Richard Muller cozying up to Bill Clinton – but there's good news too

Interesting and a bit unexpected.

Is Muller’s middle name ‘Sybil’?

Dr. Muller is being a politician and protecting his organization and his job. Notice he still haven’t moderated the AGW mantra just altered the message to make it more palatable.

It looks like he saved the “BEST” for Last.

Perhaps he’s noticed that we’ve noticed and that others have noticed that we’ve noticed.
Is that clear? 😉

“mutual goal of mitigating global warming.”
Uh Huh, as if we can do that any way.

“The temperature of the Earth has been rising in a way that closely matches the rise in carbon dioxide. The history of solar activity does not match the data at all.”
Ok, I’d agree that the stratospheric cooling suggests that some of the warming is due to CO2 increase but to claim there’s no correlation to solar activity is absurd. Why has it always got to be all or nothing? Muller talks about objectivity but doesn’t display much.

Slightly OT, but speaking of temperature series, where are the November 2012 numbers from UAH and RSS?

Sorry, I don’t buy it. Something is up. Their push to tackle the problem “globally” is still on. They’ll still be pushing for a centralized government and for the UN to take over.
Someone pointed out the other day (sorry, I forget who) that the IPCC were backing down ONLY to appear more “reasonable” and to tone down their show of alarmism. I think this display is more of the same.
So: WARNING. Watch your backs. I mean it. In the days or weeks to come, the extremists on this issue will be waving around whatever evidence they can pounce on – or make up – proclaiming that we are the unreasonable ones and that the world, therefore, should listen to them.

Ohoh.Either his off sprongs business needs more money,or he is angling for an Amassadorship when Hillary gets in. I trust this guy about as far as I can spit into a hundred knot headwind.He’s TOO namby-pamby on the fence.

If you think Bill Clinton is committed to climate change then you’ll think Richard Muller is committed to climate change.

Clinton and Muller: Fabians to the Bolsheviks. Both want us in the same place, just have differing paths to get us there. Funny, I was quite literally just pondering such matters. Call me a skeptic, or a cynic, but this type has a track record.

John R T says:
December 11, 2012 at 5:39 pm
Either, “Truth to power,” or his daughter’s business is in for big money.
____________________________
Well his daughter has a Shell VP on board ….

It would be nice if some of the $2,000,000,000 Clinton collected for Haiti would be spend on something in Haiti, EG clean water

Muller recently lied in his WSJ article about being a “former skeptic.” He never was a skeptic.
When billions of dollars are involved, all kinds of subversive actions are being used and paid for, including using stool pigeons pretending “not to be skeptic’s enemies.”
I think Muller is a Green Totalitarians’ stool pigeon. Whatever he says to appear being your friend, he says with the objective to betray you.

As a follow up to my initial comment, check how the Vancouver Sun reporter is stringing the subject for a series of 3 articles:
http://www.vancouversun.com/business/Water+damage+claims+surpass+fire+claims/7679979/story.html
The articles come from a single source/viewpoint and feature the SAME academics prominently: Deborah Harford from SFU, whose ACT Institute is sponsored by Willburforce and Bullitt Foundations (of course not a word on that from the writer Tracy Sherlock) and Stephen Sheppard
professor in landscape architecture and forest resources management at UBC, who is insuring work for himself and his students, peddling glossy green residential planning reports based on fantasy climatology.
As usual, the reporter gobbles the well rehearsed alarmism especially when Gordon McBean is involved. Clearly, this series should be considered like “paid advertisement” not information.
Then another reporter Larry Pynn hammers the nail: “METRO VANCOUVER – Combating rising sea levels due to global warming could cost $9.5 billion in flood-protection improvements in Metro Vancouver”
http://www.vancouversun.com/technology/Metro+Vancouver+dike+improvements+could+cost+billion+2100+report/7682197/story.html#ixzz2EoDCZOK7
Not ONE word that sea level rose 1.2 in in 100 y in Vancouver…
These articles are brainwashing and once again, follow the money to figure out who is launching this campaign and who will benefit from it.

Robertin Ariz, “responsible alarmist voice”? How do you reconcile these words… LOL

Muller’s problem is that with the BEST project and its conclusions, he fell into the “correlation is causation” trap. The question I have is whether he actually believes that the science supports that conclusion. I’m guessing that he doesn’t. That he’s just pleasing one side of the debate one year and the other side the next.
With this interview we are clearly into the “next” year.

Every place usually has something they enjoy making fun of. Arkansas had one person with a shrill voice they wanted to get rid of and they did… and her husband too. I’m surprised she gave Uncle Bubba permission to do that.
George Washington never told a lie… Richard Nixon never told the truth… and Bill Clinton cannot tell the difference.
So I wouldn’t read too much into it.

