Skeptic Now Says Global Warming is Real
Vol: 127 Issue: 30 Monday, April 30, 2012
Until two years ago, Richard Muller was a skeptic when it came to global warming. Indeed, the well-known physicist was best known for his stunning refutation of the whole global warming theory.
Muller’s research has been backed by the Koch brothers, among others, who put up about one-fourth of his research money. The Koch brothers, Charles and David, run a large privately held company involved in oil and other industries.
Since their enterprises produce significant quantities of greenhouse gases that keeps the EPA breathing down their necks, the fact the Koch brothers financed Muller’s research adds considerable gravitas to his conclusions.
Muller decided to conduct his own investigation into the claims about global warming following “Climategate” when email accounts from leading global warming proponents were hacked and released to the public.
The emails revealed what many skeptics (including this one) had long suspected. If you offer research grants to scientists if their investigations lead to a desired conclusion, the more money you grant them, the more evidence they will find in order to keep the grant money flowing.
That’s what makes Muller’s conclusions so earth-shattering in the minds of the global warming proponents. Here we have a guy that they figure was offered grant money to disprove global warming and his conclusions are that temperatures really are on the rise.
Muller found that temperatures are some 1.6 degrees warmer than they were in the 1950’s. Muller’s numbers, according to published reports, match those by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and NASA.
Muller’s ultimate findings, released last October, are almost the same as those being offered by climate scientists and global warming True Believers since Al Gore first published “Earth in the Balance” back in 1989.
Most of the data for Gore’s book back in 1989 came from research commissioned by then-Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher of the UK. Thatcher was fighting a pitched battle with environmentalists of a planned UK expansion of nuclear power generating plants.
This was shortly after Three Mile Island and the environmentalists were winning the debate. Thatcher then offered research grants to scientists seeking a link between fossil fuel emissions and global warming.
Of course, they were able to find links, and the more evidence they came up with, the more research money they ended up with until East Anglia University scored a permanent gig as the government’s go-to science guys whenever they needed to justify some unpopular government initiative.
All anybody had to do is link it to the fight against global warming and label dissenters “flat-earthers” or “heretics”.
That is what bothered Muller and made him a skeptic.
Assessment:
The headlines are all about Muller’s miraculous conclusions that Al Gore was right. Every news report is playing as if all the global warming science has been vindicated and all the objections have been handled.
“Muller’s research team carefully examined two chief criticisms by skeptics. One is that weather stations are unreliable; the other is that cities, which create heat islands, were skewing the temperature analysis.
“The skeptics raised valid points and everybody should have been a skeptic two years ago,” Muller said in a telephone interview. “And now we have confidence that the temperature rise that had previously been reported had been done without bias.”
Muller said that he came into the study “with a proper skepticism,” something scientists “should always have. I was somewhat bothered by the fact that there was not enough skepticism” before.
There is no reason now to be a skeptic about steadily increasing temperatures, Muller wrote recently in The Wall Street Journal’s editorial pages, a place friendly to skeptics.
Is it true? Have all the objections been handled? I have read and read and read everything I can find about Muller’s investigation and the way it is being presented by the mainstream media, which has staked its credibility on the dangers posed by man-made global warming.
Most of the mainstream media headlines read just about the same; “Richard Muller, Global Warming Skeptic, Now Agrees Climate Change is Real.” Typical of the spin are op-eds like this one:
“Richard Muller, a UC-Berkeley physicist, and until now a climate change skeptic, has announced that global warming is real. His review showed the average land temperature has increased 1.8 degrees Fahrenheit since the 1950s, a finding consistent with that of the International Panel on Climate Change.”
“This paper has reported on the head-in-the-sand crowd at the Heartland Institute in Chicago. Heartland is pushing a climate-denying curriculum for our children. Their books were cooked by Dr. David Wojick, whom Heartland describes as an environmental science researcher for the Department of Energy. But Wojick has never conducted a lick of research for the DOE, the agency said. Leaked documents show Heartland to be nothing more than a shill for the oil industry.”
Gee, doesn’t that sound even-handed? Having cited Richard Muller and accusing the “head in the sand crowd” of “cooking the books” the op-ed goes on to cite an even higher Authority:
“We ignore Christ’s admonition about environmental stewardship at our peril. In so doing we may contemplate our children, when they get old, recollecting to their grandchildren how it used to snow here.”
I grew up in the Sixties — I recall winters that started in October and ended in May. I already tell my grandchildren stories about walking to school knee-deep in snow. (And in my case, it really was uphill — both ways.)
I live on the shores of Lake Erie where the headwaters of the Niagara River flow down to the Falls. Every year, a joint US-Canadian energy consortium installs an “ice boom” that stretches across the mouth of the river from Fort Erie to Buffalo.
