It’s a scientist’s duty to be properly skeptical, says Berkeley physics Prof. Richard Muller, who still says that much, if not most, of what is attributed to climate change is speculative, exaggerated or just plain wrong. He has analyzed some of the most alarmist claims and his skepticism about them hasn’t changed.
What has changed is his doubt about the very existence of global warming. And he is now going a step further: Humans are almost entirely the cause, he says.
But Hurricane Katrina cannot be attributed to global warming, he notes. The number of hurricanes hitting the United States has been going down, not up; likewise for intense tornadoes. Polar bears aren’t dying from receding ice, and the Himalayan glaciers aren’t going to melt by 2035. And it’s possible that we are currently no warmer than we were a thousand years ago, during the “Medieval Warm Period” or “Medieval Optimum,” an interval of warm conditions known from historical records and indirect evidence like tree rings. And the recent warm spell in the United States happens to be more than offset by cooling elsewhere in the world, so its link to “global” warming is weaker than tenuous.
He details it all in his own words. The Conversion of a Climate-Change Skeptic By Richard A. Muller, New York Times
What has changed is his doubt about the very existence of global warming. And he is now going a step further: Humans are almost entirely the cause, he says.
But Hurricane Katrina cannot be attributed to global warming, he notes. The number of hurricanes hitting the United States has been going down, not up; likewise for intense tornadoes. Polar bears aren’t dying from receding ice, and the Himalayan glaciers aren’t going to melt by 2035. And it’s possible that we are currently no warmer than we were a thousand years ago, during the “Medieval Warm Period” or “Medieval Optimum,” an interval of warm conditions known from historical records and indirect evidence like tree rings. And the recent warm spell in the United States happens to be more than offset by cooling elsewhere in the world, so its link to “global” warming is weaker than tenuous.
He details it all in his own words. The Conversion of a Climate-Change Skeptic By Richard A. Muller, New York Times
http://www.populartechnology.net/2012/06/truth-about-richard-muller.html
"I was never a skeptic" - Richard Muller, 2011
"If Al Gore reaches more people and convinces the world that global warming is real, even if he does it through exaggeration and distortion - which he does, but he’s very effective at it - then let him fly any plane he wants." - Richard Muller, 2008
"There is a consensus that global warming is real. ...it’s going to get much, much worse." - Richard Muller, 2008
"Let me be clear. My own reading of the literature and study of paleoclimate suggests strongly that carbon dioxide from burning of fossil fuels will prove to be the greatest pollutant of human history. It is likely to have severe and detrimental effects on global climate." - Richard Muller, 2003