RobertInAz says:
On another subject, there are a number of inappropriate ad hominem attacks on Dr. Muller in this thread.
There aren’t any ad hominem attacks on Muller above. There are some insightful comments on his lack of character, and a few insults. All are appropriate.
He appears to be one of the more responsible alarmist voices and this many here do not appreciate how important his voice is.
Muller is a liar. He is a self promoting charlatan who is playing politics with science to further his personal political and financial agendas. There is nothing responsible about his stalking horse tactics and his ‘respect for skeptics’ is exactly as real as his own ‘former skepticism’. Stories told to achieve an end.

I’m not a scientist, I’m a writer. My strength is that I study people, I recognize people, their motives, their ploys. In the past I’ve also come up against manipulation frequently enough to now spot it a mile off. Muller is not being honest. The turn around is too sudden and has no cause.
What we’re looking at here is a shift in the Alarmist stance. Some of the smarter Alarmists have recognized that their message is not being received by the general public as readily as it once was, especially when delivered with extreme aggression. The order has gone out, perhaps from the IPCC (because it seems to have shown up there first, but I could be wrong on that), to calm it down a bit so they can get their BS back under the radar where it once worked so effectively.
They recognize that we are being heard and our views are beginning to get accepted as scientific, logical, reasonable. They’ve tried shouting us down. That backfired. More and more people are looking our way to see what’s happening here and to learn why the guys with the money, the spotlight and the microphone are so worried about us way out in the shadows. They recognize that polititcians are beginning to think twice about the so-called “solutions” being rammed down their throats – especially when there are clearly better solutions to hand. They recognize that people are getting angry about the number of people dying in the snow year after year and the taxes going to a non-problem. The Alarmists are getting frightened because the ordinary citizen is looking around for something better than the Greens/Reds and the destruction of economies and other needless sacrifices around the world.
So now they’re coming in with the soothing tones and the “let’s be reasonable” voice. They still have the money, the spotlights and the microphone. They’re just looking at another way to harpoon us because, collectively, we’re getting to be a nuisance and we’re spoiling their party.
Do not doubt for a moment that the Alarmist still see us as the enemy. This isn’t Muller on his own. You will see it’s an orchestrated move to downplay our objections. They are simply trying not to shoot themselves in the foot anymore.
Maybe we can take advantage of this and publically call for that reasonable open debate. If they are so reasonable, will it be granted – reasonably? No, it won’t, but it could be worth the attempt to see how they squirm out of it “reasonably”.

Michael Tobis says:
December 11, 2012 at 6:14 pm
Just discovered this: http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/08/02/alarmist-fact-checking-street-lights-dont-melt-at-115f/
OK. You got me. I was wrong and silly. D’oh.
But here’s the question – what’s good for the goose, and what’s good for the gander?
“He says climate skeptics deserve our respect, not our ridicule.”
Sure, respect when you’re being genuinely skeptical, and not when you are being ridiculous.

[My bold]
The reason why the cause of the melting streetlights was quickly found is because some people were sceptical. It is a cornerstone of science.
Mr. Muller might one day regret his ‘alleged’ conversion to CAGW in light of the stalled global mean temps.

July 2012 – New York Times – Dr. Richard Muller
CALL me a converted skeptic. Three years ago I identified problems in previous climate studies that, in my mind, threw doubt on the very existence of global warming.
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/30/opinion/the-conversion-of-a-climate-change-skeptic.html?pagewanted=all

Some point out that this is nonsense.
I have never read any sceptic stating doubts that the world has warmed since the end of the Little Ice Age. I have never read any sceptic who doubts the world warmed for a short period prior to 16 years ago. His alleged conversion is what’s “ridiculous”.

“2. He suggests individually reducing our carbon footprint is pointless — we need to “think globally and act globally,” by encouraging the switch from coal to gas power in China and developing nations.” He’s a fan of “clean fracking.”
Yeah, he’s a real Mr. nice guy 100% focused on a global carbon treaty. A true and honorable Green Totalitarian. Nothing more nothing less.
http://green-agenda.com

Which of his many faces was he talking out of ??

