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When we began our study, we felt that skeptics had raised legitimate issues, and we didn't know what we'd find. Our results turned out to be close to those published by prior groups. We think that means that those groups had truly been very careful in their work, despite their inability to convince some skeptics of that. They managed to avoid bias in their data selection, homogenization and other corrections.
When we began our study, we felt that skeptics had raised legitimate issues, and we didn't know what we'd find. Our results turned out to be close to those published by prior groups. We think that means that those groups had truly been very careful in their work, despite their inability to convince some skeptics of that. They managed to avoid bias in their data selection, homogenization and other corrections.
<p>Global warming is real. Perhaps our results will help cool this portion of the climate debate. How much of the warming is due to humans and what will be the likely effects? We made no independent assessment of that.<ref>{{cite news|url=http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204422404576594872796327348.html|title=The Case Against Global-Warming Skepticism|publisher=Wall Street Journal|date=October 11, 2011}}</ref></p>
<p>Global warming is real. Perhaps our results will help cool this portion of the climate debate. How much of the warming is due to humans and what will be the likely effects? We made no independent assessment of that.<ref>{{cite news|url=http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204422404576594872796327348.html|title=The Case Against Global-Warming Skepticism|publisher=[[Wall Street Journal]]|date=October 11, 2011}}</ref></p>
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Revision as of 19:35, 1 August 2012

For other people named Richard Müller, see Richard Müller (disambiguation).

Richard A. Muller (born January 6, 1944) is an American professor of physics at the University of California, Berkeley. He is also a faculty senior scientist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.

Career

Muller obtained an A.B. degree at Columbia University (New York) and a Ph.D. degree in physics from University of California, Berkeley. Muller began his career as a graduate student under Nobel laureate Luis Alvarez doing particle physics experiments and working with bubble chambers. During his early years he also helped to co-create accelerator mass spectrometry and made some of the first measurements of anisotropy in the cosmic microwave background.

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.

In March 2011, he testified to the U.S. House Science, Space and Technology Committee that preliminary data confirmed an overall global warming trend.[1] On July 28, 2012, he stated, "Humans are almost entirely the cause."[2]

Along with Carl Pennypacker,[3] Muller started The Berkeley Real Time Supernova Search,[4] which became The Berkeley Automated Supernova Search.[5] It then became the Supernova Cosmology Project, which discovered the accelerating expansion of the universe, for which Muller's graduate student, Saul Perlmutter, shared the 2011 Nobel Prize in Physics.

Positions and recognition

Muller was a member of the JASON Defense Advisory Group, which brings together prominent scientists as consultants for the United States Department of Defense.

Muller explaining antimatter

He was named a MacArthur Foundation Fellow in 1982. He also received the Alan T. Waterman Award from the National Science Foundation "for highly original and innovative research which has led to important discoveries and inventions in diverse areas of physics, including astrophysics, radioisotope dating, and optics."

Muller is a founder and the current chairperson of the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature ("BEST") project, which intends to provide an independent analysis of the Earth's surface temperature records.

In 1999, he received a distinguished teaching award from UC Berkeley.[6] His "Physics for Future Presidents" series of lectures, in which Muller teaches a synopsis of modern qualitative (i.e. without resorting to complicated math) physics, has been released publicly on YouTube by UC Berkeley and has been published in book form. It has been one of the most highly regarded courses at Berkeley. In December 2009, Muller officially retired from teaching the course, although he still occasionally gives guest lectures.

MIT Technology Review

For several years, he was a monthly columnist with MIT's Technology Review. In his August 2003 column on the polygraph machine used in lie detection examinations, Muller asserted that "the polygraph procedure has an accuracy between 80 and 95 percent."[7] The National Academy of Sciences found that there is "little basis for the expectation that a polygraph test could have extremely high accuracy."[8]

Hockey stick graph controversy

In a 2004 Technology Review article,[9] Muller supported the findings of Stephen McIntyre and Ross McKitrick in which they criticized the research, led by Michael E. Mann, which produced the so-called "hockey stick graph" of global temperatures over the past millennium, on the grounds that it did not do proper principal component analysis (PCA).[10] In the article, Richard Muller stated:

McIntyre and McKitrick obtained part of the program that Mann used, and they found serious problems. Not only does the program not do conventional PCA, but it handles data normalization in a way that can only be described as mistaken.

Now comes the real shocker. This improper normalization procedure tends to emphasize any data that do have the hockey stick shape, and to suppress all data that do not. To demonstrate this effect, McIntyre and McKitrick created some meaningless test data that had, on average, no trends. This method of generating random data is called "Monte Carlo" analysis, after the famous casino, and it is widely used in statistical analysis to test procedures. When McIntyre and McKitrick fed these random data into the Mann procedure, out popped a hockey stick shape!

That discovery hit me like a bombshell, and I suspect it is having the same effect on many others. Suddenly the hockey stick, the poster-child of the global warming community, turns out to be an artifact of poor mathematics. How could it happen?[9]

He went on to state "If you are concerned about global warming (as I am) and think that human-created carbon dioxide may contribute (as I do), then you still should agree that we are much better off having broken the hockey stick. Misinformation can do real harm, because it distorts predictions." Muller's statements were widely quoted on skeptical blogs, and his status as a believer in global warming made his criticism of the "hockey stick" particularly damaging. In response, Mann criticized Muller on his blog RealClimate.[11] Marcel Crok, a reporter for the Dutch popular science magazine Natuurwetenschap & Techniek, later did a story on the incident.[12]

In October 2011, Muller wrote in an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal, concerning his work with the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature project:

When we began our study, we felt that skeptics had raised legitimate issues, and we didn't know what we'd find. Our results turned out to be close to those published by prior groups. We think that means that those groups had truly been very careful in their work, despite their inability to convince some skeptics of that. They managed to avoid bias in their data selection, homogenization and other corrections.

