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

I should add Ged Davis (Shell VP) in the IPCC and the Climategate e-mails, old comment on Davis
(I found the links) On the TEAM at Muller Assoc. you find Arthur Rosenfeld, Former California Energy Commissioner and Marlan Downey, Oil and Gas Executive ….. Former President of the international subsidiary of Shell Oil 2nd old comment
I also suggest you read this old thread on Muller
This old comment should also be reread:

Betapug says:
October 22, 2011 at 5:52 pm
Joe Romm does not miss a beat covering ” the well known smearers of climate scientists, Judith Curry and Richard Muller.”
Besides it is old news: “Climate Progress actually broke this story back in March — ……….based on an email Climatologist Ken Caldeira sent me after seeing their preliminary results …”
Anthony, Roddy says he will miss you:
“Mike Roddy says:
October 20, 2011 at 9:33 pm
Muller and I have mutual friends at Berkeley-he is an opportunist, and was once Nobelist Louis Alvarez’ lap dog. He has become a little weird, but is still a smart scientist.
I think Muller was gaming Koch and Watts the whole time. He knew about the NOAA study, of course, and all of the suspense about postponing the BEST results until “all the data are in” was just a way to milk the Kochs out of more money, which amounted to a lot compared to a professor’s salary.
In this case, the charge that climate scientists were “after grant money” was correct, but the results verified what has become obvious. Only a complete idiot would claim otherwise.
As for Watts, the whole notion that scientists were conspiring to use faulty temperature stations to exaggerate climate change was never anything more than a joke. Even Curry and Muller figured that one out.
Watts is not going to be headlining any Heartland conferences for a while. I’ll miss the humor opportunities, but good riddance.”
Roddy is in the business of selling steel (produced using coke, maybe even Koch coke?) framed structures, claiming they have a smaller carbon footprint because they reduce logging.

Then there is Elizabeth Muller’s press statement in support of anti-CO2 alarmism

Elizabeth Muller, co-founder and Executive Director of Berkeley Earth, said she hopes the Berkeley Earth findings will help “cool the debate over global warming by addressing many of the valid concerns of the skeptics in a clear and rigorous way.” This will be especially important in the run-up to the COP 17 meeting in Durban, South Africa, later this year, where participants will discuss targets for reducing Greenhouse Gas (GHG)emissions for the next commitment period as well as issues such as financing, technology transfer and cooperative action.
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/10/28/explaining-muller-vs-muller-is-best-blissfully-unaware-of-cosmic-ray-cloud-theory/

And if you want to know what this is all really about.

“The carbon economy is the fastest growing industry globally with US$84 billion of carbon trading conducted in 2007, doubling to $116 billion in 2008, and expected to reach over $200 billion by 2012 and over $2,000 billion by 2020″ – World Bank Carbon Finance Report for 2007

kadaka (KD Knoebel) says:
December 11, 2012 at 11:07 pm
3. He says climate skeptics deserve our respect, not our ridicule.
So he’s saying he used to deserve respect, even from himself, and now?
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.”
I added the “clean fracking” link from the original, which goes to a paywalled WSJ opinion piece. Been searching for what he means by “clean fracking”. Is that like “clean coal”?
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
Of course Muller is a big fan of fracking, after all he has a Shell Oil VP on his ‘Team’ at Muller & Assoc. Fracking has been the goal from day one. Wipe out the coal industry and substitute gas. The whole scam is working like a charm.
We have the closing of coal plants. In the USA the EPA has a three-year timeline. EPA estimates about 600 plants with 1,100 coal and 300 oil units are affected.
In the UK people are already dying of hypothermia (7,800 people die during [last] winter because they can’t afford to heat their homes properly, says fuel poverty expert Professor Christine Liddell of the University of Ulster. That works out at 65 deaths a day) and the price of fuel skyrocketing with a quarter of Brits living in fuel poverty as energy bills rocket.
On top of that the rank and file Greenies are becoming disenchanted with windmills and solar panels as the environmental consequences slowly seep into their brains. If that doesn’t work you have Smart Meters waiting in the wings so the rolling blackouts can be shunted to residental/small businesses customers only. (see bottom)
At this point I really do not think big energy cares whether or not the carbon trading scheme works (the banks/financial traders do of course) They have pretty much achieved their goal. They know when the reality of a ‘low carbon lifestyle’ hits just as the global temperature takes a down turn there will be screaming from the ‘useful idiots’ for polititians to DO SOMETHING and more tax payer money will be funneled to the energy companies to build gas fired (and nuclear?) plants.
It goes right along with Who has been behind CAGW from the beginning.