Its purpose is to prevent large ice floes from breaking off in the lake and interfering with the giant hydroelectric power production facilities near the Falls. This year was the first year I can recall in my lifetime where Lake Erie never froze over.
This is all very rich stuff and seems to utterly destroy climate change skepticism. Here we have this famous physicist saying that global warming is real. Wow!
Except I agree with Muller. Global warming IS real. I never doubted that it was real. How could I? I pretty much agree with all of Muller’s conclusions, as Muller presents them.
Shocked? Don’t be.
The headlines say that Muller is no longer a “climate change skeptic” because he believes global warming is real. But if one reads carefully, the spin slows down and guess what!
“Muller did not address in his research the cause of global warming. The overwhelming majority of climate scientists say it’s man-made from the burning of fossil fuels such as coal and oil. Nor did his study look at ocean warming, future warming and how much of a threat to mankind climate change might be.”
In other words, Muller simply acknowledged facts already in evidence and NOT in dispute. Nothing about Muller’s conclusions suggests that global warming is in fact man-made, and so nothing about Muller’s conclusions are any different than the majority of climate change skeptics.
Even skeptics can tell that it was colder in Sixties, warmer in the Nineties and somewhat cooler since the turn of the century. Even without looking up records.
I need only look at my winter wardrobe — a mixture of parkas and spring jackets.
What is at issue is STILL at issue — what causes it — and is it permanent? Nothing about Muller’s research changes the debate.
All the most recent data shows that the Sun is heating up after a period of minimal activity that has lasted most of the 21st century. And now that the Sun is heating up again (and we’re worrying about sunspots and electrical grids) it appears to be getting warmer again.
Not everywhere. The glaciers that were shrinking a couple of decades ago are getting bigger again. The ice caps that were shrinking are now increasing in size. But it takes a few years of warmth to make them shrink and a few years of cooling to make them enlarge.
I often refer to it as “weather patterns”. (And who knows? It might even catch on).
As for the cause of global warming, this experiment can be recreated at will and it works every time. Go outside at noon on a sunny day. Record the temperature. Go back out twelve hours later and take another reading at exactly the same place.
What did you find? My guess is that it was cooler at midnight. Why?
Correct. The cause of global warming is the sun. Something Grok the caveman figured out all on his own, back before the advent of research grants.
If the cause of global warming is the sun, then all the money being thrown at “green” companies and “green” energy plans (that don’t work) is a waste. So the debate ignores the sun as if it were irrelevant and instead, blames Western use of fossil fuels.
Not China, or India or the former Soviet Union, none of whom are gullible enough to believe the nonsense, primarily because they don’t need climate change to scare their populations into going along — they have other, more convincing methods.
No, it is only the West that needs climate change in order to convince their populations to go along with the program, which, if one is paying attention, is to force the West to submit to some form of global authority empowered with the ability to pass laws, impose taxes and even make war in the name of saving the planet.
Note that it is the West in the crosshairs. The Kings of the East, Gog-Magog and the Kings of the South aren’t in a panic about their own emissions, although they don’t mind sharing in our panic about ours.
Note also that it isn’t climate change that is the debate. The debate is about whether or not it is man-made or part of existing weather patterns and cycles that go back as far as we can trace them in the fossil record.
The debate has been raging for almost a quarter-century. Should we fear what appears to be coming upon the earth? Or is it a case of confusion about the cause? What is the cause?
Well, signs in the sun seem to suggest solar flares, but if the sun is the cause, then there is nothing we can do about it. A perplexing situation, is it not? We have people practically keeling over with heart attacks out of fear of rising seas washing away places like Manhattan.
To listen to the climate change alarmists, one would almost assume that the powers of heaven are about to sweep us all away.
Heeeyyyy, that’s a kinda familiar-sounding assessment. Like maybe I’d heard it before . . . let’s see. . .
“And there shall be signs in the sun, and in the moon, and in the stars; and upon the earth distress of nations, with perplexity; the sea and the waves roaring; Men’s hearts failing them for fear, and for looking after those things which are coming on the earth: for the powers of heaven shall be shaken.”
The Lord pretty much covers the whole global warming debate in a single, fifty-seven word prophecy.
According to the Bible, it is a lie that isn’t going away anytime soon. The Lord says it will be an issue all the way through the Tribulation, suggesting that it may be an important plank in the AC’s platform as he rises to power.
“And then shall they see the Son of man coming in a cloud with power and great glory.”
And the very next verse after that brings us back to where we are at this moment on the Bible’s timeline.
“And when these things BEGIN to come to pass, then look up, and lift up your heads; for your redemption draweth nigh.” (Luke 21:25-28)
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