Global warming is real. Perhaps our results will help cool this portion of the climate debate. How much of the warming is due to humans and what will be the likely effects? We made no independent assessment of that.[13]

While the BEST project did not delve into the proxy data sets used in the "hockey stick", the importance of the work regarding the modern temperature record is explained on the BEST web site:

Existing data used to show global warming have met with much criticism. The Berkeley Earth project attempts to resolve current criticism of the former temperature analyses by making available an open record to enable rapid response to further criticism and suggestions. Our results include our best estimate for the global temperature change and our estimates of the uncertainties in the record.[14]

On July 28, 2012, he stated, "[G]lobal warming [is] real .... Humans are almost entirely the cause."[15]

Other work

Muller is President and Chief Scientist of Muller & Associates, an international consulting group specializing in energy-related issues.[16]

Muller is Chief Technology Officer of SoliDDD Corp., which uses the fundamental equations of physics and optics, together with advanced optical design methods, to deliver improved realistic 3D images. [17]

Muller demos a Van de Graaff generator

Published books

  • Nemesis: The Death Star (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1988) ISBN 0-7493-0465-0
  • The Three Big Bangs: Comet Crashes, Exploding Stars, and the Creation of the Universe (with coauthor Phil Dauber, Addison-Wesley 1996) ISBN 0-201-15495-1
  • Ice Ages and Astronomical Causes: data, spectral analysis, and mechanisms (with coauthor Gordon MacDonald, 2002) ISBN 3-540-43779-7
  • The Sins of Jesus (a historical novel, Auravision Publishing 1999) ISBN 0-9672765-1-9
  • Physics for Future Presidents (Custom Publishing, 2006) ISBN 1-4266-2459-X free excerpts)
  • The Instant Physicist: An Illustrated Guide (W.W. Norton 2010) ISBN 978-0-393-07826-8

References

  1. ^ Lauren Morello, "Study of Temperature Data Confirms Warming Trend, Scientist Tells House Panel", The New York Times, March 31, 2011.
  2. ^ "The conversion of a climate change skeptic" 30.July.2012 New York Times Op-Ed by Richard A. Muller
  3. ^ Goldhaber, Gerson (February 20, 2008). The Acceleration of the Expansion of the Universe: A Brief Early History of the Supernova Cosmology Project (SCP). Dark Matter 2008. Marina del Rey, California. pp. 53–72.
  4. ^ Perlmutter, Saul; Crawford, Frank S.; Muller, Richard A.; Sasseen, Timothy P.; Pennypacker, Carlton R.; Smith, Craig K.; Treffers, R.; Williams, R. (July 13–24, 1987). "The Status of Berkeley's Realtime Supernova Search". In Robinson, L.B. (ed.). Instrumentation for Ground-Based Optical Astronomy, Present and Future. The Ninth Santa Cruz Summer Workshop in Astronomy and Astrophysics. Lick Observatory: Springer-Verlag. p. 674. Bibcode:1988igbo.conf..674P. ISBN 0-387-96730-3. {{cite conference}}: |access-date= requires |url= (help); Check date values in: |date= (help); Unknown parameter |booktitle= ignored (|book-title= suggested) (help)
  5. ^ Perlmutter, Saul; Muller, Richard A.; Newberg, Heidi J. M.; Pennypacker, Carlton R.; Sasseen, Timothy P.; Smith, Craig K. (June 22–24, 1991). "A doubly robotic telescope - The Berkeley Automated Supernova Search". Robotic telescopes in the 1990s. 103rd Annual Meeting of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific. University of Wyoming, Laramie. pp. 67–71. Bibcode:1992ASPC...34...67P. {{cite conference}}: Check date values in: |date= (help); Unknown parameter |booktitle= ignored (|book-title= suggested) (help)
  6. ^ Steve Tollefson (1999-04-14). "Distinguished Teaching Awards - Richard Muller". The Berkeleyan. UC Berkeley Office of Public Affairs. Retrieved 2011-03-01.
  7. ^ "When Lie Detectors Lie or Don't," Technology Review, August 2003
  8. ^ “The Polygraph and Lie Detection”, National Academy of Sciences, 2003
  9. ^ a b Muller, Richard (October 15, 2004). "Global Warming Bombshell". Technology Review. Retrieved March 17, 2012.
  10. ^ Montford, Andrew, The Hockey Stick Illusion, Stacey International, 2010, pp. 177-178
  11. ^ Mann, Michael E., "Myth vs fact regarding the 'Hockey Stick', RealClimate (blog), 4 December 2004.
  12. ^ Crok, Marcel, "Protocol based on flawed statistics", Natuurwetenschap & Techniek, 2005
  13. ^ "The Case Against Global-Warming Skepticism". Wall Street Journal. October 11, 2011.
  14. ^ "Why is the work being done by Berkeley Earth important?". Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature. 2011. Retrieved March 17, 2012.
  15. ^ Muller, Richard (July 30, 2012). "The conversion of a climate change skeptic". New York Times. {{cite news}}: Unknown parameter |middle= ignored (help)
  16. ^ Muller & Associates home page
  17. ^ SoliDDD Corp. home page

External links

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