So far, we haven’t examined whether Berkeley Earth’s methodology is sound.
Their scapel method of treating discontinuities identified by their automatic algorithm, scapels/splits the 7,400 GHCN stations into 44,380 new effective stations. This is what their methodology paper says.
There is no way, this method did not introduce even more spurious errors into the trend.
Let’s say a little more than half of the discontinuities identified and scapeled out, were when temperatures at some station were falling. Now let’s say one-third of those were actually real and not just station moves or equipment changes. Well, now the methodology has just pulled out a bunch of real drops in temperature.
They have to show us the number of flagged “down” discontinuities is balanced out by the number of “up” discontinuities. They have to show us that this balances out over time as well. Not that the balance of down discontinuities is at the beginning or end of the record. They have not done this that I can find.
And neither has the NCDC done this for their break-point/discontinuity pairwise algorithm. Both methodologies could suffer from the same problem.
The methodologies sound good on paper until you start to think about what they are really doing. Like eliminating Reykavik’s “real” drop in temperatures in the 1960s. The Iceland meteorological office insists it was a real decline and there was no station or equipment changes. The algorithms, however, insist that it is a clearly a discontinuity and has to be removed. The drop is taken out and the overall trend is just re-adjusted higher. Now multiply that situation over 7,400 stations over 1400 months and we just have a bunch of spurious errors introduced into what is supposed to be an homogenized record. Hopefully, people will understand what is posted here. Its hard to describe.

Muller is talking sense. Why are so may on here talking rubbish? Nearly everything he says is reasonable. Maybe he still sticks to the conventions of ‘global warming’ but, surely, most so-called ‘sceptics’ would agree that the world has warmed. And some of that is due to human causes. And some of that is due to increases in CO2? Bloody hell, cut the man some slack.

Muller is still not being scientific in his comments. For example, it is illogical to believe that billions of individuals ‘reducing’ their carbon footprint is pointless (unless of course, you don;t believe in CO2 as a major warming contributor?). If everyone managed a 10% reduction in power use, that would be a significant saving of fossil fuels. So,. IMHO that comment is clearly politically based and not scientifically based.
On point 2 – again, if he is accepting that clean fracking is ok – then he obviously doesn’t consider the CO2 meme to be catastrophic?
as for the respect for skeptics – I dunno, just seems a bit tongue in cheek to me….
Overall, adding these points together would indicate a slight shift in his perceived position, (certainly a change from a hyped up attacking stance to a more controlled defensive stance?) – and if so, we have to ask why?

Michael Tobis says:
December 11, 2012 at 6:14 pm
““He says climate skeptics deserve our respect, not our ridicule.”
Sure, respect when you’re being genuinely skeptical, and not when you are being ridiculous.”
Michael Tobis, we don’t care what a rent seeker like Muller declares about us. We are watching him; and not for his science.

Werner Brozek says:
December 11, 2012 at 8:46 pm
Now I know that satellites and ground based data are different. However I still found the discrepancy between RSS and GISS odd over the last three months. For GISS: 0.62 + 0.68 + 0.68; for RSS: 0.383 + 0.294 + 0.195.
GISS are out to make 2012 the hottest year evah (using ‘adjustments’ where necessary).
http://stevengoddard.wordpress.com/2012/12/11/hansen-caught-cheating-again/
http://stevengoddard.wordpress.com/2012/11/18/warming-the-present-at-giss/
http://stevengoddard.wordpress.com/2012/11/18/cooling-the-past-at-giss/
+ many more.

I think many skeptics would agree with Muller. Extra CO2 will produce ‘some’ warming. I suspect that even James Hansen would agree that catastrophic warming requires a tipping point or positive feedbacks.

Muller: We need to act, but no need to panic. I see no tipping points that are scientifically valid. Of course, we don’t understand the atmosphere and biosphere well enough to be sure.

The only thing I disagree with, about the above statement, is the need to act.
The official climb-down on CAGW is continuing. There is a leaked version of the next IPCC report circulating. There was a story on Slashdot. It came from a story on ABC. link They are predicting some warming and some sea level rise but nothing catastrophic. Nothing dramatic and nothing worth ruining our economy to prevent. The mainstream is moving. Now all we have to do is convince them that more CO2 is a very good thing and some warming is beneficial. Dipping back into Little Ice Age conditions should do that. 🙂

Has BEST actual mangled to get anything through peer review and published yet , or is it still ‘science by press release ?

Bill Illis (December 12, 2012 at 1:20 am) wrote:
“The methodologies sound good on paper until you start to think about what they are really doing. Like eliminating Reykavik’s “real” drop in temperatures in the 1960s. The Iceland meteorological office insists it was a real decline and there was no station or equipment changes. The algorithms, however, insist that it is a clearly a discontinuity and has to be removed. The drop is taken out and the overall trend is just re-adjusted higher. Now multiply that situation over 7,400 stations over 1400 months and we just have a bunch of spurious errors introduced into what is supposed to be an homogenized record. Hopefully, people will understand what is posted here. Its hard to describe.”
The dealbreaking problem is that such algorithms simply & plainly canNOT differentiate natural changepoints from artificial ones. Parties advocating the use of such adjustments are making clear their lack of desire & patience to carefully appreciate and understand nature. They’re making it clear that understanding nature is not a priority for them. This is offensive. Bulldozing records of natural variability is part of their strategy. This eliminates trust.

