Richard A. Muller has never been comfortable with conventional scientific wisdom. In the 1980s, when his mentor Luis Alvarez came up with the then outrageous idea that a giant comet or asteroid impact wiped out the dinosaurs, the University of California, Berkeley, physicist went him one better, suggesting that the meteorite had been hurled our way by a dim companion star to the sun, which Muller dubbed Nemesis. In the 1990s he posited that ice ages are triggered by space debris encountered because of cyclical changes in the location of Earth’s orbit.

More recently, Muller called Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth a pack of half-truths and asserted that measurements of global temperature rises are deeply flawed, insisting that many of those who warn of climate change have sold the public a bill of goods. Although he is convinced that climate change is real, potentially dangerous and probably caused in part by humans, he has taken climate scientists to task for ignoring criticisms by outsiders, including meteorologist Anthony Watts of the Watts Up with That? blog and statistician Steve McIntyre of the Climate Audit blog. Along with several colleagues, Muller started the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature (BEST) project to rectify what he saw as the flaws in existing measurements of global warming.

Muller’s views on climate have made him a darling of skeptics—and newly elected Republicans in the House of Representatives, who invited him to testify to the Committee on Science, Space and Technology about his preliminary results. Muller, how­ever, surprised the skeptics, the committee’s leadership and himself by declaring on March 31 that so far, at least, BEST was confirming what the mainstream had been saying all along: Earth is warming in line with the projections of climate models.

That testimony immediately turned Muller from hero to villain in some skeptics’ eyes and delighted environmentalists. (The Web site Grist declared: “Science bites climate skeptics in the ass on the House floor.”) Muller will be finished with the final study any day now, and if it confirms those early results, as expected, he could be permanently relegated to the skeptics’ doghouse. In an interview with Scientific American shortly after his testimony, Muller made it clear that this did not bother him even a little bit.

Scientific American: As a physicist by training, what got you interested in climate change as a topic?
MULLER: I became interested in the relationship between astronomy, Earth history and geology. A theory called the Milankovitch theory related astronomical causes to the ice ages. But there’s been a nonscientific interest in that relationship for a long time—that’s astrology, right? People believe the future is in the stars. And because of that, I think the field got very little attention. I spent 10 years in that field, culminating in a technical book called Ice Ages and Astronomical Causes [Springer, 2000]. It’s very detailed, technical, mathematical. When I would give presentations on this subject, of course, half the questions had to do with global warming. So I began preparing myself to answer those questions by studying the issue of global warming. And all the tools I had developed and all the methods I had learned were appropriate for this new field.

The reason I really took on the field seriously had to do with my recognition that so much of the public discourse was ignoring the science, that the issue was enormously important. There were recommendations that even the poor nations of the world spend substantial fractions of their gross domestic product on addressing global warming. It was affecting major U.S. energy policy. And yet the science didn’t seem settled. So it struck me as perhaps the most important issue in the world that a physical scientist can address.

How did the BEST project come about?
A colleague of mine drew my attention to some of the issues that were raised by Anthony Watts, who was showing that many of the stations that recorded temperature were poorly sited, that they were close to building and heat sources. I also separately learned of work done by Steve McIntyre up in Canada, who looked at the “hockey stick” data [the data behind a 1999 graph showing temperatures remaining more or less steady for 1,000 years, then rising sharply in the 20th century, like the blade of a hockey stick].

I reviewed the paper that the hockey stick was based on, and I became very uncomfortable. I felt that the paper didn’t support the chart enough. A few years later, McIntyre came out and, indeed, showed that the hockey-stick chart was in fact incorrect. It had been affected by a very serious bug in the way scientists calculated their principal components. So I was glad that I had done that.

There were other issues, too. There were three major groups analyzing temperature, and issues began to be raised. One of them was: Why had they used only a small fraction of the available temperature stations? We looked into this and realized that they did it because their methods of statistical analysis really were fine with a small number of stations, and they worked better when they had long, continuous records. So they were selecting stations that had such records.

This raised a legitimate question: Is there an inherent bias when you choose stations that have long, continuous rec­ords? There’s a possibility that could happen because if you have a station that’s been around for 100 years, it may have started out as being rural and then later was inside of a city, and that could have given it an anomalous warming. We see this in stations in Tokyo, for example. It’s called the urban heat-island effect.

The three groups claim that it was not a problem. And maybe they were right. We found it very hard to evaluate that and decided that with modern computers, we could design a system that could actually use all of the data that would address the known problems, such as the urban heat island, in a different way. Not necessarily a better way but in a different way.