The Climatic Research Unit (CRU) is a component of the University of East Anglia and is one of the leading institutions concerned with the study of natural and anthropogenic climate change….
…Initial sponsors included British Petroleum, the Nuffield Foundation and Royal Dutch Shell.[6] The Rockefeller Foundation [Standard Oil money] was another early benefactor… WIKI

There is also the nuclear people and the Oman connection

Enron, joined by BP, invented the global warming industry. I know because I was in the room. This was during my storied three-week or so stint as Director of Federal Government Relations for Enron in the spring of 1997, back when Enron was everyone’s darling in Washington. It proved to be an eye-opening experience that didn’t last much beyond my expressing concern about this agenda of using the state to rob Peter, paying Paul, drawing Paul’s enthusiastic support….
The basic truth is that Enron, joined by other “rent-seeking” industries — making one’s fortune from policy favors from buddies in government, the cultivation of whom was a key business strategy — cobbled their business plan around “global warming.” Enron bought, on the cheap of course, the world’s largest windmill company (now GE Wind) and the world’s second-largest solar panel interest (now BP) to join Enron’s natural gas pipeline network, which was the second largest in the world. The former two can only make money under a system of massive mandates and subsidies (and taxes to pay for them); the latter would prosper spectacularly if the war on coal succeeded.….
http://dailycaller.com/2010/12/15/lessons-from-the-global-warming-industry/

Info on rolling blackouts:

Don’t want smart meter? Power shut off
The rollout of smart electric meters across the country has run into a few snags: one woman doesn’t want one, and ended up in the dark as a result.
You might not think that would be an issue. But it is, because Duke Energy is now beginning to disconnect any homeowner who refuses a new electric meter.

Energy InSight FAQs
….Rolling outages are systematic, temporary interruptions of electrical service.
They are the last step in a progressive series of emergency procedures that ERCOT follows when it detects that there is a shortage of power generation within the Texas electric grid. ERCOT will direct electric transmission and distribution utilities, such as CenterPoint Energy, to begin controlled, rolling outages to bring the supply and demand for electricity back into balance.They generally last 15-45 minutes before being rotated to a different neighborhood to spread the effect of the outage among consumers, which would be the case whether outages are coordinated at the circuit level or individual meter level. Without this safety valve, power generating units could overload and begin shutting down and risk causing a domino effect of a statewide, lengthy outage. With smart meters, CenterPoint Energy is proposing to add a process prior to shutting down whole circuits to conduct a mass turn off of individual meters with 200 amps or less (i.e. residential and small commercial consumers) for 15 or 30 minutes, rotating consumers impacted during that outage as well as possible future outages.
There are several benefits to consumers of this proposed process. By isolating non-critical service accounts (“critical” accounts include hospitals, police stations, water treatment facilities etc.) and spreading “load shed” to a wider distribution, critical accounts that happen to share the same circuit with non-critical accounts will be less affected in the event of an emergency. Curtailment of other important public safety devices and services such as traffic signals, police and fire stations, and water pumps and sewer lifts may also be avoided.

Bill Illis says:
December 12, 2012 at 1:20 am
So far, we haven’t examined whether Berkeley Earth’s methodology is sound….
_______________________________
It was put under the microscope ages ago:
A ton of WUWT articles with links to other sites are here:
http://home.comcast.net/~ewerme/wuwt/categories.html

“Individually reducing carbon footprints is pointless — we need to think globally and act globally”.
This makes me very nervous. It sounds like he’s suggesting individuals don’t actually have to cut out anything, but that’s not really what he means.
“Individually reducing carbon footprints is pointless” = Turning off some of your lights and turning down your heating simply won’t do it.
“We need to think globally and act globally” = Much better if we take away your house.
Anything global will clearly outdo any of our piddling little individual efforts. But that’s okay, we don’t have to worry about it – the UN will do it for us. /sarc.
As for Muller being “reasonable” and “honest” and “will flip when the time is right” – forget it. He has proven himself to be a liar and a cheat. What’s to trust? This is the price one pays for being a liar and a cheat.
There is a con in the making. As I said earlier, this doesn’t just involve Muller. Is the IPCC losing power? I don’t believe so. Was the IPCC deliberately not invited to COP18? It looked like it, but I don’t think so. Various bodies are pulling back into the shadows and downplaying alarmism because they recognize that shouting and screaming and demanding are tactics that are no longer working. They are playing the “Let’s be reasonable” game. They will whisper and smile and look rational for the cameras, but there’s a big boot at the end of all this, and you can bet it’s swinging our way.
I don’t trust Muller an inch. I don’t trust any of them an inch. This isn’t a man “coming over to our side” nor a man “taking the blinkers off” – this is a man getting ready to slip the knife in yet again. Too much is at stake, for him/them and for us, too. Please do not be duped again by Muller. The Alarmists are taking us for fools – let’s not prove them right.

