Source: MSNBC
URL: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/26315908/ns/msnbc_tv-rachel_maddow_show/#48409332
Date: 30/07/2012
Event: Richard Muller: "The curve of global warming simply matches that of carbon dioxide"
Credit: MSNBC
People:
Rachel Maddow: For the past 30 years, the MacArthur Foundation has given what are commonly described as "genius grants". You can be of any age, working in any field. There is no warning that you are even being considered. And then one day - bingo! - here's $500,000. "You show exceptional promise in whatever it is that you do. Go do more of it. Go do more of whatever it is you want to do, with this no-strings-attached half million bucks." The people who get a genius award each year - the list of folks, when it comes out, these tend to not be very well-known people. I mean, there are exceptions, but most of the names are not names that you instantly have heard of, when they win the prize. But if you look at the lists, right? The further you go back in time, the more MacArthur genius grant names you do recognise from the old lists. And that makes sense. If the genius award recognises people who show great potential. Right? The idea is that they will get to be famous later.
This year will be the 31st year of MacArthur genius grants, 31 years. Our guest tonight for the interview received his MacArthur genius grant 30 years ago, in the second year that they were giving them out. As a professor of physics at UC Berkeley, as a senior scientist at the Lawrence Berkeley lab, as a multiple award-winning physicist, it was a big deal that someone as highly esteemed and accomplished as Professor Richard Muller described himself as a sceptic on the issue of climate change. He argued that there were problems in the data about global warming and he doubted whether global warming was happening. Because of those views, it was not necessarily a surprise that when Professor Muller launched a new project to study the veracity of global warming data, his single largest private backer was the Charles G. Koch Foundation. The Koch donation provided almost a quarter of the program's entire budget. And yes, that is "Koch" as in Charles and David Koch, the Koch brothers, the conservative billionaires who got that way by inheriting their father's oil and chemical company fortune. They are oil zillionaires, and while, of course, their funding of this project did not come with strings attached, frankly the Koch brothers do fund a lot of what happens on the "global warming is a hoax" side of things.
Richard Muller's latest study was an independent scientific endeavour. And its results are the opposite of in accord with its funders' political positions. When Professor Muller was invited to testify before a House Sub Committee on the Environment last year, he reported there that contrary to his previous beliefs, contrary to his expectations, his preliminary analysis showed that indeed there is a global warming trend. Then six months after delivering that information to Congress, Professor Muller declared publicly that global warming is real. And he said he was no longer sceptical of the data about which he had once voiced doubts.
[Excerpt from NBC Nightly News, November 11, 2011.]
Anne Thompson: A new study finds global warming is real, and that the science behind it is not impacted by biased, bad data or cities that act as heat islands.
Richard Muller: The existence of global warming, I think, is pretty much beyond dispute now. I think we have closed the last remaining questions on that.
Anne Thompson: Muller's study is getting a lot of attention because it was funded in part by a foundation backed by Charles and David Koch. They are oil billionaires and climate change deniers. Today no-one can deny that extreme weather is here to stay.
Rachel Maddow: That was last November. That was a bombshell. Now here's another. Look at this, from the New York Times this weekend. [Text from the New York Times is on the screen.] Richard Muller writes "Call me a converted skeptic. Three years ago I identified problems in previous climate studies that, in my mind, threw doubt on the very existence of global warming. Last year, following an intensive research effort involving a dozen scientists, I concluded that global warming was real and that the prior estimates of the rate of warming were correct. I'm now going a step further: Humans are almost entirely the cause." Joining us now for the interview is Professor Richard Muller of the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature Project at UC Berkeley. His new book is called Energy for Future Presidents. Professor Muller, thank you very much for your time tonight it's nice to have you here.
Richard Muller: Thank you for the invitation.
Rachel Maddow: First let me ask, as a non-scientist, have I screwed any of that up, in explaining how you've got to this position you've just detailed in the Times?
Richard Muller: No, I think it was accurate, except for the characterisation of the Koch Foundation, which always gave us a completely open hand, and indicated no preference for what our results would show.
