Richard Muller on Climate change

Richard Muller who's book we read "Physics for Future Presidents"- comes up in
today's Paul Krugmen column - very interesting-
Randy

The Truth, Still InconvenientBy PAUL KRUGMAN
So the joke begins like this: An economist, a lawyer and a professor of
marketing walk into a room. What’s the punch line? They were three of the five
“expert witnesses” Republicans called for last week’s Congressional hearing on
climate science.

But the joke actually ended up being on the Republicans, when one of the two
actual scientists they invited to testify went off script.

Prof. Richard Muller of Berkeley, a physicist who has gotten into the climate
skeptic game, has been leading the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature project,
an effort partially financed by none other than the Koch foundation. And climate
deniers — who claim that researchers at NASA and other groups analyzing climate
trends have massaged and distorted the data — had been hoping that the Berkeley
project would conclude that global warming is a myth.

Instead, however, Professor Muller reported that his group’s preliminary results
find a global warming trend “very similar to that reported by the prior groups.”

The deniers’ response was both predictable and revealing; more on that shortly.
But first, let’s talk a bit more about that list of witnesses, which raised the
same question I and others have had about a number of committee hearings held
since the G.O.P. retook control of the House — namely, where do they find these
people?

My favorite, still, was Ron Paul’s first hearing on monetary policy, in which
the lead witness was someone best known for writing a book denouncing Abraham
Lincoln as a “horrific tyrant” — and for advocating a new secessionist movement
as the appropriate response to the “new American fascialistic state.”

The ringers (i.e., nonscientists) at last week’s hearing weren’t of quite the
same caliber, but their prepared testimony still had some memorable moments. One
was the lawyer’s declaration that the E.P.A. can’t declare that greenhouse gas
emissions are a health threat, because these emissions have been rising for a
century, but public health has improved over the same period. I am not making
this up.

Oh, and the marketing professor, in providing a list of past cases of “analogies
to the alarm over dangerous manmade global warming” — presumably intended to
show why we should ignore the worriers — included problems such as acid rain and
the ozone hole that have been contained precisely thanks to environmental
regulation.

But back to Professor Muller. His climate-skeptic credentials are pretty strong:
he has denounced both Al Gore and my colleague Tom Friedman as “exaggerators,”
and he has participated in a number of attacks on climate research, including
the witch hunt over innocuous e-mails from British climate researchers. Not
surprisingly, then, climate deniers had high hopes that his new project would
support their case.

You can guess what happened when those hopes were dashed.

Just a few weeks ago Anthony Watts, who runs a prominent climate denialist Web
site, praised the Berkeley project and piously declared himself “prepared to
accept whatever result they produce, even if it proves my premise wrong.” But
never mind: once he knew that Professor Muller was going to present those
preliminary results, Mr. Watts dismissed the hearing as “post normal science
political theater.” And one of the regular contributors on his site dismissed
Professor Muller as “a man driven by a very serious agenda.”

Of course, it’s actually the climate deniers who have the agenda, and nobody
who’s been following this discussion believed for a moment that they would
accept a result confirming global warming. But it’s worth stepping back for a
moment and thinking not just about the science here, but about the morality.

For years now, large numbers of prominent scientists have been warning, with
increasing urgency, that if we continue with business as usual, the results will
be very bad, perhaps catastrophic. They could be wrong. But if you’re going to
assert that they are in fact wrong, you have a moral responsibility to approach
the topic with high seriousness and an open mind. After all, if the scientists
are right, you’ll be doing a great deal of damage.

But what we had, instead of high seriousness, was a farce: a supposedly crucial
hearing stacked with people who had no business being there and instant
ostracism for a climate skeptic who was actually willing to change his mind in
the face of evidence. As I said, no surprise: as Upton Sinclair pointed out long
ago, it’s difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends
on his not understanding it.

But it’s terrifying to realize that this kind of cynical careerism — for that’s
what it is — has probably ensured that we won’t do anything about climate change
until catastrophe is already upon us.

So on second thought, I was wrong when I said that the joke was on the G.O.P.;
actually, the joke is on the human race.