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65-404: Berkeley Earth founder Richard A. Muller told The Guardian ...we are bringing the spirit of science back to a subject that has become too argumentative and too contentious, ....we are an independent, non-political, non-partisan group. We will gather the data, do the analysis, present the results and make all of it available. There will be no spin, whatever we find. We are doing this because it

130-476: A director of its parent company, Northwest Explorations Inc. When Northwest Explorations Inc. was taken over in 1998 by CGX Resources Inc. to form the oil and gas exploration company CGX Energy Inc., McIntyre ceased being a director. McIntyre was a strategic advisor for CGX in 2000 through 2003. McIntyre says that during his career his skills in statistical analysis enabled him to analyse mineral prospecting data and out-bet his rivals. He also occasionally worked as

195-502: A focus on energy conservation and the use of natural gas as a bridging fuel. In an op-ed published in The New York Times on 28 July 2012, Muller announced further findings from the project. He said their analysis showed that average global land temperatures had increased by 2.5 °F (1.4 °C) in 250 years, with the increase in the last 50 years being 1.5 °F (0.8 °C), and it seemed likely that this increase

260-536: A government policy analyst, including a period at the federal Anti-Inflation Board. Prior to 2003 he was an officer or director of several small public mineral exploration companies. He retired from full-time work, but still sometimes engaged in mining consultancy. He is an active squash player and once won a gold medal in the World Masters Games in squash doubles. In April 2011, Trelawney Mining and Exploration Inc. of Toronto , Ontario announced

325-670: A nice, steep curve in the hope of palming something off on you." McIntyre & McKittrick's papers were cited by Senator Jim Inhofe and Representative Joe Barton to support their political criticisms of the MBH studies, and Representative Sherwood Boehlert requested the National Academy of Sciences in the United States to arrange an investigation. The outcome was the North Report , published in 2006, which endorsed

390-414: A press conference that the repeated Freedom of Information (FOI) requests made by Steve McIntyre and others could have amounted to a campaign of harassment, and the issue of how FOI laws should be applied in an academic context remained unresolved. In May 2010 BBC environment analyst Roger Harrabin wrote that McIntyre "arguably knows more about CRU science than anyone outside the unit — but none of

455-438: A strong medieval warm period, and said this paper raised pertinent questions. In an October 2004 Technology Review article, Muller discussed blog postings by McIntyre and McKitrick alleging that Mann, Bradley and Hughes did not do proper principal component analysis (PCA). 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

520-572: Is a founder and board member of Berkeley Earth , a non-profit organization focused on publishing independent analyses of the Earth's surface temperature records . In 1999, he received a distinguished teaching award from UC Berkeley. 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

585-656: 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." Richard A. Muller 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

650-749: 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? 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

715-489: Is co-founder and Chief Science Officer of Deep Isolation, a company offering deep borehole disposal of nuclear waste. Muller is Chief Executive Officer of Deep Fission, Inc, a company propose to license a deep borehole light water reactor design. Stephen McIntyre Stephen McIntyre (born c. 1947) is a Canadian mining exploration company director, a former minerals prospector and semi-retired mining consultant whose work has included statistical analysis . He

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780-467: Is necessary to prevent creating an artificial jump in year 2000". The adjustment reduced the average temperatures for the continental United States by about 0.15  °C during the years 2000-2006. Changes in other portions of the record did not exceed 0.03 °C; it made no discernible difference to the global mean anomalies. McIntyre later commented: My original interest in GISS adjustment procedures

845-597: Is premature although changes, especially in regional character, are likely as the atmospheric environment changes. In a report for the Centre for Policy Studies , Muller (and Elizabeth Muller of Berkeley Earth , his daughter) wrote that the benefits of shale gas , displacing harmful air pollution from coal, far outweigh the environmental costs of fracking . According to the Mullers, air pollution, mostly from coal burning, kills over three million people each year, primarily in

910-591: 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. 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

975-670: 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. On July 28, 2012, he stated, "Humans are almost entirely

1040-400: Is the founder and editor of Climate Audit , a blog which analyses and discusses climate data. He is a critic of the temperature record of the past 1000 years and the data quality of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies . He has made statistical critiques, with economist Ross McKitrick , of the hockey stick graph which shows that the increase in late 20th century global temperatures

1105-614: Is the most important project in the world today. Nothing else comes close. Berkeley Earth has been funded by unrestricted educational grants totaling (as of December 2013) about $ 1,394,500. Large donors include Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory , the Charles G. Koch Foundation , the Fund for Innovative Climate and Energy Research (FICER), and the William K. Bowes Jr. Foundation. The donors have no control over how Berkeley Earth conducts