Rachel Maddow: That's fair and smart of you to point out, and I appreciate you doing that. I do - I did try to insist that there was no implication that there was any funding - strings attached to the funding, but I think, as was noted in that NBC Nightly News report as well, the fact that they were among your funders, as part of the reason why I think your position on this, your evolution on this has received such attention. Do you think that - do you see why people might put that sort of political shine on what it is that you've done?
Richard Muller: Well, I - we tried very hard to be objective and non-political. We're hoping that by doing so, and sticking by the higher standards of science, that we will help cool the debate and bring together everybody. Science is that small realm of knowledge on which universal agreement is possible and likely. And I'm hoping we can settle the science so the more contentious issues - what to do about it - can then be debated.
Rachel Maddow: On that point, why, in your words, is it important to know specifically if - and how much - humans are the cause of global warming? Admitting that global warming is happening, obviously, is step one. Why is the second step so important, in terms of policy and coming up with ways to cope with it, as a civilisation?
Richard Muller: Well, if we are a cause, we can do something about it. If we're not a cause, if it's the solar variation - which we ruled out, in our current study - then it's hopeless, we just have to wait for it to happen. But if we're causing it, we can do something about it. And I personally am concerned, not with the current global warming, which I think has been quite small but real - it's with the future global warming that the danger lies, and we need to recognise where that's coming from and then look for a solution.
Rachel Maddow: What were some of the other factors besides solar variation - people commonly describe that as sunspots - some of the other areas that you thought might have inflected the data in the past, that you were able to rule out with this current round of research?
Richard Muller: Well, the main one is variation in the Sun. There were volcanic eruptions which have affected the climate, and we see those very clearly. [On screen now is a graph showing a line representing average temperatures rising but with dips labelled with famous volcanic eruptions.] But they're short lived - a volcanic eruption tends to cool the planet for about three years. We were concerned about effects such as El Nino and the Gulf Stream. And those cause variations too - we were able to see that. But they also tend to be short-lived. The remarkable thing was when we took those out, that the solar variation - the fingerprint of solar variation - was just absent. And then we looked for the other things - we tried various different fits to it - the shock to me was that the carbon dioxide curve was right on. At that point I was very surprised - I had been - I like to think I'm completely open-minded, and so when we got that fit, in a relatively simple way, and that doesn't require elaborate computer programs. The curve of global warming simply matches that of carbon dioxide. At that point, my opinion finally formed.
Rachel Maddow: You go out of your way to say that correlation is not causation, but that this correlation is very strong. There's something else needs to correlate better with the data, if it is going to be an alternate hypothesis. And also an explanation for why the temperatures have gone the way they have. Given what you see in the correlation between carbon dioxide and temperatures, do you think that the level of reduction we'd have to have in carbon dioxide is so great - in order to affect temperature - that it would have to be a global economic shock or would we be able to reduce carbon dioxide in a way that you think could be economically sustainable, but would still really affect temperature?
Richard Muller: Well, I think there are two key things that we can do. One of them is a global effort towards energy efficiency and conservation - I think that's realistic. But the biggest thing is - and this will be controversial - the biggest thing is a switch away from coal and to the one thing that can replace it in the poor countries - which are going to produce most of the carbon dioxide - natural gas. We have to make fracking clean, so that countries such as China and India can switch. Natural gas produces one third of the carbon dioxide of coal, for the same energy. If we don't do this, I don't think - I don't think we have a chance.
Rachel Maddow: If we can figure out a way to do it without it causing earthquakes and lighting our drinking water on fire, I think a lot of people will want to go down that path.
Richard Muller: Exactly. I don't think that's hard. It requires more than $3 million fines. But clean fracking, the technology there is something which I think is achievable. And that's something that we really have to aim at, because nothing else can be afforded by the poor countries. Unfortunately, China is already, by the end of this year, producing twice the carbon dioxide of the United States, and it's growing very, very rapidly. So we have to come up with a technology that can be afforded by the developing world.
Rachel Maddow: Professor Richard Muller of the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature Project, UC Berkeley, thank you very much for joining us tonight and for being populist enough in your approach to this information than you did it in an op-ed for the New York Times, that everybody could read. Thank you, sir.
Richard Muller: Thank you.