Convert coal power to methane? What for? They both produce CO2. Clean coal technology is not new. The anti coal agenda is driven by the oil companies who provide funding to the Sierra Club crowd to lobby against coal. Pretty simple hypocrisy on the part of the anti CO2 CAGW’ers.

The fear of UN as a world government (via climate policies) expressed by some, is unwarranted, based on ideology rather than understanding.. The UN is an organisatiosn that lobbies can take over (and the Greens and climate research have done so but this is no ordained and happened by default). The Un and most of its agencies remains weak in practice as long as its membersbers refuse to act and pay jointly. The climate scare has provided the World Bank with income and influence, and this what bureaucracies want, but they need not get it , if…..

Peter Miller says:
December 12, 2012 at 1:37 am

Having read the comments here, I can only conclude most did not read the original article.
…

Does the man believe CO2 is causing global warming to the point CO2 needs to be controlled or reduced? If so, nothing else he says matters (for he then contradicts himself and becomes the consumate politician–willing to say anything and everything to achieve his ultimate goal).
Beware wolves in sheep’s clothing. And don’t castigate the rest of us for seeing through his charade.

@ Sonja Boehmer-Christiansen:”The fear of UN as a world government (via climate policies) expressed by some, is unwarranted, based on ideology rather than understanding..”
You must be kidding yourself. We have political leadership today who claim they support Global Governance and hand over all powers to the UN the moment the time is right. Just listen to the first speech made by the current “NON ELECTED” President of the EU. In the mean time we have more UN rules interfearing with our lives than many of you know. In fact, Agenda 21 rulings are already closing down entire roads and rural area’s. Please wake up and activate your gray cells.

Gixxerboy says:
Muller is talking sense. Why are so may on here talking rubbish? Nearly everything he says is reasonable.
Well, if one is to come to a conclusion about nearly everything he says, one has to follow everything he says – out of both of his faces. He says a few things of minor importance that skeptics will like, to seem reasonable and gain acceptance for the big-ticket items that are the goals of his agenda. He’ll give you hurricane Sandy, so you will accept that “We need to act.”
Maybe he still sticks to the conventions of ‘global warming’ but, surely, most so-called ‘sceptics’ would agree that the world has warmed. And some of that is due to human causes. And some of that is due to increases in CO2?
According to Muller, 100% of ‘global warming’ over the last 250 years is due to human CO2.
That is what you are buying into, when you roll over for Muller’s Clintonesque sweet talk. It is the contents of the package, not the wrapping paper, that is important.
Bloody hell, cut the man some slack.
No. Lying politicians operate on ‘slack’. Last thing you do is give it to them.
Muller is playing his part in the kabuki.
Bad Warmist says: “Sceptics are stupid. Hurricane Sandy is all our fault! We need to act.”
‘Good’ Warmist says: “Sceptics are right. Hurricane Sandy is not our fault. We need to act!”
Sorry. I wasn’t born yesterday. They’re both bad warmists.