Anthony and a few others may be pleased with Mueller’s Romney-like about face, but I don’t believe there’s anything behind it but self-interest. We’ll have to wait and see what he does.

Michael Cohen says:
December 11, 2012 at 6:31 pm
Slightly OT, but speaking of temperature series, where are the November 2012 numbers from UAH and RSS?
I commented on RSS earlier. UAH just came out.
With the UAH anomaly for November at 0.281, the average for the first eleven months of the year is (-0.134 -0.135 + 0.051 + 0.232 + 0.179 + 0.235 + 0.130 + 0.208 + 0.339 + 0.333 + 0.281)/11 = 0.156. This would rank 9th if it stayed this way. 1998 was the warmest at 0.42. The highest ever monthly anomaly was in April of 1998 when it reached 0.66.
The last three months of UAH are rather different from the last three months of RSS, but perhaps the version6 will make things closer when it comes out.
For UAH: 0.339 + 0.333 + 0.281
For RSS: 0.383 + 0.294 + 0.195

“1. Most of the evidence, as presented to the public, is exaggerated or distorted.
2. Global warming is indeed real and dangerous, and it is worthy of serious effort to stop.
3. Assuming the theory is correct (it may not be), none of the well-known proposals to stop global warming that have been made have any realistic chance of working, even if they are fully implemented.”
Note that his willingness to allow that the theory may be wrong rather vitiates his second point–how would we know it is dangerous if the theory is wrong?
I missed this earlier remark (which which I largely agree, I personally think that Muller is comparatively reasonable about the climate, if also somewhat mercurial). I agree completely with points 1 and 3. I half agree with 2. Global warming is without any reasonable doubt real. The world has warmed, on average, since the late 1700s, putting on somewhere around 1 to 1.5 C. That warming is in no way uniformly distributed — it warmed very slowly (with an additional dip) well into the 19th century, then added a fairly consistent roughly 0.1 C/decade, with a few bobbles, from the latter 19th century up to the present. So let’s agree that global warming is real, as long as the word anthropogenic is omitted. The conflation of the former with the latter is part of point 1.
Is global warming — regardless of cause — potentially dangerous? Absolutely. So might be global cooling. Global climate stasis could be dangerous. It’s all a matter of degree and secondary consequences. A half degree here or there would barely be detectable (either way), especially spread out over a half-century. A half degree plunge, or rise, over a decade, could cause considerable damage with little time to adjust. A half degree spread out over longer times than a century wouldn’t even be noticable. A rise or fall of a degree or more would almost certainly cause considerable damage, again if it occurred in any sort of short time frame.
The third problem with this sentence is that if the GW is not necessarily A, and the fact that it is “dangerous” does not mean that its danger is preventable by humans or capable of being “stopped”, that it makes sense to expend “serious effort” trying to stop it!
The addition of this one word, plus the omission of the perhaps implicit word “anthropogenic” modifying the global warming bit, plus the modification of “serious effort trying to stop it” into “cost-effective effort into trying to understand it and, as indicated, prepare for it in reasonable ways” and we’d have perfect agreement.
Let’s try, then, to change Muller’s second sentence into:
2. Global warming is indeed real, some portion of the most recent warming may be anthropogenic, and even natural climate change is potentially dangerous. It is therefore worthwhile to invest cost-effectively in trying to understand the climate and, as indicated by empirically founded discovery, prepare for climate change in reasonable ways.
Specifically, invest in research, and invest in some bet-hedging new technologies. In the meantime, watch carefully and be prepared to act no matter what happens, without panicking or spending a catastrophic sum on ineffective measures taken to prevent a catastrophe that may never happen in the meantime.
rgb

lip service in this case. Something’s up.
richardscourtney says:
December 13, 2012 at 2:27 am
…
Several snow ploughs, gritters, and their trained operators are maintained for use to deal with the snow because the costs of this are less than the costs of coping with snow.

…
??? How exactly are “dealing” and “coping” with snow different? The ploughs etc. are simply techniques and tools for coping with snow competently, as opposed to not and just suffering the consequences. A parallel to “climate mitigation” would be some (stupid and futile) attempt to prevent the snow.

All Muller’s reasonableness is “mitigated” by his insertion of the assertion that human-caused CO2 rise has driven dangerous climate change which must be responded to. He’ll happily cede anything if you’re prepared to buy that pig in a poke. That’s game over.