Bishop Hill Muller in the Carbon Brief
Aug 3, 2012 Climate: Surface The Carbon Brief has interviewed Richard Muller. It's a wideranging piece with much of interest, not least Muller's confirmation that he was never a global warming sceptic.
Asked if it's really accurate to say he was ever a skeptic, Muller replies: "I have considered myself only to be a properly skeptical scientist. Some people have called me a denier - no, that's completely wrong. If anything, I was agnostic.
There is also Muller's reaction to McKitrick's revelation that he had found errors in the BEST papers:
Muller is sanguine: "There were no mistakes in that paper. McKitrick had comments and found things he thought were mistakes, but we wrote back to him and told him he was wrong." He adds: "I think the conclusion that urban heat islands contribute essentially zero to the warming we see is on very solid ground." Indeed, due to BEST and studies that went before it, Muller says that the question of whether urban heating skews warming data is no longer a legitimate quibble with data that shows warming.
Reader Comments (51)
Oops
climate brief should be carbon brief
Since when did 'sanguine' mean the same as 'arrogant but wrong'?
From many statements over the last decade he was never a CO2 agnostic but rather a firmer warmer.
"Muller says that the question of whether urban heating skews warming data is no longer a legitimate quibble with data that shows warming" - delusional is the word that comes to mind
Muller may think that McKitrick was wrong, but the Journal Editors agreed with McKitrick and rejected the original article. This makes Muller seem delusional.
I sympathise with Muller. He's clueless about how the MSM can change in a flash. Furthermore, from personal experience it takes a real iconoclast and, probably, misanthrope to break through the IPCC conditioning and impose an alternative which explains all observations without having to cheat.
If your career depends on getting grants approved by colleagues and they all cluster around the consensus, they're the peer group you try to impress. Yet it's the younger group of academics who realise 'consensus' is for academic wrinklies, so why not tell the truth but be very careful how you do it?
I think the guy is weird.
Nothing that Muller says makes any sense. He climbed onto to fame's back by criticizing Mann and Hansen and has reached conclusions which are exactly the same as theirs. Nothing wrong in that, but the original criticisms still stand and the issues are unresolved! What's more, Muller's method uses a different variant of number-crunching rather than new data gathering to answer questions that he threw up.
Same data, similar assumptions, only slightly different methods of calculation, same answer, ... but ... a new player on the scene! If only Mosher, Lucia et al had the smarts ... Instead they are 'open-sourcing' the same crap from their two bedroom apartments and chasing Gleick and Monckton. Heh.
Does anyone know where the authors' responses to McKitrick's reviews are? Perhaps they have not been posted?
From the two reviews McKitrick posted, it seems that he put reasonable questions which deserved an answer.
In the interview, Muller says "McKitrick had comments and found things he thought were mistakes, but we wrote back to him and told him he was wrong."
I would be far more interested in hearing Muller say why McKitrick was wrong than that he was wrong.
' the question of whether urban heating skews warming data is no longer a legitimate quibble with data that shows warming.'
it never really was all you needed was mark 1 common sense to tell urban heating heating was going to have an effect , that only changed after Jones , the dog eat my data , Chinese claim. Like the hockey stick the the quires were create by the changing of what was know and agreed about, for the political needs of 'the cause ' , to what was a guess and argued about .
The fact Muller does not get why it failed peer review is hardly a recommendation for the quality of BEST work .
This has been trotting through my head all week. Should we not make better distinction between urban heat islands per se and simply badly-sited thermometers of which there appear to be many? A thermometer can be well-sited within an UHI, i.e. away from sources of artificial heat such as A/C or engine exhausts, brick tarmac etc., in which case we can imagine that it would effectively "contribute essentially zero to the warming we see". - or not much. The trouble is that Muller dishonestly skates over the siting problem and perhaps sceptics are not stressing it enough.
It remains my contention that Muller was a "false flag" when he publically entered the picture.
[Snip - venting]
I do hope I'm not the Jackson he's referring to!
Usually we are blessedly free on this site of Americans who forgot to take their pills this morning. Where the hell has this one popped up from?
(BTW, AngryAmerican, I think your comment at 1:26 PM is over the top.)
Lately I found that - in August 2010, and thus before the so called energy transition in Germany was commenced - a brunch of the German Pirate Party tried to start an initiative: "Checking the climate hypothesis" (Überprüfung der Klimahypothese) (the link to that discussion is obviously not trustworthy: https://lqfb.piratenpartei.de/pp/initiative/show/1862.html). The members voted against it after an uninformed person wrote something like that even the leading sceptic Richard Müller is now converted. It didn't bother them that Müller et al's study was never published and Müller never was a "sceptic". Müller and the newspapers can be proud of this mess.