However in view of the significance of the 16 years lately, I would like to elaborate on RSS. The slope for 15 years and 11 months from January 1997 on RSS is -4.1 x 10^-4. But the slope for 16 years and 0 months from December 1996 is +1.3 x 10^-4. So since the magnitude of the negative slope since January 1997 is 3 times than the magnitude of the positive slope since December 1996, I believe I can say that since a quarter of the way through December 1996, in other words from December 8, 1996 to December 7, 2012, the slope is 0. This is 16 years. Therefor RSS is 192/204 or 94% of the way to Santer’s 17 years.
Or, one could simply look at the temperature curve itself, note that almost all of the increase over the entire satellite era occurred in one single event — the 1997-1998 El Nino, and that it was flat (as far as is concerned) before this event. In other words, the entire timeseries from 1979 to the present is inconsistent with any sort of picture of gradual warming driven by a steadily increasing concentration of CO_2. It is consistent with a system that is multistable — has many limit points that correspond to a kind of “dynamic equilibrium” — that can be jarred from multidimensional orbits around one locally stable attractor into orbits around another locally stable attractor, where the unusually strong ENSO event sufficed to force such a transition.
Really, there is no other particularly good explanation of the data in terms of single variables (as Bob Tisdale is fond of pointing out, and pointing out, and pointing out — because it is true). Of course when you take into account additional variables such as CO_2 and/or solar state, you can come up with other explanations. Perhaps increased CO_2 caused the emergence of the second attractor, and perhaps its continued rise is destabilizing the currently stable attractor. Perhaps the prolonged period of high solar activity in some way caused the emergence of the second attractor with little help from CO_2, and now that it has gone down to the lowest level in 100 years an attractor at a cooler temperature is emerging and we’ll either smoothly decay or “jump” down to it. Perhaps attractors are “dense”, with nearly equal probability of jumping up or jumping down all of the time, but with the direction of the jump strongly dependent on the perturbation that causes it plus e.g. the phases of the various decadal oscillations. All we can see is that over the 33 years of good data, the first fifteen of them exhibited almost no warming, then there was a comparatively huge jump, and the last fifteen of them have exhibited almost no warming, strongly suggesting that Koutsoyiannis’ picture of Hurst-Kolmogorov punctuated equilibrium is the right statistical framework for describing the climate, although perhaps not the local noise of the time-evolution through the Poincare’ cycles bound to an attractor.
As for the 17 years, or 15 years, or whatever — bullshit. It is completely, totally meaningless as a number barring assumptions that are impossible to justify and according to the data, rather likely to be wrong concerning the correct statistics and corresponding dynamics of the process of climate evolution. The hypothesis of carbon dioxide driven global warming with high feedback/climate sensitivity could be dead right, but the nature of the dynamical evolution could be one of 5-20 year flat stretches bound to a currently stable attractor (plus substantial noise) followed by a dynamically driven jump to a strictly warmer attractor following the CAGW doomsday scenario curves. Or, it could be dead wrong and CO_2 could be a minor, easily overcome modulator of the probability of upward or downward transitions in a phase space of nearly equally balanced attractors, where the upward or downward transition probability is much more strongly influenced by the dynamical heating or cooling potential of the decadal oscillations and/or solar state (through mechanism unknown) or steady by very slow orbital variations or hundred year cyclic variations in the thermohaline circulation or aerosol levels or…
The best that can be said is what can be said from the entire data set. That treats everything interior as noise (in the specific sense that we profess complete ignorance of the causes of the variation), and suggests a warming rate of roughly 0.1 C/decade, projecting 0.9 C more warming by the end of the century, all things being equal. The uncertainties are great enough, however, that they embrace 2 C over the century or 0 to slightly negative numbers over the century (still from the 33 year baseline).
Is this a naive estimate? Sure, it assumes a monotonic linear trend for a temperature series that is neither linear nor monotonic across one single full century in the known climate record. Does this estimate account for what is “natural” warming versus anthropogenic warming? How could it? Warming doesn’t come with a label and we cannot directly measure either the precise amount of warming caused by CO_2 increase nor the hypothetical feedback amplification and we do not know the baseline of what temperature would be doing without the additional CO_2. It is a maximum ignorance — or maximum entropy, if you prefer — estimate based strictly on the satellite era data.
If we were to use data from outside of that era without the bias of presumed knowledge, without Bayesian priors, we’d do little better. Indeed, we’d do almost infinitely worse. If we go back forty years we get perhaps the greatest rate of warming. If we go back fifty to sixty years we get less. If we go back 140 years we get little change from the 33 year linear extrapolation (certainly within its probable error bounds). If we go back 300 years we get the same. If we go back 700 years we get a very small rate of warming. If we go back 1000 years we get a very very small rate of warming. If we go back 2000 or more years, we get net cooling for almost all starting points (with two or three localized exceptions) until we reach a point where we get consistent, strong, and then very strong warming. Go back 100000 years and we get anything from (by now very small indeed) warming to equally ignorable cooling. And so on, into the past.
We can explain almost none of this quantitatively! Assertions that we can are bullshit too — prove it, and predict the five million, or fifty million year climate record. We haven’t a bloody clue — not one that we can check — for why ice ages punctuate the climate record back as far as we can see, separating eras where almost without exception it was far warmer than it is today, even when the Sun was very likely somewhat cooler. The current ice age is happening with a much brighter Sun than the one that shown down on the Precambrian era or the Ordovician-Silurian transition. We have hypotheses as to why these ice ages happened, as to why the world remained warm with a significantly lower insolation, but we really don’t have a hell of a lot of data to support the hypotheses or any reliable way to test them. They’re right up there with the debate about dinosaurs and whether they were warm or cold blooded, warm nurturing parents or lay ’em and leave ’em egg parents who would cheerfully eat their own young, scaly lizards or feathered lizards, colorful or drab. All we have to go on (for most of this, for most species) is rare, indirect evidence drawn from the handful of species that actually left fossils that we have actually been fortunate enough to find.
Dinosaurs could have built artifacts and cities and had a bloody civilization that lasted a thousand years and the reshaping of the Earth a dozen times over in between might well have erased every recognizable trace of it. And so it is with the climate, which we infer, in part from that selfsame incomplete fossil record.
Skeptics, to be completely fair, need to not engage in wishful thinking and imagine that the last 16 years disproves GW, AGW, CAGW, or that it proves that the world is about to cool, or start the descent into an ice age, or whatever. It does nothing of the sort. It “proves” absolutely nothing but that for reasons we do not fully understand, the world has not warmed or cooled much for 16 years but rather fluctuated in a way that cannot be distinguished from “no linear trend”.
CAGW supporters, to be equally fair, need to not engage in wishful thinking and imagine that the last 16 years supports the hypothesis of high climate sensitivity leading to catastrophic warming. It does nothing of the sort. Indeed, it is, or should be, quite worrisome to them in the specific sense that it should be causing them to question or doubt their hypothesis and consider modifying it (which is not worrisome at all, of course, quite the contrary — it would be excellent news). In particular, every year the temperature remains flat should be pushing them to consider two changes — the obvious one of reduced climate sensitivity within their existing model(s), and with a correspondingly larger explanatory role for natural fluctuations and trends in the past, and the less obvious one of recognizing that climate dynamics is not a linear or even trivially nonlinear process but rather that the “average global temperature” is a one-dimensional projection of a complex and chaotic dynamical process that appears very much to be dominated by locally stable attractors that emerge and disappear according to internal non-Markovian dynamics that we are almost completely clueless about but that appear to be more than capable of “erasing” any trivial linear or nonlinear trend driven by a single variable so that no single variable can explain even local dynamics as more than an accident.
In other words, everybody needs to stop claiming knowledge that they just don’t have. That way we could stop pretending that we have a friggin’ clue as to what the climate is going to do in ten years, or twenty years, not with enough certainty to justify literally betting the health, safety and happiness of countless people in the world on the arguments either way.
Here’s the bottom line: We should, as a civilization, take moderate measures to hedge our bets against the worst case warming scenarios without panicking and spending trillions of dollars on it. Reasonable measures absolutely include doing more billion dollar research on the question (hey, at least the results here are immediately useful to the extent that the research succeeds, unlike, for example, the answer to the question of whether or not the Higgs Boson exists — so far) and on non-Carbon based energy resources. Just in case. After all, if the thermal record tells us anything, it is that we have time — the extrapolated linear trend is not something to panic over, and some fraction of that warming is almost certainly not anthropogenic.
The seas may disastrously rise, but they aren’t doing it yet. Crops may fail, storms may lash humanity, but there isn’t a clue that either one is happening yet. The arctic may melt, but it has melted before in the 1930s and it wasn’t disastrous (the polar bears somehow muddled through) and there is no disaster up there — yet. None of these things will happen overnight even if warming resumes and the CAGW extreme of the AGW hypothesis proves correct. And frankly, even if it were correct, there is damn all we could do about it with our current technology that wouldn’t count as a “catastrophe” for most of humanity in its own right — we’d be choosing between catastrophes, not avoiding one. Surely mere common sense suggests searching for technologies that might permit civilization to continue of the worst case scenario proves correct and the choice really is stop burning carbon or die in appalling numbers, while at the same time refusing to buy in to the assertion that it is true without some very hard, impossible to ignore, evidence.
Which simply does not, at this time, exist.
In twenty years we’ll know more. In fifty years y’all that are younger than I am will know more. It might take, however, seventy or even a hundred years for us to get to where we really understand the climate well enough to predict it on a century-plus timescale or to “steer” the climate in a predictable way by deliberately altering (for example) the chemistry of our atmosphere or deliberately turning Panama into a deepwater open connection between the oceans by means of a few thousand nuclear bombs that both dig and cool by blasting dust into the atmosphere nuclear winter style. In the meantime, doing stuff like that or spraying an orbital curtain in between us and the Sun is just crazy talk — I mean, what could go wrong?
rgb