This is how scientists do things. We can’t always claim that our methods are better than what came before, but we can do things differently and see if we come to the same answer. If we come to a different answer, then that raises the issue of why. And then we can address that issue. But doing things in a different way is a real benefit to a field like this.

Did the mainstream temperature-analysis groups think so, too?
We contacted the other groups who were doing this, and I would say that there was universal agreement that doing things in yet a different way could help. Jim Han­sen [of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies], for example, really welcomed our effort because he believed, based on his own care with the subject, that the answer we were going to get would be the same as his group has gotten. That’s very nice—that kind of confidence comes about only in people who have done careful work.

Anthony Watts, whom some climate scientists consider a denier, not just a skeptic, has denounced you for going public before the final results are in. Why did you go public?
The idea that you don’t show anybody, including your colleagues, results until they are peer-reviewed is something new in science. And it’s brought about because of media attention. I don’t think that’s good.

Now, the problem becomes even more difficult when someone like me is asked to testify before Congress. I didn’t volunteer. I came close to turning it down. And I discussed it with my colleagues, and for the most part they said, “Look, this is the government. This is important. If you don’t give them your honest opinion, your honest thoughts on what you know, they’re going to pass legislation that doesn’t take into account the current status of the science.”

Given the favorable things you’ve said about climate science critics such as Watts and McIntyre, do you think you were called to testify because Committee Chair Ralph M. Hall thought you’d come down against the mainstream consensus?
Before my testimony, there were news articles in prominent newspapers already claiming that I had a bias, that I had an agenda. I don’t know where they got this from. Well, I can guess. I think they were predicting what I was going to say in the hopes of discounting it when it came out.

I’m not even going to guess at the Republican committee chair’s motivations. Having testified before Congress, I have a sense that most members of Congress are serious, that they are thoughtful, that if they have a point of view that disagrees with what you call the mainstream, it’s because there have been legitimate skeptics who have raised real issues that have not necessarily been answered.

I don’t care whether I’m speaking to a Republican or a Democrat; science is nonpartisan. And I believe that my refuge is sticking to the science. I have no agenda. I have no political reasons for saying one thing or the other. I stick to the science. I think that’s what I’m good at. And if I say something that’s surprising, that’s good. That adds to the discussion.

You’ve also said more than once that nothing we do in the U.S. to reduce emissions will make any difference because emissions from coal burned by India and China are growing so rapidly.
In fact, if we cut back and China continues to grow and India continues to grow, our cutting back will not achieve any real good. The hope is that we’ll set an example that China and India will follow. But the way it’s presented by many people, for political purposes because it sounds more compelling, is that we are responsible for terrible global warming, and we have to cut back regardless of what other people do. And that is not looking at the numbers.

Do you consider yourself a climate skeptic?
No—not in the way that the term is used. I consider myself properly skeptical in the way every scientist would be. But people use the term “skeptic,” and unfortunately, they mix it in with the term “denier.” Now, there are climate deniers. I won’t name them, but people know who they are. These are people who pay no attention to the science but just cherry-pick the data that were incorrectly presented and say there’s no there there.

I include among the skeptics people such as Watts and McIntyre, who are doing, in my opinion, a great service to the community by asking questions that are legitimate, doing a great deal of work in and out—that is something that is part of the scientific process.

But you’ve certainly been critical of people one might call climate “advocates,” right?
I’ve been quoted as saying that both Gore and [New York Times columnist Thomas L.] Friedman are exaggerators. These are people who are so deeply concerned with the dangers of global warming that they cherry-pick the data, too, and they’re not really paying attention to the science, which is not surprising. They’re not scientists.

But that’s not science. With science, you have to look at all the data and draw a balanced conclusion. And I believe they’re doing it because they are so deeply concerned, and they have accomplished some real good in alerting the American public to an issue that it needs to know about. But not being scientists, they feel they don’t have to show the disagreeing data, they don’t have to show the discordant data. To the general public, Gore is a scientist. The danger is that when you do it to exaggeration, eventually people will discover you’ve exaggerated, and then people react.

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.

Do you think that the IPCC, a major arbiter of climate science, is a legitimate institution?
The IPCC [Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change] has some very legitimate science in it. The problem is the aspects of the IPCC that have gotten the most public attention are the places where they are grossly exaggerated. So when people say the IPCC is still basically right, the public view of the IPCC is not in the temperature measurements and the computer models; the public view is in the exaggeration, such as the melting of the Himalayas.