{"id":860,"date":"2012-07-30T11:50:34","date_gmt":"2012-07-30T18:50:34","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.venturacountytrails.org\/WP\/?p=860"},"modified":"2022-08-03T11:07:49","modified_gmt":"2022-08-03T18:07:49","slug":"koch-funded-climate-change-skeptic-reverses-course","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/venturacountytrails.org\/WP\/2012\/07\/30\/koch-funded-climate-change-skeptic-reverses-course\/","title":{"rendered":"Koch-funded climate change skeptic reverses course"},"content":{"rendered":"

A Berkely professor makes a surprise ‘total turnaround’ in a study funded by doubters of global warming.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Source of this article: The Los Angeles Times<\/a>, July 30, 2012<\/p>\n

WASHINGTON \u2013 The verdict is in: Global warming is occurring and emissions of greenhouse gases caused by human activity are the main cause.<\/p>\n

This, according to Richard A. Muller, professor of physics at UC Berkeley, MacArthur Fellow and co-founder of the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature project. Never mind that the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and hundreds of other climatologists around the world came to such conclusions years ago. The difference now is the source: Muller is a long-standing, colorful critic of prevailing climate science, and the Berkeley project was heavily funded by the Charles Koch Charitable Foundation, which, along with its libertarian petrochemical billionaire founder Charles G. Koch, has a considerable history of backing groups that deny climate change.<\/p>\n

In an opinion piece in Saturday\u2019s New York Times\u00a0titled \u201cThe Conversion of a Climate-Change Skeptic,\u201d<\/a> Muller writes: \u201cThree 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\u2019m now going a step further: Humans are almost entirely the cause.\u201d<\/p>\n

The Berkeley project\u2019s research has shown, Muller says, \u201cthat the average temperature of the Earth\u2019s land has risen by two and a half degrees Fahrenheit over the past 250 years, including an increase of one and a half degrees over the most recent 50 years. Moreover, it appears likely that essentially all of this increase results from the human emission of greenhouse gases.\u201d<\/p>\n

He calls his stance now \u201ca total turnaround.\u201d<\/p>\n

Some leading climate scientists welcomed Muller\u2019s comments, proof, they argued, that the science is so strong that even those inclined to reject it cannot once they examine it carefully.\u00a0 Michael E. Mann, director of the Earth System Science Center at Pennsylvania State University, said that Muller\u2019s conversion might help shape the thinking of the \u201creasonable middle\u201d of the population \u201cwho are genuinely confused and have been honestly taken in\u201d by attacks on climate science.<\/p>\n

On his Facebook page<\/a>, Mann wrote: \u201cThere is a certain ironic satisfaction in seeing a study funded by the Koch Brothers \u2013 the greatest funders of climate change denial and disinformation on the planet \u2013 demonstrate what scientists have known with some degree of confidence for nearly two decades: that the globe is indeed warming, and that this warming can only be explained by human-caused increases in greenhouse gas concentrations. I applaud Muller and his colleagues for acting as any good scientists would, following where their analyses led them, without regard for the possible political repercussions.\u201d<\/p>\n

Tonya Mullins, a spokeswoman for the Koch Foundation, said the support her foundation provided, along with others, had no bearing on the results of the research. “Our grants are designed to promote independent research; as such, recipients hold full control over their findings,” Mullins said in an email. “In this support, we strive to benefit society by promoting discovery and informing public policy.”<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>Muller\u2019s conclusions, however, failed to sway the most ardent climate contrarians, like Marc Morano, a former top producer for Rush Limbaugh and communications director for the Republicans on the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee who now runs the website climatedepot.com.\u00a0 \u201cMuller will be remembered as a befuddled professor who has yet to figure out how to separate climate science from his media antics. His latest claims provide no new insight into the climate science debate,\u201d Morano said in an email.<\/p>\n

Muller\u2019s New York Times commentary follows research he did last year that confirmed the work of scientists who found the Earth\u2019s temperature was rising. In the past, Muller had criticized which global temperatures were used in such research, contending that some monitoring stations provided inaccurate data.\u00a0 Now, Berkeley\u2019s research has weighed in on the causes of the temperature rise, testing arguments climate contrarians have used.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhat has caused the gradual but systematic rise of two and a half degrees?\u201d Muller writes. \u201cWe tried fitting the shape to simple math functions (exponentials, polynomials), to solar activity and even to rising functions like world population. By far the best match was to the record of atmospheric carbon dioxide, measured from atmospheric samples and air trapped in polar ice.\u201d<\/p>\n

Muller asserted that his findings were \u2018stronger\u2019 than those of the U.N.\u2019s Intergovernmental\u00a0 panel. Yet,\u00a0 neither Berkeley\u2019s research from last year or the new findings on causality have been published in peer-reviewed journals, which has raised criticism and concerns among climatologists and contrarians alike.<\/p>\n

Benjamin D. Santer, a climate researcher at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and a lead author of the 1995 U.N. climate report, said he welcomed the involvement of another research group into \u201cdetection and attribution\u201d of climate change and its causes. But he also said he found it troubling that Muller claimed such definitive results without his work undergoing peer-review.<\/p>\n

\u201cIf you go into the public arena and claim to have generated evidence that is stronger than the IPCC, where is the detailed, scientific evidence? Has he used fundamental new data sets?\u201d Santer said. \u201cPublish the science and report on it after it\u2019s done.\u201d<\/p>\n

He added: \u201cI think you can do great harm to the broader debate. Imagine this scenario: that he makes these great claims and the papers aren’t published? This (op-ed) is in the spirit of publicity, not the spirit of science.\u201d<\/p>\n

Elizabeth Muller, co-founder and executive director of the Berkeley project and Richard Muller\u2019s daughter, said the papers had been peer-reviewed, but not yet published. But because of the long lead-up to publication, the Berkeley team decided to place its papers online, in part to solicit comment from other scientists. She said all the papers, including the latest, would be on the BerkeleyEarth.org website by Sunday evening.<\/p>\n

\u201cI believe the findings in our papers are too important to wait for the year or longer that it could take to complete the journal review process,\u201d Elizabeth Muller wrote in an email. \u201cWe believe in traditional peer review; we welcome feedback [from] the public and any scientists who are interested in taking the time to make thoughtful comments. Our papers have received scrutiny by dozens of top scientists, not just the two or three that typically are called upon by journalists.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A Berkely professor makes a surprise ‘total turnaround’ in a study funded by doubters of global warming. Source of this article: The Los Angeles Times, July 30, 2012 WASHINGTON \u2013 The verdict is in: Global warming is occurring and emissions of greenhouse gases caused by human activity are the main […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11,24,7,8,15,14,29],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-860","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-california","category-drought","category-environment","category-global-warming","category-international","category-national","category-politics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/venturacountytrails.org\/WP\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/860","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/venturacountytrails.org\/WP\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/venturacountytrails.org\/WP\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/venturacountytrails.org\/WP\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/venturacountytrails.org\/WP\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=860"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/venturacountytrails.org\/WP\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/860\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3689,"href":"https:\/\/venturacountytrails.org\/WP\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/860\/revisions\/3689"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/venturacountytrails.org\/WP\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=860"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/venturacountytrails.org\/WP\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=860"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/venturacountytrails.org\/WP\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=860"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}