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Richard A. Muller

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Richard A. Muller (born January 6, 1944) is a noted 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]

The 2011 Nobel laureate Saul Perlmutter was a graduate student under Muller at Berkeley.

Positions and recognition

Muller is 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 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.[2] 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." The National Academy of Sciences found that there is "little basis for the expectation that a polygraph test could have extremely high accuracy."[3]

Global Warming Skepticism

In a 2004 Technology Review article,[4] 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 [5] In response, Mann criticized Muller on his blog RealClimate.[6] Marcel Crok, a reporter for the Dutch popular science magazine Natuurwetenschap & Techniek, later did a story on the incident.[7]

In October 2011, Muller recanted his global warming skepticism in an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal, writing the following:

"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."[8]

Despite the fact that Muller's research was funded by the billionaire brothers, Charles and David Koch of Koch Industries, whose business stands to benefit from continued global warming skepticism (i.e., if people continue their fossil fuel use unabated by concerns over global warming), Muller's detailed research of some 1.6 billion temperature records from more than 39,000 temperature-reporting stations worldwide led him to conclude that the "hockey stick graph" of global temperatures that he had once criticized was accurate after all.[9][10]

Soon after this announcement was published, Tom Blumer of Newsbusters.org pointed out that Muller admitted believing[clarification needed] in man-made global warming at least as far back as the early 1980s when he was interviewed in 2008: [11] [12]

"Do you consider yourself an environmentalist?

Oh yes. [Laughs.] In fact, back in the early '80s, I resigned from the Sierra Club over the issue of global warming. At that time, they were opposing nuclear power. What I wrote them in my letter of resignation was that, if you oppose nuclear power, the U.S. will become much more heavily dependent on fossil fuels, and that this is a pollutant to the atmosphere that is very likely to lead to global warming."

Other work

Muller is President and Chief Scientist of Muller & Associates, an international consulting group specializing in energy-related issues.[13]

Muller is married to architect Rosemary Muller.

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 978-0393078268

References

  1. ^ Lauren Morello, "Study of Temperature Data Confirms Warming Trend, Scientist Tells House Panel", The New York Times, March 31, 2011.
  2. ^ Steve Tollefson (1999-04-14). "Distinguished Teaching Awards - Richard Muller". The Berkeleyan. UC Berkeley Office of Public Affairs. Retrieved 2011-03-01.
  3. ^ “The Polygraph and Lie Detection”, National Academy of Sciences, 2003
  4. ^ http://www.technologyreview.com/energy/13830/
  5. ^ Montford, Andrew, The Hockey Stick Illusion, Stacey International, 2010, pp. 177-178; Muller, Richard A., "Global warming bombshell", Technology Review, 15 October 2004
  6. ^ Mann, Michael E., "Myth vs fact regarding the 'Hockey Stick', RealClimate (blog), 4 December 2004.
  7. ^ Crok, Marcel, "Protocol based on flawed statistics", Natuurwetenschap & Techniek, 2005
  8. ^ http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204422404576594872796327348.html
  9. ^ http://www.calacademy.org/sciencetoday/global-warming-confirmation
  10. ^ http://arstechnica.com/science/news/2011/10/climate-skeptics-perform-independent-analysis-finally-convinced-earth-is-getting-warmer.ars
  11. ^ Holly Richmond "Author and physicist Richard A. Muller chats with Grist about getting science back in the White House"
  12. ^ Tom Blumer "WaPo Punked by Berkeley Warmist Posing as Skeptic"
  13. ^ Muller & Associates home page

External links

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