CO2 in my opinion is a harmless trace gas, yet essential and necessary for life on earth. Anyone trying to lower the 0,039% of CO2 in the atmosphere is an enemy of life. We need more of it to feed the world, not less.
Ah, please, surely we don’t really need this sort of hyperbole. Someone interested in lowering the 400 ppm CO_2 in the atmosphere is not necessarily “an enemy of life”, and while your opinion may be that it is a harmless trace gas, you could easily be mistaken, and people that disagree and think otherwise, especially when and where they have an actual physically supported argument as opposed to an opinion stated as fact, are not “evil” or seeking World Domination.
There may well be some people seeking World Domination on the back of the CAGW hypothesis. There were and continue to be plenty of people seeking or continuing to hold onto substantial parts of World Domination on the back of the beliefs of people raised not to question them concerning the existence and probable deity of a legendary figure who might or might not have lived 2000 years ago, or the religious philosophy written down by a real figure reportedly taking dictation from an angel 1300 years ago, or the religious society established by a real figure who claimed to have found golden tablets under the direction of a different angel just a few hundred years ago. That doesn’t reduce the sincerity of the people that without the faintest shred of concrete evidence continue to accept those incredible beliefs.
Personally, I think the exploitation of those beliefs are a greater risk to civilization than the CAGW assertions, by far — the latter can be falsified and if you are correct, will be falsified in due course, whereupon the peasants can descend with their pitchforks and torches or not as seems fitting. The former are killing people literally ever day by the score, with a risk of killing people by the hundred, or thousand, or even million, hovering perpetually in the wings. If rationality is a standard worth pursuing in public affairs, we could start with the enormous irrationality of religious beliefs that threaten one with an eternal (but non-verifiable) catastrophe as the reward for disbelief or non-compliance and the huge waste of public wealth and diversion of political power enabled by the collection of irrational belief systems. Talk about ongoing real-world catastrophes — look no further.
rgb

