React how?
I have a sense that part of the reason why climate change is getting less attention in the U.S. these days is because the public is reacting to the prior exaggerations. The public is the jury and hears it on both sides. And when people hear such different results, they get very confused. And right now I believe the public is in a state of confusion because people have learned that some of the issues raised by legitimate skeptics are valid.
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13 Comments
Add CommentDr. Muller,
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisYour curriculum vitae is very impressive. Your PHYSICS research is outstanding. Your publications are great. The TONE of your website shows a flavor of a smile on your face. Your thinking is generally good for science and your bent is curiosity. I have some concerns.
Anytime an article appears in Scientific American in relation to global warming, I am suspicious. Scientific American is VERY political. They have an ax to grind and their editors are, at best, looking for a way to promote global warming, no matter what the science is. I have spent the last two years grinding their faces in the dust of the bad science that they have allowed to be promoted in their magazine. I am in contact with many PhD's who have come to believe that the whole global warming thing is political baloney from the start. I believe that there may be current global warming but I do not believe that it is man-made.
New data is emerging that raise doubts about the surface temperature record in the U.S. There is a meterologist, Anthony Watts, that has become suspicious about our 1,221 surface temperature stations in the U.S. to see if land use changes may be contaminating their records. He is going around photographing those stations and the pictures can be found on www.surfacestations.org. He shows many cases where stations seem to be reporting warming, but are close to nearby buildings, parking lots and heat-generating activities (air conditioners). It is becoming clear that the U.S. temperature record is showing more warming than has actually occurred.
We can establish these facts:
Egyptian Cooling - 750 - 450 BCE
Roman Warming - 200 BCE - 600 CE
Dark Ages Cooling - 440 CE - 900 CE
Medieval Warming - 900 CE - 1300 CE
Little Ice Age Cooling - 1300 CE - 1900 CE
Modern Warming - 1900 CE - present
These facts can be established by what you call PROXIES. NONE of the political hacks out there, including Al Gore, want to go back further than 1000 years because it messes with their political ideas and aspirations. They would love to get rid of the Medieval Warming. If you compare ice cores one finds that the earth has warmed and cooled on a regular basis irrespective of what man does. The conclusion is made by many researchers that the SUN and its sunspot periodicity are the main drivers of our climate.
Remember, when a man is on his knees in front of you, he may not be paying homage to you, he may be pulling the rug out from underneath you. Be careful of Sci. Am!
Perhaps someone needs an update regarding the flawed assertions of Watts and others on their preferred bits of an enormous scientific case. And is it me, or is SciAm slipping in it's standards? No, the subtitle doesn't help much.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thishttp://climateprogress.org/2011/05/22/scientific-american-lemonick-richard-muller/
Richard Muller has no hesitation criticizing Al Gore for cherry-picking data and ignoring assorted outcomes, yet he is happy to praise a prominent blogger for doing precisely the same thing.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI have been reading Anthony Watts' blog, Watts Up With That?, for some time now. His whole approach to science is backwards. Take his Surface Stations project: Watts could not bring himself to accept the documented increase in the US temperature record. There had to be a problem with the instrumentation or book keeping--somewhere. Read his interview with Glenn Beck. At first he speculated that the composition of new weather shelter paint had interfered with the measuring system. Nope. The paint was fine and he was unable to make a case. On his travels, however, he chanced upon a single weather station that had been encroached upon (by an air conditioner). Watts had finally found something to hang his hat on. Over the years, his volunteer organisation discovered several more. This is his one small success story; having a tiny fraction of surface stations stricken from the US temperature record. The result changed nothing. The US, and the planet, is still warming, yet even now Watts still cannot bring himself to accept the science. There has to be a serious error--somewhere--and working backwards he is determined to find it.
He does this continuously. Spinning the contents of scientific papers, only emphasising uncertainties, ignoring central conclusions, or pretending the paper says the opposite of what it actually does. Sometimes, instead of quoting people who actually produced a report, he will quote the GWPF. His blog is one big Argument from Incredulity (the world is too big, and we are too small, to have any discernable impact).
Meanwhile, scientists are getting on with the job, making real world observations, updating and improving computer models, testing, falsifying and eliminating competing hypotheses, advancing their understanding all of the time. By contrast, WUWT features guest posts from a Conservapedia editor plus an individual who says he has invented a cure-all for disease.
I should think that if Scientific American is going to publish an extensive interview like this, they might at least conduct a modest fact check of the statements made by the person interviewed. Among other problems with the statements of Dr. Muller, the conversation of Dr. Cicerone with Al Gore that he described never took place, according to both Gore and the office of Dr. Cicerone.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIn addition, his comments about Michael Mann's work are terribly misleading, failing to note that a review of Mann's "hockey stick" by the National Academy of Sciences confirmed its conclusions, and that it has been verified by subsequent independent studies.