1170-595: Is unprecedented in the past 1,000 years. McIntyre, a native of Ontario, attended the University of Toronto Schools , a college-preparatory school in Toronto, finishing first in the national high school mathematics competition of 1965. He went on to study mathematics at the University of Toronto and graduated with a Bachelor of Science degree in 1969. McIntyre then obtained a Commonwealth Scholarship to read philosophy, politics and economics (PPE) at Corpus Christi College, Oxford , graduating in 1971. Although he

1235-520: The IPCC Third Assessment Report section, which prominently displayed the hockey stick graph based on the 1999 reconstruction by Mann , Bradley and Hughes (MBH99). McIntyre began studying Mann's research, which had produced the graph, and met Ross McKitrick . McIntyre has remarked on how his suspicions of this graph were aroused: "In financial circles, we talk about a hockey stick curve when some investor presents you with

1300-739: The JASON advisory group, which brings together prominent scientists as consultants for the United States Department of Defense . He was named a MacArthur Foundation Fellow in 1982 . He also received the Alan T. Waterman Award in 1978 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

1365-517: The Soon and Baliunas controversy led to the paper being dismissed as defective and resignations of the journal's editors, Muller wrote in his 17 December 2003 Technology Review column that, while poor papers were not uncommon, Soon and Baliunas had attracted unusual attention for their portrayal of a prominent Medieval Warm Period in contrast to the Mann , Bradley and Hughes (MBH99) reconstruction of

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1430-504: The University of East Anglia , said: "I look forward to reading the finalised paper once it has been reviewed and published. These initial findings are very encouraging and echo our own results and our conclusion that the impact of urban heat islands on the overall global temperature is minimal." Michael Mann , director of the Earth System Science Center at Pennsylvania State University , commented that "...they get

1495-554: 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". In his April 2002 column on the anthrax attacks , Muller claimed "I think it likely that the anthrax terrorists were working for Osama bin Laden, and intended to murder thousands of people." After

1560-736: The temperature record of the past 1000 years . This reconstruction, nicknamed the hockey stick graph , had featured prominently in the IPCC Third Assessment Report , and differed significantly from the schematic diagram shown in the IPCC First Assessment Report . Muller gave his views on the subsequent controversy. He noted the October 2003 paper by Stephen McIntyre and Ross McKitrick published in Energy and Environment which alleged that correction of errors in MBH99 would show

1625-431: The urban heat island effect, poor station quality, data selection and data adjustment. In the fifth paper which they now made public, they fitted the shape of the record to various forcings including volcanoes, solar activity and sunspots. They found that the shape best matched the curve of the calculated greenhouse effect from human-caused greenhouse gas emissions. Muller said he still found "that much, if not most, of what

1690-404: The 1950s and suggesting that global warming is the cause. Atmospheric scientists Paul Markowski , Harold E. Brooks , et al., replied that Muller made substantial methodological flaws and was ignorant of long established findings in severe storms meteorology. They argue that there is no discernible decrease in significant tornado activity and that attribution of tornadic activity to global warming

1755-512: The Bronx High School of Science . 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 performing 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

1820-483: The CRU e-mails stated: "Some e-mails said McIntyre's attempts to get original data from scientists are frivolous and meant more for harassment than doing good science. There are allegations that he would distort and misuse data given to him. McIntyre disagreed with how he is portrayed. 'Everything that I've done in this, I've done in good faith,' he said." The independent Science Assessment Panel's chair, Lord Oxburgh , said at

1885-603: The CRU inquiries has contacted him for input." In March McIntyre had submitted evidence to the Independent Climate Change Email Review (chaired by Sir Muir Russell ), and points he raised were discussed in the Review report published on 7 July 2010. New Statesman named McIntyre as 32nd of its "50 People Who Matter 2010", citing his role in the email controversy. It said "The influence might not be positive, but there's no doubt he has shaped

1950-508: The MBH studies with a few reservations. The principal component analysis method criticised by McIntyre & McKittrick had a small tendency to bias results so was not recommended, but it had little influence on the final reconstructions, and other methods produced similar results. McIntyre's blog has as a recurrent topic the struggle to obtain underlying data from peer reviewed papers. McIntyre has stated that he started Climate Audit so that he could defend himself against attacks being made at

2015-986: The PCA methodology had little effect on the shape of the graph. By 2006 there was general acceptance of the conclusion of the graph that recent warming was unprecedented in 1,000 years. 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

