In the world of global finance, Alan Greenspan became an oracle. During his nearly 20 years as chairman of the Federal Reserve, legions strained to parse his sentences and discover deep meaning in his every utterance.
Now, in the world of global climate change, there is Richard A. Muller, a professor of physics at the University of California at Berkeley.
As nations around the planet wrestle with life-or-death decisions about whether and how to confront their growing consumption of fossil fuels, Mr. Muller has managed to emerge from the fray as the Man Whose Opinion Matters.
After nearly two years of study, Mr. Muller last month announced what he regards as the most definitive finding to date about the accuracy of land-based temperature readings, showing a clear warming trend over the past 50 years. At the same time, however, he questioned whether the trend was continuing and whether land-based results were too limited in scope.
“Right now,” he says of the earth as a whole, “we don’t know that it’s warming. It may be constant, we don’t know.”
Such cryptic pronouncements have proved irresistible to advocates on both sides of the debate, catapulting Mr. Muller to media fame as the man so principled in his approach to science that he can’t be pegged as either a believer in man-made global warming or a denier.
“He shows little interest in entering the political fight,” said one admiring editorial this month in The New York Times.
Mr. Muller eagerly embraces the description. “I am not good at politics, I have no interest in politics,” he said in an interview. “And I got into this because I felt the subject had been too politicized, and I wanted to simply do science, good science, in a nonpolitical, nonpartisan way.”
Beyond all the scrupulous nonpartisanship, what Mr. Muller has contributed to the underlying science is less clear, given that the occurrence of planetary warming has been widely accepted by climate scientists for more than two decades.
And even less clear is whether the heavy qualifications Mr. Muller is now placing on his own findings reflect a truly objective observer. His outside interests include a consulting agency, Muller & Associates, which advises energy companies in areas that include “enhanced oil recovery and underground coal gasification.”
“It is an amazing conflict of interest” for Mr. Muller to be issuing scientific assessments on global warming given his business associations, said Joseph J. Romm, a climate-policy analyst at the Center for American Progress who served as an Energy Department official in the Clinton administration. Mr. Muller says it’s not credible that his work on climate change has been influenced by energy companies.
A Consensus on Climate?
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a body formed by the United Nations, has been issuing reports since 1990 showing that the earth’s average temperature is increasing and that carbon dioxide from man-made activities—primarily, the burning of fossil fuels—is the chief cause.
Mr. Muller said he began his own search for the truth last year because he questioned the accuracy of land-based temperature measurements, citing poor equipment and problems that included sensor gauges located too close to heat sources like buildings and parking lots. He and his colleagues, including fellow physicists, resolved that uncertainty by painstakingly ranking the value of 39,000 land-based temperature stations and then factoring the reliability of each to build a quality-weighted worldwide average.
His team, called the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperatures project, worked with financial support from groups that include the Fund for Innovative Climate and Energy Research, created by Bill Gates, and the Charles G. Koch Foundation, which derives revenue from its founder’s oil and chemical conglomerate.
In the end, Mr. Muller’s temperature analysis aligned with previously published studies suggesting that the world’s average land temperature has increased by nearly 1 degree centigrade since the 1950s.
Asked if the Koch Foundation could accept that conclusion, a spokeswoman, Tonya Mullins, said Mr. Muller’s work still needed to pass muster in a peer-review process and noted that Mr. Muller made no determination about either ocean temperatures or the responsibility of fossil fuels.
Those who accept the scientific consensus on climate change and its causes have also been cautious. Michael E. Mann, a professor of meteorology at Pennsylvania State University known for using evidence from physical sources such as tree rings and glaciers to show that current global temperatures are well above the averages of the past 1,000 years, called Mr. Muller’s work useful. Mr. Mann said he’s disturbed, however, by Mr. Muller’s subsequent attempts to obscure his own conclusion.
In particular, Mr. Muller has made a point in interviews of emphasizing the lack of any definitive data showing that global land temperatures have increased at all in the last 13 years. “We cannot, in the last 13 years, tell from our data whether there is a slowdown or not,” Mr. Muller told The Chronicle.
That kind of comment is “just silly,” Mr. Mann said, since 1998 was known to be one of the warmest years on record because of an unusually strong El Niño, the cyclical pattern of Pacific Ocean warming. “That’s not legitimate science,” he said. “No practicing climate scientist would take seriously the notion that you can measure global warming based on a 10-year trend, especially based on cherry-picking a warm starting year.”
‘Just Practicing Scientists’
Mr. Muller has also had public disagreements with a leading member of his own team, Judith A. Curry, a critic of the scientific consensus on global warming who serves as chair of the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at the Georgia Institute of Technology.
Shortly after Mr. Muller publicized the group’s findings last month, Ms. Curry gave an interview to the Daily Mail newspaper of London in which she faulted him for making the announcement without consulting her, for failing to emphasize the lack of temperature increase since the late 1990s, and for writing an opinion article in The Wall Street Journal declaring the study as ending any legitimate skepticism over global warming.
After conferring with Ms. Curry, Mr. Muller has taken care to emphasize his uncertainty about any temperature change in the last 13 years, and to explain his public release of the study results as a modern version of the once-traditional method of vetting scientific findings with peers worldwide before seeking publication in an established peer-reviewed academic journal.
He also said he had no role in choosing the Wall Street Journal headline, which read: “The Case Against Global-Warming Skepticism.” That headline “misrepresented the article,” Mr. Muller said. “The skeptics, who are really upset with me, are upset with me over the claim that I said it’s an end to skepticism, when in fact I never said that.” In the body of the Journal article, however, he stated that he was writing the article to “explain why you should not be a skeptic, at least not any longer.”
Either way, Mr. Muller is confident that the experience has only enhanced his reputation as an impartial analyst of climate change. That was made “absolutely” clear earlier this month, he said, when he presented his findings at a climate-change conference in New Mexico, sponsored by groups that include the Los Alamos National Laboratory.
“I could sense that the scientists at that meeting recognized the value of what we’ve done, the care that we took, our openness,” he said.
As for the rest of the politically charged world of climate change, Mr. Muller said the confusion he generates is largely a reflection of the fact that he is a nonpolitical scientist.
“Whenever I make a presentation anywhere, I can almost sense in the audience that people are trying to figure out which side is Muller really on,” he said. “And I think I leave most of them pretty much confused, because in fact we really are just practicing scientists and we’re doing it with great care, and I think it’s evident in our papers and in everything we write.”