Of course he thinks that “individually reducing carbon footprints is pointless — we need to “think globally and act globally”. The global warming cult is really all about a UN ruled socialist paradise. For socialism, individuality and personal accountability poses a threat to the socialist way of doing things, i.e. by surrendering all your thinking to the will of the collective and blindly following the group think dictates of the benevolent nanny state. The minute that the peasants start thinking and acting for themselves, is the moment when the door is opened to possible skeptical thoughts, and next comes the challenge to power as skeptical peasants expand their questions.

R. de Haan says:
December 12, 2012 at 7:28 am
“You must be kidding yourself. We have political leadership today who claim they support Global Governance and hand over all powers to the UN the moment the time is right. Just listen to the first speech made by the current “NON ELECTED” President of the EU. In the mean time we have more UN rules interfering with our lives than many of you know. In fact, Agenda 21 rulings are already closing down entire roads and rural area’s. Please wake up and activate your gray cells.”
Exactly right.
All those pretty trees and gardens planted along new construction and those prominently marked bicycle lanes you never see used…Agenda 21. I saw three lanes reduced to two lanes just to add a bicycle path, when there are parallel roads 1 block away with no traffic and sidewalks galore. Agenda 21. And controlling the internet will another control. Sooner than you expect.
Unprecedented restrictions in zoning…Agenda 21. Huge apartment complexes constructed…not a problem. Agenda 21. Build a new home on your ranch…good luck. Fail the housing industry, turn property owners into apartment dwellers. Agenda 21. 9-11, a crisis, Patriot Act, Agenda 21 Utah’s NSA Data Collection Center collecting 100% of every digital transmission. Search engine data, cell phone data, texting data, collecting data by pinging those cute little chips in your electronics everywhere you go, etc,..all of them…globalliy. Agenda 21. Makes Orson Wells “1984” a reality. Drones in your neighborhood coming soon. Facebook, twitter, Share this, share that. …World better wake up. …and no, I am not paranoid; old enough to see the changes and recognize what it means. When they say they are collecting an “enemies list” you better listen…it’s everyone.

I understand you to be making the same point – except that you ignore the risk of cooling – when you write
I don’t ignore the risk of cooling, I just consider cooling back to the temperature range of the 20th century unremarkable and non-risky. A LIA-scale dip would be a problem, but historically that too seems “unlikely” and likely to proceed at slow enough of a rate that we could cope with it. I’m opposed to chicken-littlism in either extreme. It’s a weird modern version of apocalyptic religion.
So sure, we could melt like an ice cube in the summer sun, we could freeze down into a snowball with full resumption of glaciation, but these extremes are unlikely until empirically proven otherwise. “Likely” variation is on the scale of what we have seen in the century scale past, over century scales, and on the downhill side for 0.3 to 0.5C that is simply not catastrophic or even “interesting” from the social or economic point of view. On the uphill side another 0.5C will probably cause some actual damage, but it will have benefits as well. Damage might outweigh benefits.
By all means, let’s prepare for cooling as well as warming, but invest our money proportional to the best estimated probability of associated damage and the likely timeframe that damage might occur in. That would probably make it 10 to 1 in favor of ameliorating warming as there is lots of time to cope with temperatures as cool as they were in (say) 1950. By not actually “coping” — simply returning to an older normal.
rgb

Michael Tobis says:
December 11, 2012 at 6:14 pm
Sure, respect when you’re being genuinely skeptical, and not when you are being ridiculous.
Have you ever acknowledged a single case of sceptics being “genuinely sceptical?” Have you ever been “genuinely sceptical” of climate science?
I won’t hold my breath.

@rgbatduke 8:46. Thanks Dr Brown, thats a refreshing blast of reality and common sense, now if there was some way to get our indoctrinated politicians to read and comprehend.
We never did know enough to panic which is why I feel the instigators of this CO2=CAGW, must be held responsible.
I did not know that Esops Tales and the rest of folk lore is no longer taught, maybe these cautionary tales need to be compulsory for High school. Or as the morning prayer in our legislatures.