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2080-474: The RealClimate website. On 2 February McIntyre set up his Climate Audit blog, having found difficulties with posting comments on the climate2003.com layout. Climate Audit was co-winner of a 2007 Weblog Award for "Best Science Blog", receiving 20,000 votes in the online poll. Stephen McIntyre has been highlighted by the press, including The Wall Street Journal . In 2007, McIntyre started auditing

2145-600: The appointment of McIntyre to their board of directors and then later to chairman in June 2011. In September 2011, McIntyre was appointed to the board of directors of Augen Gold Corp., which was shortly acquired by Trelawney Mining and Exploration Inc. in November 2011. In October 2011, McIntyre was appointed to the board of directors of Southeast Asia Mining Corp. and later resigned in May 2012. Trelawney Mining and Exploration Inc.

2210-426: The broad mix of people involved especially those who have previous experience in handling large data sets gives me greater confidence in the result being closer to a bona fide ground truth than anything we've seen yet. When the initial results were released, and found to support the existing consensus, the study was widely decried by deniers. Watts spoke to The New York Times , which wrote: "Mr. Watts ... contended that

2275-535: The cause." Along with Carl Pennypacker , Muller started The Berkeley Real Time Supernova Search, which became The Berkeley Automated Supernova Search. 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 . In the 1980s, Muller joined

2340-474: The climatology blog RealClimate . An earlier website, Climate2003, provided additional information for papers co-written by McIntyre and Ross McKitrick, including raw data and source code, and comments by McIntyre. On 26 October 2004 McIntyre commented on climate2003.com, "Maybe I'll start blogging some odds and ends that I'm working on. I'm going to post up some more observations on some of the blog criticisms." On 1 December Mann and nine other scientists launched

2405-405: The code is released and released in a language that people can use freely." Stephen McIntyre , editor of Climate Audit , a climate-skeptics blog , said that "the team deserves credit for going back to the primary data and doing the work" and even though he had not had an opportunity to read the papers in detail, he questioned the analyses of urban heating and weather station quality. By contrast,

2470-462: The course of their programming. According to any reasonable audit standards, one would conclude that the GISS software had failed this particular test. While GISS can (and has) patched the particular error that I reported to them, their patching hardly proves the merit of the GISS (and USHCN) adjustment procedures. These need to be carefully examined. Colby Cosh, writing for Maclean's magazine, believes McIntyre's criticisms of climate science are at

2535-431: The developing world. The Mullers state that "Environmentalists who oppose the development of shale gas and fracking are making a tragic mistake." Muller is President and Chief Scientist of Muller & Associates, an international consulting group specializing in energy -related issues. Muller is Chief Technology Officer of SoliDDD Corp., which uses advanced optical design methods to deliver improved 3D images. Muller

2600-486: 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

2665-599: 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. On July 28, 2012, he stated, "[G]lobal warming [is] real .... Humans are almost entirely the cause." Foreign Policy named Muller one of its 2012 FP Top 100 Global Thinkers "for changing their minds". In November 2013 Muller wrote an op-ed in The New York Times arguing that strong to violent tornado activity decreased since

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2730-459: The freely available data ...show... that it was very very unlikely that the results would change". Since the publication of its papers in 2013, Berkeley Earth has broadened its scope. Berkeley Earth has three program areas of work: 1) further scientific investigations on the nature of climate change and extreme weather events, 2) an education and communications program, and 3) evaluation of mitigation efforts in developed and developing economies, with

2795-623: 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. Muller, who grew up in the South Bronx , attended public schools in New York City, including PS 65 (on 141st St), Junior High School 22 (on 167th St), and

2860-601: The heart of the Climatic Research Unit email controversy in November–December 2009. McIntyre is mentioned over 100 times in the hacked Climatic Research Unit (CRU) emails. In the emails, one climate researcher dismisses him as a "bozo". Others speculate over his funding, and argue about whether to ignore or counterattack him, although, according to Cosh, some unnamed scientists acknowledge that his criticisms have merit. The Associated Press analysis of

2925-483: The hockey stick. Misinformation can do real harm, because it distorts predictions." In an article on the RealClimate blog on various myths about the graph, Mann mentioned Muller's article as parroting the claims of McIntyre and McKitrick. Muller's opinion piece in the reputable MIT journal helped to spread the idea that the hockey stick shape was a statistical artifact, but several peer reviewed studies showed that

