20111031_YT
Source: YouTube
URL 1: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VDMGw0_9nbE
URL 2: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zu4hwTo_hRE
Date: 31/10/2011
Event: Richard Muller is interviewed at the Third Santa Fe Conference on Global and Regional Climate
Attribution: Rob Nikolewski
People:
- Richard Muller: Lead scientist, Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature Project
- Rob Nikolewski: Managing editor, Capitol Report New Mexico
Richard Muller: We expect there to be a big reaction, because the issue was so important, and it's been so contentious. And there's been so much confusion. There are people who are legitimate sceptics, who have raised legitimate questions. And they haven't really gotten the clear answers that I felt, as a scientist, they needed. And I have a sense we are filling a gap. We are a group of people who respect many, maybe most, of the sceptics - not all of them, but many of them. I realise they raise good issues, and we are addressing them with a full scientific approach. And that puts us in a unique position. We're not coming at this with an agenda, we don't have our opinion ahead of time. We're trying to open up the science and make it clear. I believe that science is that narrow realm of reality on which everybody can agree. So if we apply the methods of science to some of the questions, we can resolve those questions.
Rob Nikolewski: For your study says, without doubt, the Earth is warming. Is that the bottom line/takeaway?
Richard Muller: Well you know, I think most people would have agreed to that. There are a few sceptics who say no, but most people agree it's been warming. What we've done is measure, I think with more precision, how much it has warmed, and ruled out the possibility that our measurement could have been affected by several other things. Like the fact that cities are hotter, not because of global warming but because they burn more fuel.
Rob Nikolewski: Heat islands.
Richard Muller: Heat islands, that's right. That people had, in the past, manipulated the data and - yes, they had adjusted it, but our analysis, when we don't adjust it, showed it doesn't make a difference. There are other issues too, the quality of the stations. For the most part, the quality of the stations is, by the previous criterion, is very bad, and we were able to look at that and say even though it's so bad, it doesn't affect the trends. You have a station that's next to a building, but the trend seems to be the same. So we were able to address these issues; the data selection, the fact that the previous groups used less than 20% of the data - we used over 96% of the data. So we addressed that issue. I think by addressing these issues, which were legitimate things to be addressed, we have - I hope, our goal is to cool the debate a little bit, and focus in on a few things that are still uncertain, such as the human contribution.
Rob Nikolewski: By the way, talked to Dr Curry, and she said she was uncomfortable with the over-arching sense that the - I think, your words - that one should not be a sceptic, when it comes to -
Richard Muller: Oh, she - have you talked to her recently?
Rob Nikolewski: Yeah - talked to her 15 minutes ago.
Richard Muller: But I never said you shouldn't be a sceptic. I never said that. You're looking at the op-ed piece in the Wall Street Journal?
Rob Nikolewski [bringing out some papers]: Yeah, well - it was in that paper today. She said that there's no... You would say that there is reason for scepticism on the Wall Street Journal article.
Richard Muller: No, the Wall Street Journal article - they changed it. They changed the title. My title was "Let's Cool the Warming Debate".
Rob Nikolewski: Okay.
Richard Muller: Okay. They changed the title to "An End of Scepticism." That was not me - they didn't seek my approval.
Rob Nikolewski: So you disagree with that.
Richard Muller: Oh yeah. It doesn't represent the article. You read the article, you find it doesn't say what that title says. That was their contribution. Just as you don't have control of the titles of your news articles.
Rob Nikolewski: Well, fortunately I do - [inaudible]. So, do you feel like you're, sort of, being pulled by two different - by the different extremes of this argument, that people that do fervently believe that global warming needs to be addressed, and those who are sceptical are pulling what you say one way or the other?
Richard Muller: When you use the word "belief" that makes me think: wait, there's someone who's starting with a conclusion. We are not trying to address the true believers. There are people who dismiss global warming completely and never will. We can't convince them. We're trying to address the people who still have open minds.
Rob Nikolewski: What about the true believers on the other side?
Richard Muller: Neither side.
Rob Nikolewski: Right.
Richard Muller: No, the true believers are people who have made up their mind and I'll list Al Gore, [inaudible.] They're not scientists, and so they reach their belief and then they push it in order to try and do some good.
Rob Nikolewski: So, you're uncomfortable with the - I mean, the - pardon - you saw the article in the New Mexican today.
Richard Muller: No, I haven't, actually.
Rob Nikolewski: Well, it's actually an Associated Press article -
Richard Muller: Oh yeah -
Rob Nikolewski: - which basically puts you in the Al Gore camp. You feel uncomfortable with that?
Richard Muller: It's not my... [inaudible] - a mistake. In the Al Gore camp? That's ridiculous. I mean, I wrote a book in which - my Physics for Future Presidents book. Look at the last thing in that. What I point out is that most of what appears in An Inconvenient Truth is absolutely either wrong, exaggerated or misleading.
Rob Nikolewski: Okay. And then the BBC interviews as well, you think that... again I'm getting it second-hand from the -
Richard Muller: Helpful for you to straighten these things out.
