Sunday July 29, 2012
HOW TO BECOME AN UNPERSON. Steven Hayward at Power Line, March 2011:
Embedded below, if I have mastered the custom Power Line formatting, is a stunning five-minute video of Berkeley physicist Richard Muller shredding the infamous climate “hockey stick” that is making the rounds widely on the Internet....
..in the aftermath of Climategate, Muller is “going big” you might say. Watch this and you’ll see what I mean, especially his summary phrase, “You’re not allowed to do this in science.” Muller is not just tenured, but is late in his career, so feels free to speak out, unlike younger academics who don’t dare cross the Climate McCarthyism of the universities. More importantly, Muller is heading up the new Berkeley Earth Temperature Study, which will review and analyze all of the data on this subject starting from scratch. Unlike the Climategate cabal in Britain and in our NASA, the Berkeley group will share its data with all comers. Keep your eye on this; it will take time–years more than months probably–but may prove to be the thread that unravels the main prop of the climate campaign.
Since then, the science has led Muller not to "unravel the main prop of the climate campaign," as Hayward predicted, but to what Muller himself calls his "total turnaround" on AGW: "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."
Steven Hayward at Power Line, this weekend:
But just how much of a “skeptic” was Muller? Here’s the opening from his 2008 interview with Grist.org... Sounds pretty close to the “consensus” party line to me, and as such today’s Times op-ed does not represent a fundamentally new position for Muller at all. (I’m wondering whether a Times editor pressured him to use the “total turnaround” language.) Actually, Muller has always been among the group of folks known as “lukewarmers"...
Soon enough we'll be told that Muller was always a thought-criminal.