I just watched this video interview on MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow show (h/t to Poptech)
Despite the tacky caption, it was what Dr. Muller didn’t talk about that was, ahem, the best part.
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.
If you can get past the “genius” lead in part, its worth watching. Video here
cd says:
July 31, 2012 at 3:05 am
“His whole position now seems contrived.”
This seems to be a recurring theme..
http://www.amazon.com/The-Sins-Jesus-Richard-Muller/dp/0967276519
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?
Al Adrian,
You will never be convinced. But to provide a response:
1) That comment is a quote of Prof Freeman Dyson, a skeptic of CAGW.
2) Ibid
3) Natural variability; it has repeatedly happened before. See the Null Hypothesis.
4) Relative humidity has been declining since WWII.
5) Not a cloud expert, so I’ll give you that one. What does it have to do with CO2?
6) The widely predicted tropospheric hot spot, the “fingerprint of global warming”, never materialized. The prediction failed.
7) Extreme weather events are decreasing.
8) Glaciers have been naturally receding since the Little Ice Age.
9) Antarctic ice – 90% of global ice – is increasing.
10) Sea level rise is decelerating.
11) Satellite data shows that despite rising CO2, temperatures have been flat to declining for the past 15 years.
12) Ocean pH has not measurably changed. Do a keyword search for “acidification”. Learn.
13) Cherry-picking some areas of Arctic permafrost ignores #9. The Arctic has less than one-tenth the ice of the Antarctic.
You are reading the wrong blogs. Your examples reek of confirmation bias. Read this site for a few months, and the scales might fall from your eyes.
The Null Hypothesis remains unfalsified. Despite a 40% rise in CO2, temperatures have not accelerated. Conclusion: CO2 has too tiny of an effect to be measured. Thus, AGW is a false alarm.
Finally, it is not the job of skeptics to ‘develop an alternative’ climate hypothesis [AGW is far from being a ‘Theory’. It is not even a testable hypothesis]. The job of skeptics is to destroy any proposed hypothesis or conjecture if they can. And scientific skeptics have done an excellent job of deconstructing the CO2=AGW conjecture. Time for the alarmist crowd to reset, and start over – beginning with the realization that Occam’s Razor applies, and that adding the extraneous variable of a tiny trace gas is an unnecessary, confusing distraction or worse.
“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.”
Someone kindly pointed out the following quotes made by Muller
“There is a consensus that global warming is real. …it’s going to get much, much worse.” – Richard Muller, 2008′‘
“Let me be clear. My own reading of the literature and study of paleoclimate suggests strongly that carbon dioxide from burning of fossil fuels will prove to be the greatest pollutant of human history. It is likely to have severe and detrimental effects on global climate.” – Richard Muller, 2003
Not really the stuff of a bone-fide a former Climate Denier is it ?
Is he a denier? is he not a denier … I think I may need a daisy to work this out I think he might too.
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.
To those not familiar with MSNBC, you might have noticed their motto, Lean Forward.
Isn’t that another way of saying “Bend Over” ?
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.
Correlation is not necessarily causation.
:
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]
It is an interesting picture and I did wonder what it was intended to convey.
It seems to be one of a series done in Prof. Muller’s home to promote something around his conversion I think, of which this is another:-
http://cagw.mythicalunderworld.com/wp-content/plugins/rss-poster/cache/9bc85_AP111028037724.jpg
Anyway, in the context of correlation vs. causation, which seems central to determining the culpability of CO2 in the warming debate, I did wonder whether the inclusion and positioning of the gorilla in the well taken shot was deliberate and intended to say something about evolution perhaps.
(apologies for the split comment, as I tried including it in the earlier ‘correlation’ one using HTML tags, which failed to work)
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/
I’ll tell you what’s really interesting to me: to folks like Rachel Maddow, “Climate-Change Deniers” are people of dubious mental stability and even (perhaps especially) ethical integrity. As a category, Maddow and others laughingly dismiss “Climate-Change Deniers” they way some people make fun of senior citizens with dementia who also occasionally shoplift in the pet toy section at WalMart.
But “Former Climate-Change Deniers,” on the other hand—well, to the Maddow crowd these are a unique breed of intellectually-gifted individuals with the hardy moral fiber required to stare down their former fellow partisans and save the planet.
In Muller’s case, this raises an interesting question: how do Maddow and her ilk explain how one goes from the equivalent of a village idiot to joining the ranks of Newton, Einstein, and Hawking in (ahem—supposedly!) one short year?