Rob Nikolewski: Right, that's why I'm talking to you. That - so - it just seems that talking to -
Richard Muller: My Wall Street Journal not bad [?], except for the title, it seems pretty much represents -
Rob Nikolewski: Okay. And oh, also, there was something in the Daily Mail today.
Richard Muller: Oh yes.
Rob Nikolewski: About a graph drawn, using BEST old [?] data, showing that global warming has stalled over the last decade. Is that correct, incorrect?
Richard Muller: It's incorrect. I mean, what they have done is an old trick. That's how to lie with statistics, right. And the scientists can't do that, because ten years from now, people will look back on my publications and say: was he right? But the journalists 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 were to do this, I could demonstrate - for example, the same dataset, that from 1980 to 1995, 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 the conclusion based on our dataset, 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. No scientist could do that, because people - you'd be discredited, for lying with statistics. Newspapers can do that because ten years from now, nobody will remember that they showed that plot.
Rob Nikolewski: So - I talked to Dr Curry about this as well. It seems that if you're someone who's a member of the public, who doesn't have a dog in this fight -
Richard Muller: Tough. Really tough.
Rob Nikolewski: - you're just trying to find out what things are going on -
Richard Muller: One book by Alan Cromer, in which he once said "The general public has a hard time distinguishing the utterly fantastic claims of astrology from the utterly fantastic claims of astronomy." I mean, black holes and, you know, things like this, it's really tough. And so what the public does is they try to find people they can trust, and then listen to them. And I know stuff. It's - I'm not sure if I have any advice. I could always say "Listen to me", but that's, [laughs] that's no good.
Rob Nikolewski: But it also seems that - I mean, you're a scientist, Dr Curry's a scientist, but yet somehow this seems - falls into the realm of religion. For one side or the other.
Richard Muller: No. I fault science for this. I think many scientists have gone along the wrong train of thought. They look at the data, they look at it in great detail, they analyse 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 5 degrees of global warming in the next 60 years, that's going to be awful". And scientists do that. And they could publish this and show their 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. They'll talk about polar bears dying, even though 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. Well, I feel exactly the opposite. When the problem is really important, then we have to hunker down, and really use the best methods of science.
Rob Nikolewski: Yet I pick up an editorial by Eugene Robinson, Washington Post. It says "What Dr Muller says proves that these sceptics are wrong, and they've got to get on this cap-and-trade train."
Richard Muller: That's ridiculous. [Laughs]. I mean, some people say I proved that there was no Climategate. No. The Climategate thing was a scandal. It was terrible what they did. It was shameful the way they hid the data. There's real scepticism, valid scepticism 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, and need to be incorporated in the future. This issue isn't whether there's global warming, it's how much there is. And then how much of that is caused by humans. And there's still a lot of uncertainty in that, and some of the sceptics are raising very good points on that issue.
Rob Nikolewski: Do you feel frustrated that - is it wrong for me to say that sometimes it sounds like what you're saying - or indeed the conclusion I could reach is that what you're saying has been distorted by people from the left and the right?
Richard Muller: Of course that's happening. But in the end, you know, we've written our papers. It's the sort of thing where the initial reaction - people hear some news and they put their own spin on it, they want to show that they were verified. So they do that. But, you know, over the weeks, over the months, it'll settle down and people will realise what we actually said, we wrote scientific papers on this subject and they will read those. And when they read them, they'll look at the quality and they'll decide whether they're up to the snuff. I think these are very high-quality papers.
Rob Nikolewski: So, do you think that even though you defend your paper, do you think that maybe you'll have some second thoughts about doing the Wall Street Journal editorial?
Richard Muller: No, no.
Rob Nikolewski: Because the headline was misleading, that maybe -
Richard Muller: I don't think I would have done it if they told me they were going to change the headline. But if you read the article - and so many people just read the headlines -
Rob Nikolewski: Sure.
Richard Muller: If you actually read the article, you will get the message. And so running that article, I think, has helped calm down things. I mean, people are angry with me. Scientists are angry with me. And they said that article -
Rob Nikolewski: On both sides?
Richard Muller: From both sides. And I say to them "Did you know that the title was changed by the Wall Street Journal?" They go "No". I say "Yes, my original title - ". "Oh". Why should that affect them? They didn't read the article?
Rob Nikolewski: Last question for you. So, for the average American... And again, you don't have a dog in the fight, you - you want the world to go on for millions of years, for their grandchildren, etc. Is there a big takeaway from what you've written in this paper? For the average person.
Richard Muller: The rise in temperature is small, 1.6 degrees, but it is real. 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's some question about those models, some valid scepticism. 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 are putting a significant amount of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, and that it's substantial, compared to what's been there before, it's 36% 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. Listen - all projections show that most of the future 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 - like anything that we do, that will not be followed by China and India, is basically wasted.
Rob Nikolewski: Dr Muller, I appreciate your time.