Peter Miller says:
December 12, 2012 at 1:37 am
Having read the comments here, I can only conclude most did not read the original article.
Most of what Muller said was completely rational…
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Trojan Horse

Sonja Boehmer-Christiansen says:
December 12, 2012 at 6:15 am
The fear of UN as a world government (via climate policies) expressed by some, is unwarranted, based on ideology rather than understanding.. …
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To put it bluntly BOVINE FECES!
Sorry that will not fly any more because Pascal Lamy Director General of the World Trade Organizatio let the cat out of the bag with all his ‘Global Governance’ anti-sovereign nation articles. The WTO and UN work hand in glove as anyone who followed the Agreement on Ag/traceability/seed patenting wars can attest.
Here are a few of Lamy’s articles – go read them and take your head out of the sand.

…The concept of governance disappeared in the 16th century with the emergence of the nation state….
…The first efficiency challenge of any global governance system stems from the fact that the classical Westphalian order is based on the full sovereignty monopoly of nation states….
We must find ways to address the opposition from sovereign nation-states…
http://www.theglobalist.com/StoryId.aspx?StoryId=5740

… Lamy asserts that the four main challenges to global governance today are Leadership (“Who is the leader?”); Efficiency (“naysayers” can block decisions); Coherence (“Each international organization focuses on a limited number of issues”); and Legitimacy (“togetherness” weakens significantly as distance to power systems grows.). Addressing these challenges, Lamy says, requires the world turn to Europe, the “one place where attempts to deal with these challenges have been made and where new forms of governance have been tested for the last 60 years.”
On the question of efficiency, Lamy gives the European Union high marks “[t]hanks to the primacy of EU law over national law.”
http://www.globalgovernancewatch.org/spotlight_on_sovereignty/lamy-calls-for-europeaninspired-global-governance

…the international system is founded on the principle and politics of national sovereignty: the Wesphalian order of 1648 remains very much alive in the international architecture today. In the absence of a truly global government, global governance results from the action of sovereign States. It is inter-national. Between nations. In other words, global governance is the globalization of local governance.
But it does not suffice to establish informal groupings or specialized international organizations, each of them being “Member driven”, to ensure a coherent and efficient approach to address the global problems of our time. In fact, the Wesphalian order is a challenge in itself. The recent crisis has demonstrated it brutally. Local politics has taken the upper hand over addressing global issues. Governments are too busy dealing with domestic issues to dedicate sufficient attention and energy to multilateral negotiations, be they trade negotiations or climate negotiations….
http://www.wto.org/english/news_e/sppl_e/sppl220_e.htm

And here lies the root of many of today’s problems. Global challenges need global solutions — and these can only come with the right form of global governance, which today, 20 years later, remains too weak….
We are in the midst of the worst-ever economic crisis — and the first to have a global reach and which has seen a decimation of employment.
We are seeing our planet deteriorate due to global warming. We see droughts and violent floods. We see entire islands disappearing under water.
What is global governance? For me, global governance describes the system we set up to assist human society to achieve its common purpose in a sustainable manner — that is, with equity and justice….
…the European construction is the most ambitious experiment to date in supranational governance. It is the story of a desired, defined and organized interdependence between its member states….
the European Union remains the laboratory of international governance — the place where the new technological frontier of international governance is being tested.
http://www.theglobalist.com/storyid.aspx?StoryId=8216

Alan Watt, CD (Certified Denialist), Level 7 says:
December 12, 2012 at 6:39 am
…. Think as many negative things about Dr. Muller is you like, but don’t believe for an instant he is even close to the manipulator and prevaricator Bill Clinton is…..
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Amen to that. Don’t get me started on that Son of a Syphilitic Camel.
You can credit him with the banking crisis, NAFTA, WTO, China’s entry into the WTO , the loss of millions of US jobs, the US trade deficit, the starvation and food riots in third world countries…… The word traitor comes to mind: President Clinton said today that reported political campaign contributions from China to the Democrats had not influenced his foreign policy… ”The decisions we made, we made because we thought they were in the interests of the American people,” Mr. Clinton said
So the permanent loss of 2.4 million American jobs to China, a ~23% unemployment, 1.9m homes foreclosed, home prices falling 34%, a growing trade deficit and the resulting skyrocketing of federal debt are in the interests of the American people – Yeah right.

Muller should never have done that “BEST” temp time series.
A much better approach is that one of PopTech’s: just pile up the papers and let the reader be induced to the conclusion. This “getting to verifiable results” business is too vulnerable to… well, verification.

RayG says:
December 11, 2012 at 6:36 pm
I realize that, given Hillary’s postion, the Clinton’s investment portfolio is probably in a blind trust but I am curious about whether or not they have followed any investment advice from his green Veep and put money in to “green” companies or funds.

Only if they’re seriously stupid. http://www.businessinsider.com/renixx-renewable-energy-index-decline-2012-12