Prominent climate change denier now admits he was wrong (+video)

Muller’s conclusions, however, did not sway the most ardent climate contrarians, like Marc Morano, a former producer for Rush Limbaugh and former communications director for the Republicans on the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee.

“Muller 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,” Morano said in an email.

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

“What has caused the gradual but systematic rise of 2½ degrees?” Muller writes. “We 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.”

Muller asserted that his findings were “stronger” than those of the UN’s intergovernmental panel. But neither Berkeley’s research from last year nor the new findings on causality have been published in peer-reviewed journals, which has raised criticism and concerns among climatologists and contrarians alike.

Benjamin D. Santer, a climate researcher at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and a lead author of the 1995 UN climate report, said he welcomed the involvement of another research group into “detection and attribution” of climate change and its causes. But he said he found it troubling that Muller claimed such definitive results without his work undergoing peer-review.

“If 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?” Santer said. “Publish the science and report on it after it’s done.”

He added: “I think you can do great harm to the broader debate. Imagine this scenario: that he makes these great claims and the papers arent published? This [op-ed] is in the spirit of publicity, not the spirit of science.”

Elizabeth Muller, co-founder and executive director of the Berkeley project and Richard Muller’s daughter, said the papers had been peer-reviewed, but not yet published. But because of the long lead-up to publication, she said, the Berkeley team decided to place its papers online, in part to solicit comment from other scientists. The papers were posted on the BerkeleyEarth.org website on Sunday.

“I 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,” Elizabeth Muller wrote in an email. “We 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.”

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