Richard Muller, who has been in much demand in recent days, because of his alleged conversion to the global warming mainstream, is going to get a whole lot more attention after his latest comments on Climategate (H/T Tom Nelson). Muller's comments come from an interview at the Brad Blog, reported here.
But the interview's friendly climate changed and really began to heat up when I asked Muller if his findings finally put to rest the far Right's claim that the cockamamie (and debunked-many times-over) "Climategate" affair "proved" that climate scientists linked to the pseudo-scandal were fudging their global warming data.
Incredibly, Muller asserted that "Climategate" was not a settled issue, and that the scientists involved were found to have "hidden" data. (He also asserted, without evidence to support it, that the "controversial" e-mails at the center of the pseudo-scandal were intentionally "leaked by a member of the team," rather than hacked. He claims that "most people" believe that to be the case, though he was unable or unwilling to back up that element of his charge either.) I pointed out that eight different investigations all found that no data manipulation took place; he asserted that temperature data had been "hidden", not manipulated. When I asked if "hiding" data was not a form of manipulation, he gave a muddled non-answer (though he made sure to get in some particularly nasty, and seemingly personal, shots at acclaimed Penn State climate scientist Michael Mann).
Rosenberg then addressed America's recently-shattered temperature records, wildfires and unrelenting drought, asking Muller if there was a clear link between these extreme weather events and climate change; Muller, again, curiously downplayed any connection, ultimately suggesting that the drought wasn't that much different from the 1930s Dust Bowl.
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Even as Muller's own scientific findings continue to come closer and closer to Mann's long-standing and well-documented assertions, there is clearly no love lost between the two men, as evidenced by the shots Muller took at Mann during our interview.
In addition, as Tom Nelson notes, there is this comment about the CRU scientists:
What they did was, I think shameful, and it was scientific malpractice. If they were licensed scientists, they should have to lose their license. What they did is they held back the discordant data...if they had done this at Berkeley or Stanford, I think, they would have been shamed. The standards that they have over there at the University of East Anglia are just not up to what we consider standard scientific methods. When you withhold data that is discordant, and they refused to release it until it came out in this leak...<