Koch-funded climate change skeptic reverses course

[poker10]

http://www.latimes.com/news/politics...,7372823.story


WASHINGTON – The verdict is in: Global warming is occurring and emissions of greenhouse gases caused by human activity are the main cause.

This, according to Richard A. Muller, professor of physics at UC Berkeley, MacArthur Fellow and co-founder of the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature project. Never mind that the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and hundreds of other climatologists around the world came to such conclusions years ago. The difference now is the source: Muller is a long-standing, colorful critic of prevailing climate science, and the Berkeley project was heavily funded by the Charles Koch Charitable Foundation, which, along with its libertarian petrochemical billionaire founder Charles G. Koch, has a considerable history of backing groups that deny climate change.

[Jeffrey]

What a load of horse puckey... good news is.. .they get to keep thier funding.

Originally Posted by poker10

WASHINGTON – The verdict is in: Global warming is occurring and emissions of greenhouse gases caused by human activity are the main cause.

[SaintPatrick333]

Well this article can claim whatever it likes. The fact is, the vast majority of scientists out there disagree wholeheartedly with the global warming nuts. This whole "crisis" became a crisis when al gore went on the campaign. Now its all about the green (and I don't mean the gases)

[_Abyssinia]

Do not believe in manmade global warming

[Swiss Guy]

Originally Posted by poker10

http://www.latimes.com/news/politics...,7372823.story


WASHINGTON – The verdict is in: Global warming is occurring and emissions of greenhouse gases caused by human activity are the main cause.

This, according to Richard A. Muller, professor of physics at UC Berkeley, MacArthur Fellow and co-founder of the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature project. Never mind that the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and hundreds of other climatologists around the world came to such conclusions years ago. The difference now is the source: Muller is a long-standing, colorful critic of prevailing climate science, and the Berkeley project was heavily funded by the Charles Koch Charitable Foundation, which, along with its libertarian petrochemical billionaire founder Charles G. Koch, has a considerable history of backing groups that deny climate change.

Humans are polluting the earth, but warming it? I don't know about that.

[SamH]

Originally Posted by poker10

http://www.latimes.com/news/politics...,7372823.story


WASHINGTON – The verdict is in: Global warming is occurring and emissions of greenhouse gases caused by human activity are the main cause.

This, according to Richard A. Muller, professor of physics at UC Berkeley, MacArthur Fellow and co-founder of the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature project. Never mind that the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and hundreds of other climatologists around the world came to such conclusions years ago. The difference now is the source: Muller is a long-standing, colorful critic of prevailing climate science, and the Berkeley project was heavily funded by the Charles Koch Charitable Foundation, which, along with its libertarian petrochemical billionaire founder Charles G. Koch, has a considerable history of backing groups that deny climate change.

So when his funding came from global warming supporters he switched? Doesn't this prove what global warming realist have said all along - the provider of the funding determines the conclusion?

[gilliam]

Muller was never a skeptic.

By the way, a skeptic Anthony Watts, commented over the weekend:

“I fully accept the previous findings of these papers, including that of the Muller et al 2012 paper. These investigators found exactly what would be expected given the siting metadata they had. However, the Leroy 1999 site rating method employed to create the early metadata, and employed in the Fall et al 2011 paper I co-authored was incomplete, and didn’t properly quantify the effects.
The new rating method employed finds that station siting does indeed have a significant effect on temperature trends.”

Bottom line: garbage in - garbage out. The weather stations in many cases reported higher temperature levels because the surrounding areas were built up around them. Full study here:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/07/2...-2/#more-68286

Anyway, the earth may or may not be getting warmer, but none of this says what the cause is.

[gilliam]

Another view, this one by Judith Curry (Professor and Chair of the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at the Georgia Institute of Technology and President (co-owner) ofClimate Forecast Applications Network (CFAN). )

Muller bases his ‘conversion’ on the results of their recent paper? So, how convincing is the analysis in Rohde et al.’s new paper A new estimate of the average surface land temperature spanning 1753-2011? Their analysis is based upon curve fits to volcanic forcing and the logarithm of the CO2 forcing (addition of solar forcing did not improve the curve fit.)