Dr Muller has made an error in his assumptions about heat island effects since his results reflect the fact that the relationship is a log normal one between temperature and surrounding population, as others have stated in the past.
Muller is simply engaging in that most fundamental and respected of American traditions - "taking care of business".
As well as being a Berkeley physics prof, Muller makes money from the GreenGov consultancy he runs with his daughter - and from his books.
This weeks PR extravaganza happened to coincide with the August 6th publication date for his latest offering
"Energy for Future Presidents"
http://www.amazon.com/Energy-Future-Presidents-Science-Headlines/dp/0393081613/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&qid=1343901067&sr=8-3&keywords=richard+muller&tag=rnwff-20
His daughter is a consummate PR pro and also runs the media relations for the BEST project.
What could me more useful than having him doing the rounds of the world's science press in the week preceding publication.
For once, Daily Kos seems to have got closer to the truth than most (athough I'm not so sure about him being a stooge of "Big Gas") :-
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2012/07/31/1115461/-Berkeley-Physicist-Flim-Flams-on-Fracking
Best is a bit of a shape shifter.
Reminds me of the opening sequence to The Prisoner
You are number six.
Who is number one?
I am number two.
What do you want?
Information.
You're not getting any!
1) If you can't find UHI, you data is crap.
2) The most recent 5 year period in the USA was a lot colder than the previous 5 year period. Mosher won't even discuss that.
http://sunshinehours.wordpress.com/2012/08/01/best-usa-tmax-fell-off-a-cliff-on-west-coast/
http://sunshinehours.wordpress.com/2012/08/02/best-usa-5-years-averages-fall-off-a-cliff-continued/
"Muller says that the question of whether urban heating skews warming data is no longer a legitimate quibble with data that shows warming."
Then why is BEST's trend so much higher than satellites over their period of overlap 1979+??
"Does anyone know where the authors' responses to McKitrick's reviews are? Perhaps they have not been posted
Ross doesn't know his site makes no mention of their responses, I think Dr. Muller makes things up as he goes along, he seems to be one of those people who assume you can fool all the people all the time. Note here he is discussing the findings of an, as yet, unpublished paper, which has already been refused publication, and for which we don't have his data and methods. Those that have seen them don't like them, so Muller wrote to them telling them they're "wrong". Does he sound like a serious scientist to anyone here?
American boy, we don't call people scum on this site if we don't agree with them. I share your frustration at the money being diverted from infinitely better causes, but we have climate scientists come to this site who genuinely believe that CO2 is going to cause problems in the future, and that they can foretell the future as well. Although BBD tells us one of them finds us boring - quite right too!
Are you implying that Mike Jackson is really Captain Climate and that at some unspecified date in the future he, metaphorically of course, tear off his shirt and trousers to reveal a blue lycra skin tight romper suit with CC written in fluorescent yellow letters, sporting a bright red cloak down to his knees?
Sorry, my memory failed at 2:18 PM: The initiative of the Pirate Party started in October 2011 (cf. here), thus after the so called energy transition in Germany was commenced.
The contrarians of that initiative stated: "Even if climate trolls pay the music they sometimes play correctly" ("Auch wenn Klimatrolle die Musik bezahlen, spielt sie manchmal richtig"), and they referred to the Berkeley Earth Project without naming Müller explicitly.
The contrarians stated also (ibid.): "Meanwhile, even the former and perhaps best known climate-critic Lomborg (see http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lomborg) concedes that there is man-made climate change." ("Selbst der frühere, vielleicht bekannteste Klima-Kritiker Lomborg (s. http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lomborg) hat inzwischen den menschengemachten Klimawandel eingeräumt.") As if Lomborg has ever doubted man-made climate change.
And under the headline "Paid critics of benefiting businesses" ("Bezahlte Kritiker von profitierenden Unternehmen") the contrarians of the initiative emphasized (ibid.) that the Royal Society demanded years ago that companies such as Esso/Exxon shall cease the funding of climate skeptics.
What a mess.
[Snip - manners]
Manners, John.
Though I'm agin nepotism in principle, the one time I tried it it was a huge success. Maybe that's how Muller feels. I do hope, though, that his definition of success differs from mine.
Anthony Watts has just released details of a major error in the BEST paper which he picked up last year but was not identified in review for the JGR: http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/08/03/an-uncorrected-assumption-in-bests-station-quality-paper/#more-68570
'BEST mixed an unacceptable station class set, Class 3, with a 1°C error (per Leroy 1999, CRN Handbook 2002, Menne et al 2010, Fall et al 2011, and of course Watts et al 2012) into the acceptable classes of stations, Classes 1&2, calling the Class 123 group “OK”......
This science lesson, from an “unqualified and inexpert morass”, is brought to you by the number 3.'
The blogger at Real Science says with respect to the Carbon Brief article, more specifically, to the UHIs: "Muller Proves He Is Incompetent".
