Muller in the Carbon Brief

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.

Comments

[Brendan H]

BitBucket: ‘To me, an accusation of sophistry is little different from an accusation of dishonesty, although perhaps softer than Hilary's…’

The way I see it, he was conflating the notions of climate scepticism and scientific scepticism in general. That’s not a major, but not quite accurate either.

‘Wouldn't your definition of a climate sceptic fit Dr Muller (pre-BEST)?’

My definition included the notion of global warming being a potential problem requiring mitigation. That’s a clear dividing line between the two sides. Climate sceptics are very reluctant to agree that CO2 warming could be a problem, because that leads to talk of mitigation.

I’m not sure of Muller’s position on mitigation pre-BEST, but in any case he has since denied being a ‘denier, so I think we can assume that he doesn’t see himself as having belonged in the climate sceptic camp.