Exxon Scientists Predicted Global Warming in 1970’s

My overall point is that there are countless people who know things, and often these things they “know” are in conflict. If we are going to decide to believe in some of these claims, and not others, it seems like we would need a way to differentiate the good and bad claims.

If Dr. Judith Curry is considered credible because she was in the climate change camp, came to know them, and decided they were wrong, then why not confer the same authority on Dr. Richard Muller, who came through the same path in the opposite direction?

“Call me a converted skeptic," physicist Richard Muller wrote in an Op-Ed in the New York Times this week, describing his analysis of data from the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature project. Though Muller was once a notable skeptic regarding studies connecting human activity to climate change, he has now concluded that "humans are almost entirely the cause" of global warming.

 

He's a physicist and not necessarily a climatologist scientist... so, should he be making these statements about the climate, or is he also a climatologists scientist too?

 

Muller founded Cal Berkeley's Earth Surface Temperature Project over a decade ago. This research group published a number of studies from this project. Funny thing. Curry was a co-author on at least one of those studies.

 

He and his daughter founded a non-profit aimed to to address major concerns about climate change skeptics?

Yes, let's use your position to fight skeptics? That sounds like a person that is more worried about his non-profit's profits than his unbiased opinions or climate change. His whole organization is geared to fight skeptics... that does NOT sound very scientific to me. It's sound very political in fact. He's looking for funding to fight skeptics.


Richard A. Muller (born January 6, 1944) is an American physicist and emeritus professor of physics at the University of California, Berkeley. He was also a faculty senior scientist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. In early 2010, Muller and his daughter Elizabeth Muller founded the group Berkeley Earth, an independent 501(c)(3) non-profit aimed at addressing some of the major concerns of the climate change skeptics, in particular the global surface temperature record. In 2016, Richard and Elizabeth Muller co-founded Deep Isolation, a private company seeking to dispose of nuclear waste in deep boreholes.[1]


Okay, this part of his career seems a bit off...

Subsequently, Muller branched out into other areas of science, and in particular the Earth sciences. His work has included attempting to understand the ice ages, dynamics at the core-mantle boundary, patterns of extinction and biodiversity through time, and the processes associated with impact cratering. One of his most well known proposals is the Nemesis hypothesis suggesting the Sun could have an as yet undetected companion dwarf star, whose perturbations of the Oort cloud and subsequent effects on the flux of comets entering the inner Solar System could explain an apparent 26 million year periodicity in extinction events.

 

Every new home is required to be elevated to a minimum of BFE (base flood elevation per FEMA) +1.0'.

 

I think you are reading this wrong. Muller’s goal was to actually bring the skeptic’s criticisms to the scientific community. By “addressing” the concerns of skeptics, it means he actually wanted to have them given a fair shake. In fact, his initial project was conceived in conjunction with the input of Judith Curry and Anthony Watts.

Next, the team set about addressing concerns raised by sceptics and others about existing Earth surface temperature datasets and their findings. Muller elaborates "First, there were issues around [weather] station quality - [sceptic meteorologist and blogger Anthony] Watts showed that some of the stations had poor quality. We studied that in great detail. Fortunately, we discovered that station quality does not affect the results. Even poor stations reflect temperature changes accurately."

'There's plenty of room for scepticism' – climate study author Richard Muller

 

Anytime your stated goal is to address skeptics means you have reached your own conclusion... makes it harder to believe in his empirical data on Climate Change, but yeah, maybe he is open to changing his stated objective about climate change skeptics.

 

I directly quoted him right him above and explained how he brought in skeptics to help design his project. He thought the concerns of climate skeptics were being wrongly ignored and then developed a huge project to rectify that. This part really isn’t in dispute, but I can offer more quotes:

“CALL me a converted skeptic. Three 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’m now going a step further: Humans are almost entirely the cause.

My total turnaround, in such a short time, is the result of careful and objective analysis by the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature project, which I founded with my daughter Elizabeth. Our results show that the average temperature of the earth’s 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.
…
It’s a scientist’s duty to be properly skeptical. I still find that much, if not most, of what is attributed to climate change is speculative, exaggerated or just plain wrong. I’ve analyzed some of the most alarmist claims, and my skepticism about them hasn’t changed.
…
Science is that narrow realm of knowledge that, in principle, is universally accepted. I embarked on this analysis to answer questions that, to my mind, had not been answered. I hope that the Berkeley Earth analysis will help settle the scientific debate regarding global warming and its human causes. Then comes the difficult part: agreeing across the political and diplomatic spectrum about what can and should be done.“

Opinion | The Conversion of a Climate-Change Skeptic (Published 2012)

 

I would like to see 5 scientists on opposite side debating this on a stage with their empirical data to back their side up with. That would be interesting.

 

This is a mass torts attorney’s wet dream. As soon as they can prove any type of damages this is going to be a massive payday.

 

Debates like this occur. I don’t know how much to take away from them, since our reactions to such are functions of both how convincing are the scientists and how convincible we are. I personally really liked this one on one debate in case you’re interested:

John Christy and Kerry Emanuel on Climate Change - Econlib

 

Dick Cheney.

 

Exactly what empirical data do you think skeptics are going to dig up? This is pretty straightforward stuff

- greenhouse gases cause warming - if not the earth would not be habitable by humans
- greenhouse gases have increased by significant and measurable amounts, and the increases can be directly attributable to human causes
- temperature has increased accordingly
- models from 50 years back have been mostly accurate in predicting this relationship. Skeptic models have missed badly.

I honestly don’t know what you think is in question. It’s as if you pour water into a glass, you are questioning if the water being poured into the glass is causing the water level to rise, or is it really even rising?

 

That doesn't seem like near enough to me. And clearly its not working very well. And it won't work well with the level of the sea rising over time, and the number of severe hurricanes increasing.

 

The new homes did good with Ian. Ft myers beach and lots of ft myers were old homes not built to todays standards. Ian and Irma both went right over our house with no damage. Newer homes on ft myers beach did fine other thanbthe under building parking areas that flooded

 

I don’t think that is true. I consulted with the entire meteorological and scientific world. temperature for the last 850 million years. Here is the graph

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Here is the one for the last 100 million years with a delta difference of 10° cooler, not hotter

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Earth is 4.5 billion years old. Looking at temperature variations for anything less than a 1/2 million years at a time is called weather. Our climate has always gone through cycles up and down.

 

This is the absolute wrong way to determine which position is better. Someone who is wrong but a glib presenter of his position would come off better than someone who is right but socially awkward.

The correct way to do this is peer reviewed journals. It isn’t perfect but it’s better than your silly idea.

 

what an A you are. This poster just expressed a desire to see a debate of ideas, which is always awesome and in the case would be educational. The poster never suggested it was a competition to determine the fate of mankind. Further, peer reviews are only as good as the peers who participate…so the only silly thing posted here is your A hole response.

Try harder.

 

I hear what you're saying. But with the rate at which the sea level is rising and storms are getting worse, will the current new homes suffer the same fate as the older ones in 25-30 years? Shouldn't the goal be for hurricane resistance of the home to be effective for the typical life expectancy of the home? Otherwise the increases in homeowner insurance will continue.

 

Leftists 8.5 times more likely to be religious apocalyptics than religious apocalyptics are.