentration and hence, diminishing returns.

William Jameson (@Juggernauzt) says:
July 31, 2012 at 6:37 am
…icey cold air from outer space,..

You forgot your /sarc tag – I hope.

Nice article in fox news, but Fox new has just about no international credebility.CNN is here it needs to be. In the interview and the article, no graph of CO2 and temp. Where the beef?

Maybe the Koch brothers will fund your upcoming look at TOBS adjustments. The other post was going hog wild with posts, so I wait till now to congratulate you on your paper, and the hard work you and others put into it.

I’m all for keeping coal in the ground as insurance, in case all else fails.
We do have plenty of natural gas, and it can be converted to liquid fuels such as gasoline and diesel.
I think this fellow is being reasonable, not asking for a shut down of society.
It was a pleasure seeing Maddow cringe when he mentioned clean fracking. Looked like a vampire at sunrise.

Sorry, couldn’t watch it. Not because of Muller, but because of Rachel Maddow. Half the piece was her blowhard diatribe propaganda rant that is just a waste of time.

Ill repeat my FB post here and then go back and enjoy the comments:
“Watched Maddow and Muller. Again he speaks of a correlation between CO2 and temperature, and that they could not find any other explanation, which means it must be humanity. This is the only argument I have every heard. It implies that ‘science’ has fathomed and understood our planet and solar system and so ruled out every other mechanism! It’s called the principle of exclusion, and it’s bogus. Thank you Anthony.”
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/06/08/alarmist-climate-science-and-the-principle-of-exclusion/

Clearly this poor man was tortured by the Inquisition and forced to confess his heresy publicly. Now that his confession is public and his views are no longer heterodox he can be accepted back as a full member of the church and thus avoid the damnation of his eternal soul.

Ironic that Ms. Muller, a executive director of BEST and the Dr.’s daughter and publicity agent, holds a degree in literature?

DR says:
July 31, 2012 at 9:27 am
@Bill Illis
I enjoy your posts and graphs, but could you change the background to a lighter color?
——————————
Something has been screwing up with imageshack lately so I’m trying a new image hoster. In addition to not screwing up the chart and having high resolution, I want it to preserve the file name because I do alot of charts and most image hosters just give you some code which doesn’t tell you what the file is or have crappy resolution.
So, try these and let me know if they don’t work.
http://s15.postimage.org/gisxup2c9/Berkeley12_vs_Had_CET_12_mon.png
http://s16.postimage.org/xpei9ayit/Berkeley2012_1773.png

Why would anybody bother discussing how Richard Muller looks? Everybody at his university looks that way, and so they do here at Cambridge. Who cares? It does not mean anything. We don’t want to be seen barking up the wrong tree.
I would even give him the benefit of the doubt and presume he did what he did and said what he said without regard for political pressure.
The real problem is that what he did was moronic, to say the least. I can’t believe he could base any arguments on curve-fitting, which is a fine tool for making a guess, but it does not replace physics. Even worse, he challenges us to come up with a better-fitting theory. As if he is not aware of over-fitting. I can’t believe he is not. I think he forfeits his physics degree if he sincerely believes this is a way to discover things about nature.
A classical example of over-fitting is tide prediction, which is another thing not based on physics. Instead, it is achieved by massive curve-fitting, and only works for making short-range predictions. If you go to the Admiralty’s web site, they will predict the next few days’ worth of tide at any location equipped with a tide gauge with admirable precision. But don’t ask them about two weeks ahead (they claim to be able to do that for a fee, but I haven’t heard any success stories) or for any place not having a tide gauge. Ostensibly, ocean tides have much simpler causes than climate, so it should be easy enough to calculate them for centuries ahead, as we can do with planet trajectories. But that’s not how they do it. They simply ignore the causes of the tide and fit historic observations at each location with a humongous Fourier series including more than 100 harmonics. No wonder it falls apart. None of those harmonics makes any sense, despite their physically-sounding names like “lunisolar synodic fortnightly”.
The point is, if you guessed a theory form curve-fitting and then used the scientific method to prove it, you are my hero. I won’t care how you look or what other people say about your eyes or hair. But if your theory is nothing but the curve, get lost.

This is what you must do to convince me. Develop an alternative theory of climate without a carbon cycle. This theory must explain what climate scientists now know: 1) nightime temps are increasing more rapidly than daytime temps. 2) winter time temps are increasing more rapidly than summer temps. 3) summers come about a week early and winters start a week later. 4) absolute humidity is correlated with CO2 concentrations. 5) high altitude clouds are forming more rapidly than in past. 6) troposphere is heating and expanding while stratosphere is cooling. 7) increasing frequency of extreme weather events 8) fast retreat of almost all alpine glaciers 9) increasing rate of mass loss from Greenland 10) increasing rate of sea level rise 11) satellite IR data shows over time that IR reflectivity as measured from the ground has increased. 12) pH of oceans has decrease. 13) melting of permafrost. NOW, can you explain all these facts without anthropogenic CO2 of approximately 32 thousand million tons annually? Also, can you develop a computer program which duplicates past global temps without use of anthropogenic CO2?

“He didn’t list station quality as one of the things he ruled out.” Perhaps not in the TV interview, but BEST certainly has looked at station quality, in part to address concerns raised by Anthony Watts (who is mentioned in several places). See:
http://berkeleyearth.org/pdf/station-quality-may-20.pdf
Final words of the conclusion: “we do not observe a significant bias in average temperature trends arising from station quality in the contiguous United States.”

Ah, so that’s Richard Muller. I thought the name sounded familiar. As it happens, I just read his book. Not the guy I had pictured. He didn’t come across to me in the book as a skeptic at all even though he was willing to dismiss some of the more outlandish claims associated with global warming. He offered what I read to be his full throated support for the work of the IPCC and seemed to draw on his experience of once having seen permafrost melting in Alaska to validate his views on a personal level. Realist? Maybe. Skeptic? Hardly.

For those attributing quotes to Muller… it is likely that there is a lot of copy-paste and wishful thinking going on. Always find the original source and read it. If the quote has been changed, or invented (which is surprisingly often), then you have to ask yourself why the words were changed.
So… /source/ the Muller quotes.
As to him be a “scientific” or “climate” skeptic. That’s easy. You can find video footage of him trashing Mann et al., and the IPCC. He changed his mind, and then, apparently, changed it again when he discovered new information. Information which he derived himself.
If only the posters of WUWT knew and understood what the cognitive bubble was. Maybe we could get on with solving the worlds problems. What I mean, and what you think I mean, are almost certainly disjoint sets. Hence, you first gotta understand the cognitive bubble – an intrinsic part of the human condition.

Richard and Elizabeth Muller, in their home: http://ww1.hdnux.com/photos/14/34/00/3260476/3/628×471.jpg
[REPLY: What was this supposed to convey and how does it relate to the thread topic? I actually rather like the photo. -REP]

2 major Australian dailies get cold feet about the Muller “skeptic conversion” narrative, or what is the explanation for these stories disappearing:
http://joannenova.com.au/2012/08/major-australian-dailies-disappear-the-muller-conversion-article-opps-404-error/