Richard Muller

The climate scientist who has caused an uproar by writing a recent global warming article in the opinion section of The Wall Street Journal told Capitol Report New Mexico on Monday (Oct. 31) he probably would not have written the article if he had known the Journal would change the headline of the piece.

“The Wall Street Journal article, they changed it, they changed the title,” Richard Muller said while attending a conference on global and regional climate change in Santa Fe. “My title was, ‘Let’s cool the warming debate.’ They changed it to ‘An end of skepticism.’ That was not me, they did not seek my approval.”

I followed up: “So you disagree with that?”

Muller: “Oh yeah. It doesn’t represent the article. If you read the article you’ll find that it doesn’t say what that title says. That was their contribution.”

Later in the interview, Capitol Report New Mexico asked Muller if he regretted writing the piece — not because he doesn’t stand by his research — but because he felt the headline was misleading.

“I don’t think I would have done it if they had told me they were going to change the headline,” Muller said. “But if you read the article — so many people just read the headlines — if you actually read the article you will get the message. So writing that article I think has helped calm down things. I mean people are angry with me. Scientists are angry.”

On both sides?

“From both sides and I say to them, ‘Do you know that the title was changed by the Wall Street Journal?’ And they go, ‘no.’ And I say, ‘Here’s my original title.’ Now why should that affect them? They didn’t read the article?”

Actually, the headline on the Journal article was not “An end to skepticism” but “The Case Against Global-Warming Skepticism” with a sub-headline of ‘There were good reasons for doubt, until now’. You can read the entire article by clicking here. I’ve placed a call to the Wall Street Journal to get their reaction to the charge that the headline was changed. As soon as I hear back, I’ll post something.

Since it was published 10 days ago (Oct. 21), Muller’s piece has become a rallying cry for liberals and environmentalists who have branded skeptics as “global warming deniers.”

Washington Post columnist Eugene Robinson wrote a last week that for “the clueless or cynical diehards who deny global warming,” Muller’s article “should help lead all but the dimmest policymakers to the overwhelmingly probable answer.” That probable answer, it seems, is adopting cap and trade programs to cut down on carbon emissions — something policy makers on the left such as Al Gore have been demanding.

But in the Capitol Report New Mexico interview, Muller went out of his way to stress that his paper does not embrace policymakers on the left (or the right for that matter) in the increasingly fractious debate.

“I’m in the Al Gore camp? That’s ridiculous,” Muller said. “I wrote a book, my ‘Physics and Technology for Future Presidents’ book, look at my book … I point out that most of what appears in ‘An Inconvient Truth’ is either absolutely wrong or it’s inaccurate or misleading.”

Muller went on:

“Some people say, I’ve proved that there was no Climate-gate. (Click here for the background on that controversy). “No, the Climate-gate was a scandal, it’s terrible what they did, it’s shameful the way they hid the data. There’s real skepticism, valid skepticism about the degree of warming that’s caused by humans and at this meeting today, we’re hearing a range of things that were not incorporated in the IPCC report (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a United Nations panel that in 2007 said increased temperatures since 1950 is  more than 90 percent due to man-made greenhouse gas concentrations) and need to be incorporated in the future. It isn’t whether there’s global warming; it’s how much there is. And how much of that is caused by humans? And there’s still a lot of uncertainty that and the skeptics are raising very good points on that issue.”

Interestingly, that’s roughly what Patrick Michaels of the Cato Institute told us a number of months ago: Michaels is a sharp critic of mandating cap and trade programs but he does not deny that the earth is warming. You can watch the interview with Michaels by clicking here.

But the Muller article has created a stir among advocates from the right as well.

The conservative U.K. newspaper the Daily Mail in London published an article Monday blasting Muller’s research, claiming that his Berkeley Earth Surface Temperatures (BEST) project produces a graph that — rather than showing increased global warming — shows that warming has stalled over the last decade.

“That’s incorrect,” Muller said Monday morning. “I mean, what they have done is an old trick. It’s how to lie with statistics, right? And scientists can’t do that because 10 years from now, they’ll look back on my publications and say, ‘Was he right?’ But a journalist can lie with statistics. They can choose a little piece of the data and prove what they want, carefully cutting out the end. If I wanted to do this, I could demonstrate, for example, with the same data set that from 1980 to 1995 that it’s equally flat. You can find little realms where it’s equally flat. What that tells me is that 15 years is not enough to be able to tell whether it’s warming or not. And so when they take 13 years, and they say based on that they can reach a conclusion based on our data set, I think they’re playing that same game and the fact that we can find that back in 1980, the same effect, when we know it wasn’t warming simply shows that that method doesn’t work. But no scientist could do that because he’d be discredited for lying with statistics. Newspapers can do that because 10 years from now, nobody will remember that they showed that.”

So what should the average person believe? Muller blames some of his climate science colleagues for intentionally distorting things:

“I think many scientists have gone along the following train of thought: They look at the data, they look at it in great detail, they analyze it and they say, ‘Oh my God, global warming is real. It’s about what we expected. This is true. We’re going to have about 5 degrees of global warming in the next 60 years. That’s going to be awful.’ And scientists do that. They can publish the data and the public will pay no attention to it because it’s all hidden in careful data analysis. So at this point they say, ‘The public’s not listening. I know this is urgent. Therefore I have to say things that the public will understand.’ And they will then endorse Al Gore even though they know what he’s saying is exaggerated and misleading. He’ll talk about polar bears dying and we know they’re not dying. And I feel scientists, unfortunately, too many of them have abandoned the scientific method precisely because the problem is so important. And I feel exactly the opposite. I feel when the problem is really important, then we have to hunker down and really use the best methods of science.”

So what’s the bottom line?

“The rise in temperature is small, 1.6 degrees, but it is real” Muller said. “We’re not sure how much of that is due to humans but the global warming models predict that it would be about that much. There are some questions about those models, some valid skepticism. But it’s enough that we know we are playing in the ballpark where things could go catastrophic. So we should take prudent measures to do this. We know we’re putting a significant amount of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere and it’s substantial compared to what’s been there before. It’s 36 percent more.

“But it’s also true — and the public needs to know this — that anything we do in the United States will not affect global warming by a significant amount because all projections show that most of the future amounts of carbon dioxide is going to be coming from China, India and the developing world. So, yes, we have a problem. Yes, we should do something about it, prudent. But anything that we do that will not be followed by China and India is basically wasted.”

Regardless of how he’s been characterized in the last 10 days, Muller sounds like a guy who’s not in one policy camp or the other.

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There is so much angry rhetoric about this issue that any journalistic discussion is attacked just as easily as the scientific claims for bias and selective editing. So I’ve posted the entire interview with Muller here … no edits. Here’s part one, running a little more than nine minutes:

And here’s part two, running about four minutes:

 

I’ll be talking to other scientists at the Third Santa Fe Conference on Global and Regional Climate Change throughout the week and will post more interviews in the coming days.