I have made public statements that I am unconvinced by their analysis. I do not see any justification in their argument for making a stronger attribution statement than has been made by the IPCC AR4. I have written MANY posts that critique the IPCC’s attribution analysis. Here I try to give a sense of the challenges in attributing climate change to causal factors.

See her post here.

[lynnvinc]

Well now that that is totally settled that AGW is real. I've known that for over 20 years. I didn't need .05 on the null (95% confidence), which was reached back in 1995. I started mitigating back in 1990, the year JPII told us we should.

And even for those who are unaware that there is near 100% consensus among climate scientists that AGW is real but are zonked into what the Exxon/Koch/Scaife-funded denialist industry spews out, at least they could be doing everything they can to mitigate climate change that saves them money or has no cost, without lowering their living standards -- which should get them down to a 1/3 to 2/3 GHG reduction within 5 to 20 years.

It's really not right that people should ignore the scientists and continue to cause harm to others on into the future, perhaps even the annihilation of all life on earth if we tip earth systems into runaway warming, which at least some scientists say is possible, even probable:

“There may have been times in the Earth’s history when CO2 was as high as 4000 ppm without causing a runaway greenhouse effect. But the solar irradiance was less at that time.

What is different about the human-made forcing is the rapidity at which we are increasing it, on the time scale of a century or a few centuries. It does not provide enough time for negative feedbacks, such as changes in the weathering rate, to be a major factor.

There is also a danger that humans could cause the release of methane hydrates, perhaps more rapidly than in some of the cases in the geologic record.

If we burn all the coal, there is a good chance we will initiate the runaway greenhouse effect [which means death to all life on earth]. If we also burn the tar sands and oil shale, I think it is a dead certainty.”

--Dr. James Hansen, Director, NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, Climate Science Division, in his Bjerknes Lecture at the American Geophysical Union, December 17, 2008. see p. 24 of http://www.columbia.edu/~jeh1/2008/A...s_20081217.pdf

[lynnvinc]

Here is a good response to the study:

http://davidappell.blogspot.com/2012...e-stopped.html

It seems BEST is getting into trouble with their claims of attribution instead of their reconstruction of the temperature data. What they've done sounds like -- well, like what a bunch of physicists would do, not what climate science needs (and what climate scientists do).

Andrew Revkin quotes Judith Curry (who declined to be a co-author on the BEST results being announced today):

Their latest paper on the 250-year record concludes that the best explanation for the observed warming is greenhouse gas emissions. Their analysis is way oversimplistic and not at all convincing in my opinion.

There is broad agreement that greenhouse gas emissions have contributed to the warming in the latter half of the 20th century; the big question is how much of this warming can we attribute to greenhouse gas emissions. I don’t think this question can be answered by the simple curve fitting used in this paper, and I don’t see that their paper adds anything to our understanding of the causes of the recent warming. That said, I think there are two interesting results in this paper, regarding their analysis of 19th century volcanoes and the impact on climate, and also the changes to the diurnal temperature range.

Physicists tend to see the world as made up of simple physical systems (particles and fields), and when the physical systems get too complicated (atoms beyond Helium, molecules, galaxies), they hand them off to the chemists and astronomers for analysis. Heisenberg et al found the laws of quantum mechanics; but then they didn't get much beyond calculating the spectra of He2+ before saying, yeesh, that's hard, enough of that! So they turned to the structure of the nucleus and the laws of quantum electrodynamics and partied it up there.

What does x-ray crystallography say about the structure of DNA? Don't ask a physicist! Pure physicists don't do that kind of stuff. Sure, they could if they really wanted to. But by and large they really don't want to, and it's not what they're good at.

Attributing climate is more like figuring out the structure of DNA than it is like figuring out the laws of quantum mechanics -- simple curve-fitting ("exponentials, polynomials") doesn't cut it. In fact, it makes you look kind of foolish. If it were that simple climatologists would have done it in the 19th century (and, of course, they've all tried curve-fitting on the second week of their research, then hid those papers in a bottom drawer.) That's exactly why they scratch around for all the clues they can get, and why they ruin their youth build climate models. (Sure, CO2 is one of the big factors, which is already enough to be worried about our large emissions; but there is usually a lot going on.)