BTW, others might find this quote from Müller in Technology Review (December 2003) interesting (cf. here, respectively here or here) (emphasis added):
"I think the conclusion that urban heat islands contribute essentially zero to the warming we see is on very solid ground."
My my, he really has been drinking deep of the koolaid :)
It's not looking good for UHI. As I have always maintained here, in the face of sometimes fierce resistance.
"It's not looking good for UHI."
NASA has no trouble finding it.
"Summer land surface temperature of cities in the Northeast were an average of 7 °C to 9 °C (13°F to 16 °F) warmer than surrounding rural areas over a three year period, the new research shows."
http://www.nasa.gov/topics/earth/features/heat-island-sprawl.html
The EPA can find it:
"The annual mean air temperature of a city with 1 million people or more can be 1.8–5.4°F (1–3°C) warmer than its surroundings. In the evening, the difference can be as high as 22°F (12°C). "
http://www.epa.gov/hiri/
Climate "Scientists" can't.
Climate scientists *adjust* for it - they aren't denying its existence. What they do not do is make erroneous claims that it is responsible for the warming trend.
BBD, the UHI adjustment seems undocumented, except for the one that adjust in the opposite direction.
Please point out where they subtract 12C from TMin in urban regions in the summer?
Michael Mann has pointed out 8 'fibs' by Muller in relation to his work http://www.facebook.com/MichaelMannScientist
"Climate scientists *adjust* for it"
It isn't actually possible to adjust data like that as you don't know what the temperature would be without UHI effects. If you decide to use neighbouring 'good' stations to try and alter the data you are in fact just using the surrounding stations data, so the correct thing to do in this case is ignore the UHI polluted data.
Does JGR use open refereeing? How did Muller write back to McKitrick, and not to the journal editor?
Louise - regarding Mann and Müller: Do you think one is just as good as the other?
Muller is sanguine: "There were no mistakes in that paper. McKitrick ... found things he thought were mistakes, but we wrote back to him and told him he was wrong."
SayNoToFearmongers: "Since when did 'sanguine' mean the same as 'arrogant but wrong'?"
Sanguine is from Latin sanguin-, blood. So it means Muller is bloody wrong.
I suppose it's possible that Muller was depending on his daughter's claim - and mangling it in his own unique way.
But what will his next act be, I wonder?! Given his past performances, I wouldn't be at all surprised to read somewhere in the unquestioning mainstream media that Muller has also asserted that JGR was "wrong" and/or "incorrect" to inform McKitrick, circa July 30/12, that:
Mind you, I suppose it's also possible that the latter-day Muller has decided join the "redefinition" circus, along with such luminaries as Mann, Jones, Briffa, Gergis & Karoly.
But speaking of Muller and mistakes ... Here's another gem I found when I was doing my homework last October for Will the real Richard Muller please stand up:
Looks like Muller has a baton pass mentality, as though he's saying to Schmidt, Mann, Jones, Briffa et al: "Come on, you guys have stuffed up and failed to advance the cause, hand over to me and I'll fix things up for you."
re BBD
"Climate scientists *adjust* for it (UHI)"
No. Climate scientists SAY they adjust for it. Not the same thing
Re: Aug 4, 2012 at 3:56 AM | Peter Wilson
"re BBD
"Climate scientists *adjust* for it (UHI)"
No. Climate scientists SAY they adjust for it. Not the same thing"
Quite - so many of the temperature monitoring stations are located at airports and just think how much air traffic has increased since the 1960s!!
Building a city around a thermometer is a long ways around to holding a hot object against it. Not a matter of greenhouse gasses but a build up of quite another kind.
Why is it important for people here that 'Muller was never a sceptic'? He clearly had doubts about the temperature record or he would not have gone to the effort he has. Surely that doubt is scientific scepticism. People here claim to be sceptical in the same scientific sense (hence the objection to claims that they 'deny' the science) and so should be kindred spirits. Where's the beef?
What I want to know is where we are now on the hockey stick graph i.e. 2/3 the way through 2012 and does it resemble anything like what the actual temperature is? That graph seems to be vertical after 2000.
BitBucket: ‘He clearly had doubts about the temperature record or he would not have gone to the effort he has. Surely that doubt is scientific scepticism.’
I agree, but that understanding has been lost somewhere along the line. The confusion is partly semantic and conceptual, ie:
1) Muller was a climate sceptic.
2) Muller was sceptical about the temperature record.
The former places Muller in a category: climate sceptic, and all that entails; while the latter says something about his attitude in general owards scientific evidence.
This difference is elided in Muller’s NYT op-ed, which is headed: ‘The Conversion of a Climate-Change Skeptic’. This headline may be the work of an editor. But in the body of the article, Muller says: ‘Call me a converted skeptic.’