Sandwalker: Your facts are incorrect. The U.N. IPCC's second assessment report, "Climate Change 1995" included a graph of the past 1000 years of climate history. It was not a "hockey stick" graph. 6 years later, the IPCC was more desperate. In "Climate Change 2001", the panel presented a radically different picture of the earth's last 1000 years. "Climate Change 2001 prominently displayed a graph based on a 1998 study by Michael Mann, a then young PhD from the Univ. of Mass. He used primarily tree rings from urban heat islands, crudely grafting onto the surface temp. record. Than Mann graph became known as the "hockey stick effect". The Mann study contradicted hundreds of historical sources on the Medieval Warming and the little ice age and hundreds of previous scientific papers. It turned out to be a lie. The Mann team had to publish a "correction of error" in Nature on July 1, 2004. They had run face forward into a study by Stephen McIntyre and Ross McKitrick (S. McIntyre and R. McKitrick": "Corrections to the Mann, et al., published in "Energy and Environment 14(2003) 751-71. McIntyre and McKitrick requested the original study data from Mann. It was provided haltingly and incompletely, but enough was provided that they found that the data did not produce the claimed results due to collation errors, unjustifiable truncation, obsolete data, geographical location errors and not identifying that the data came from URBAN HEAT ISLANDS. It was all junk science and the study was fundamentally wrong. Michael Mann has paid dearly for his stupidity and nobody quotes the "hockey stick" any more. It has been proven quite false. The National Academy of Sciences made their statement before the follow-up study of McIntyre and McKitrick came out. It's the SUN, stupid!
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisWhat planet are you living on, "amalcr"? The same question needs to be asked of Dr. Muller. The "hockey stick" has been repeatedly validated and is still accepted, in slightly improved form, as the correct historical record. See, as just an example, Scientific American in November 2009: "Novel Analysis Confirms Climate ‘Hockey Stick’ Graph". McIntyre and McKitrick's paper was a failed attempt to expand trivial technical problems into a rebuttal of Dr. Mann's entire reconstruction.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisRegarding UHI, you may been bewitched by denialist assertions. Even Anthony Watts' much-touted attempt to prove that UHI had biased the US temperature record has fizzled. Fall, et. al., (2011), with Watts as co-author, concluded that there was no evidence of bias. On the important underlying question, "Q: So is the United States getting warmer? A: Yes…"
Otherwise, this interview is rife with Dr. Muller's unchallenged scientific aspersions. A shameful reflection of Dr. Muller's integrity and on Michael Lemonick's reportage.
As a subscriber since the mid-1940s, I am appalled by Michael Lemonick's incredibly naïve interview with Richard Muller. To give support to Watts and McIntyre and their like is so far out of character for Scientific American that I am baffled by your abrupt about-face. I hope that Michael Mann takes SciAm to the cleaners in court.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI expect to read an explanation from the editor in the next issue.
I just noticed a Google ad at the bottom of the screen touting a conference to "Gather With Scientists to Fight The Ongoing Global Warming Fraud www.heartland.org". They sure have SciAm pegged right.
The "hockey stick" effect has been proven to be so invalid that the U.N. IPCC dropped it from the "SUMMARY FOR POLICYMAKERS" for its 2007 Report. That action damned the "hockey stick" to "phony" statis.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this"amalcr": So figures 1 and 4 of http://www.ipcc.ch/pdf/assessment-report/ar4/syr/ar4_syr_spm.pdf don't count because they don't use the actual phrase "hockey stick" and don't restrict themselves to decade-old knowledge? I suppose that's the strongest argument you could make.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisEven better, have a look at the Working Group's executive Summary and tell me if you still think the "hockey stick" was dropped like a hot potato...
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thishttp://www.ipcc.ch/pdf/assessment-report/ar4/wg1/ar4-wg1-spm.pdf
I refer again to (the deeply buried?) figure 1. Your statement is a complete lie.
I have read the full article in hard copy form. I was pleased to read about his refusal to be co-opted by the denialist movement and his insistence on presenting the 'inconvenient truth' of the data.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisOOOPS!!!
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisLooks like Muller got caught slicin', dicin' and cherry pickin'. Hide the Decline again in spades.
Absolutely disgusting behavior is misrepresenting BEST data to show an increase in temperature when there is in fact none. Sandbagging his co-authors as well and running in front of the media to get a few sound bytes.
His turn to get thrown under the bus.
How much more of this ourageous unethical behavior are you eco-jihadfists willing to overlook.
Lots more I'm betting.
The issue of AGW is now getting the sober and dispassionate investigation that it deserves. My guess is that a lot of eco-jihadists will be upset about someone daring to question their One True Faith.
Wow, denialism in action from "Shoshin". I wouldn't waste a nickel on any of your "guesses" or "bets". You seem blind and intolerant.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisMuller's personal biases led him to expect to find support for the denialist position that there has been no global warming, but he didn't (or perhaps couldn't because his proclamation of transparency left him with no wiggle room). THAT was when he was "thrown under the bus". Not by those you so sweetly call "eco-jihadists", but by resentful denialists who had expected him to pat together a useful bit of dissembling quasi-analysis.
Muller has recently taken a bit of heat from mainstream scientists for how he has publicized his results, but not for the results themselves. That attack has come, once again, from irate anti-science extremists like yourself. How ironic, given that denialist pseudoscience assertions tend to appear in unscrutinized think-tank "white papers"!
By the way, "faith" is defined as "belief that is not based on proof". I'd be a bit more cautious flinging that accusation around if I was you.