BEST did a great job reconstructing the temperature history of the planet (assuming their work passes peer review, at least). Perhaps they should have stopped there.

[SamH]

Originally Posted by lynnvinc

Well now that that is totally settled that AGW is real. I've known that for over 20 years. I didn't need .05 on the null (95% confidence), which was reached back in 1995. I started mitigating back in 1990, the year JPII told us we should.

[lynnvinc]

Originally Posted by SamH

I know it's funny, and it was meant to be facetious, since climate science certainly did not need a non-climate scientist's help in establishing AGW, since the greenhouse effect theory has been around for over 100 years, and evidence-based studies tentatively established AGW at .05 (95% confidence) back in 1995, and it has gone on with many confirming studies and evidence from many different angles and approaches to become very well established now, and there just are not any skeptics to speak of left among actual climate scientists.

But at least Muller reported his redundant findings honestly, despite being funded by Koch. It's sort of ridiculous that he just didn't accept what the climate scientists were saying all along (showing his arrogance and disrespect) and had to do his own study to satisfy his doubts. But at least he did it honestly.

From what I understand climate scientists think his attribution to human causes (without an understanding of the complexities involved in climate) is facile and sophomoric, but some point out his findings of diurnal temperature differences increasing slighty since 1987 (when the science would have predicted continuing decrease) is interesting and something to be looked into. The diurnal temp difference increase does not put the situation in a pre-global warming state as before the 1950s, so it could start decreasing again (which would be as expected) -- see pg. 13 of http://berkeleyearth.org/pdf/results-paper-july-8.pdf .

Actually it would be very good for us if it continues to increase to the point of less heat-related deaths and less crop harms. So I sort of hope it does increase AND the global average temps decrease and the scientists are all wrong. But I'm not going to stop mitigating even if the probl on the null reaches .95 and there is only a 5% chance AGW is real, bec I'm saving so much money mitigating. It could be the best thing that ever happened to our economy, if others would follow suit.

[JimR-OCDS]

Dr Richard Muller was on the Michael Smercornish program.

For those interested in updating their information.

http://www.smerconish.com/2012/08/th...hange-skeptic/


Jim

[lynnvinc]

I was waiting to see what RealClimate.org (hosted by real climate scientists, unlike Muller) had to say about this topic, and here it is (in part) by NASA climate scientist, Gavin Schmidt:

http://www.realclimate.org/index.php...e-games-begin/
...It was odd enough that a scientific paper was announced via an op-ed, rather than a press release, odder still that the paper was only being submitted and had not actually been accepted, and most odd of all was the framing – a ‘converted skeptic’ being convinced by his studies that the planet has indeed warmed and that human activity is the cause – which as Mike and Ken Caldiera pointed out has been known for almost 2 decades.

Not wanting to be upstaged, plenty of ‘unconverted skeptics’ – including Anthony Watts and Ross McKitrick decided to stage dramatic press events and release barbs of their own...

The ‘best’ response to this circus is to sit back and see how pretzel-like the logical justifications can become. I particularly like the recent twist to the “No true scotsman” post-hoc rationalisation...

The actual trigger for all this hoopla is the deadline for papers that can be cited in the Second Order Draft of the new IPCC report. They needed to have been submitted to a journal by Tuesday (31 July) to qualify....

To confuse the metaphor even further, Roger Pielke Sr loudly declared that whatever the results of the Watts paper it will end up being a game changer:

The TOB effect could result in a confirmation of the Watts et al conclusion, or a confirmation (from a skeptical source) that siting quality does not matter. In either case, this is still a game changing study.

If only people would change the games they play…

My inclination is just to sit back and watch the spectacle, admire the logic-defying leaps, marvel at the super-human feats of hubris and, in two weeks time, remark on how little actually changed.

[kompaz]

Originally Posted by gilliam

Bottom line: garbage in - garbage out. The weather stations in many cases reported higher temperature levels because the surrounding areas were built up around them.

Of course, if either you or Watts bothered to read Muller's paper, you would have realized that his algorithm was explicitly designed to detect and correct such situations.

Muller's analysis has addressed Watts' objections -- and still got the clear warming signal.