This plays into (1), using the term ‘sceptic’ as a category. However, Muller then goes on to say: ‘Three years ago I identified problems in previous climate studies that, in my mind, threw doubt on the very existence of global warming.’ This statement is more in accord with (2) above.
I don’t know whether Muller has intentionally conflated these meanings or has just reached for the most convenient narrative to explain his experience. But in offering his own ‘conversion narrative’, he has borrowed a theme that is largely owned by climate sceptics: ‘I was once a true believer’ etc, hence the protest.
Aug 4, 2012 at 10:51 PM | Brendan H
Conflation and "convenient [self-promoting] narrative" seem to be his hallmark; he exhibited the same behaviours in the aftermath of his WSJ Op Ed last October.
Judith Curry has an interesting post today in which she comments on some of the media coverage he's garnered in the Carbon Brief and elsewhere
The Carbon Brief piece notes:
But as Curry writes:
Muller always seems to have excuses when called out on any of his conflations and narratives of convenience. YMMV, but to my mind this verges on intellectual dishonesty. Frankly, I wouldn't trust Muller any further than I could throw him.
Yes Hilary, I agree. He seems to flip-flop a fair bit in what he says depending on who he is talking to, or the intended audience. I see it as him trying to position himself, albeit very ineptly at times, as a voice of honesty and reason whom politicians and the general public can rely on. Like someone in the mold of Richard Feynman, perhaps.
Unfortunately his apparent desire for the limelight, even if motivated by a sincere belief that he can "make a difference", could be viewed as grandstanding, self-aggrandizing and self-interested. He needs to be more careful and collaborative in his approach, and not act like a one-man-band with all the answers. He has already succeeded in getting offside with the Team (not that that should matter), Anthony Watts and Judith Curry, as well as presumably the majority of skeptics. Positioning himself "in the middle" of a contentious debate does not necessarily make him correct, nor does it mean that his voice needs to be accepted as one of sweet reason.
Hilary Ostrov: ‘Judith Curry has an interesting post today in which she comments on some of the media coverage he's garnered in the Carbon Brief and elsewhere.’
Interesting range of views. Good analysis of Muller’s background and narrative method.
‘Muller always seems to have excuses when called out on any of his conflations and narratives of convenience. YMMV, but to my mind this verges on intellectual dishonesty.’
Well, sophistry, anyway. A lot of differences come down to misunderstanding. I agree that Muller’s a showman who has cottoned on to climate science as being a potential good earner. Not that there’s anything wrong with that.
But PR allows a little more latitude in presentation, so it’s best foot forward. And semantic-style arguments are a staple of the internet. An obvious one is the (climate) sceptic play upon the term ‘climate change’ (yes, it’s always changing).
So more of a misdemeanor than a capital crime.
Brendan H
So to be a 'true' climate sceptic requires more than just scientific scepticism. A sceptic who doesn't accept the 'all climate scientists are crooked' and 'its all a giant conspiracy to impoverish the ordinary people' memes, amongst others, is just a 'scientific sceptic'; he can safely be disregarded and added to the list of the crooked if he finds reason to doubt his scepticism. Interesting...
BitBucket: ‘A sceptic who doesn't accept the 'all climate scientists are crooked' and 'its all a giant conspiracy to impoverish the ordinary people' memes, amongst others, is just a 'scientific sceptic';’
Not at all. My rough and ready definition of a climate sceptic is: Someone who denies that increasing levels of CO2 in the atmosphere from human causes are a potential problem for human beings which requires mitigation.
So a climate sceptic need not appeal to lies and conspiracy, although many succumb to the temptation.
‘…he can safely be disregarded and added to the list of the crooked if he finds reason to doubt his scepticism.’
I don't see how you reach this conclusion from my post. Perhaps you could detail your line of reasoning.
At Judith Curry's blog, I also read this quote from the same Carbon Brief
"His self-described conversion to the mainstream scientific view linking human activity to climate change has captured the imagination of a media often wary of reporting on climate change."
"...a media often wary of reporting on climate change."?
Excuse me? There is a whole industry based on 'reporting on climate change'. Scientific publishing is one of the most profitable areas in publishing, and 'Climate Change' is the Cuckoo in the nest of publicly-funded science.
Brendan H, my dictionary says
sophistry: the use of clever but false arguments, especially with the intention of deceiving.
To me, an accusation of sophistry is little different from an accusation of dishonesty, although perhaps softer than Hilary's "I wouldn't trust Muller any further than I could throw him".
Wouldn't your definition of a climate sceptic fit Dr Muller (pre-BEST)? It seems quite likely, as the definition is loose, allowing in a wide range of opinion, from those who deny CO2 is a greenhouse gas to those who agree 100% with the IPCC position on the science but think that we should do nothing about it.