2990-474: The issues addressed by the Berkeley Earth group study, expressed full confidence in the team's methods: I'm prepared to accept whatever result they produce, even if it proves my premise wrong. ... [T]he method isn't the madness that we've seen from NOAA, NCDC, GISS, and CRU, and, there aren't any monetary strings attached to the result that I can tell. ... That lack of strings attached to funding, plus

3055-525: The land surface warmed by 0.91±0.05 °C, and their results mirror those obtained from earlier studies carried out by the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), the Hadley Centre , NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) Surface Temperature Analysis, and the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia . The study also found that the urban heat island effect and poor station quality did not bias

3120-552: The most highly regarded courses at Berkeley. In December 2009, Muller officially retired from teaching the course, although he still occasionally gives guest lectures. In 2015 a team including Muller received the Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics for the Supernova Cosmology Project . For several years, he was a monthly columnist with MIT 's Technology Review . In his August 2003 column on

3185-501: The oceans, nor try to assess how much of the observed warming is due to human action. The Berkeley Earth team also released the preliminary findings to the public on October 20, 2011, in order to promote additional scrutiny. The data sets and programs used to analyze the information, and the papers undergoing peer review were also made available to the public. The Berkeley Earth study addressed scientific concerns raised by skeptics including urban heat island effect, poor station quality, and

3250-438: The problem and comes up with the same answer, and that builds confidence that pre-existing estimates are in the right ballpark. There is very substantial value in having multiple groups looking at the same problem in different ways." The ice core research scientist Eric Steig wrote at RealClimate.org that it was unsurprising that Berkeley Earth's results matched previous results so well: "Any of various simple statistical analyses of

3315-447: 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

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3380-535: The rate of warming were correct. I'm now going a step further: Humans are almost entirely the cause. He said that their findings were stronger than those shown in the IPCC Fourth Assessment Report . Their analysis, set out in five scientific papers now being subjected to scrutiny by others, had used statistical methods which Robert Rohde had developed and had paid particular attention to overcoming issues that skeptics had questioned, including

3445-472: The research or what they publish. The team's preliminary findings, data sets and programs were published beginning in December 2012. The study addressed scientific concerns including the urban heat island effect, poor station quality, and the risk of data selection bias . The Berkeley Earth group concluded that the warming trend is real, that over the past 50 years (between the decades of the 1950s and 2000s)

3510-419: The result and standard statistical techniques were used to remove outliers . The methodology also avoids traditional procedures that require long, continuous data segments, thus accommodating short sequences, such as those provided by temporary weather stations. This innovation allowed the group to compile an earlier record than its predecessors, starting from 1800, but with a high degree of uncertainty because at

3575-542: The results obtained from these earlier studies. Berkeley Earth team members include: Former team members Board of Directors After completing the analysis of the full land temperature data set, consisting of more than 1.6 billion temperature measurements dating back to the 1800s from 15 sources around the world, and originating from more than 39,000 temperature stations worldwide, the group submitted four papers for peer-review and publication in scientific journals. The Berkeley Earth study did not assess temperature changes in

3640-432: The risk of data selection bias. The team's initial conclusions are the following: The Berkeley Earth analysis uses a new methodology and was tested against much of the same data as NOAA and NASA. The group uses an algorithm that attaches an automatic weighting to every data point, according to its consistency with comparable readings. The team claims this approach allows the inclusion of outlandish readings without distorting

3705-640: The same result that everyone else has gotten," and "that said, I think it's at least useful to see that even a critic like Muller, when he takes an honest look, finds that climate science is robust." Peter Thorne, from the Cooperative Institute for Climate and Satellites in North Carolina and chair of the International Surface Temperature Initiative, said: "This takes a very distinct approach to

3770-430: The study was well received by Muller's peers in climate science research. James Hansen , a leading climate scientist and head of NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies commented that he had not yet read the research papers but was glad Muller was looking at the issue. He said "It should help inform those who have honest skepticism about global warming." Phil Jones the director of the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) at

3835-451: The study's methodology was flawed because it examined data over 60 years instead of the 30-year-one that was the basis for his research and some other peer-reviewed studies. He also noted that the report had not yet been peer-reviewed and cited spelling errors as proof of sloppiness." Steven Mosher, a co-author of a book critical of climate scientists, also disapproved saying that the study still lacked transparency. He said: "I'm not happy until

3900-584: The time there were only two weather stations in America, just a few in Europe and one in Asia. Given project leader Muller's well-publicized concerns regarding the quality of climate change research, other critics anticipated that the Berkeley Earth study would be a vindication of their stance. For example, when the study team was announced, Anthony Watts , a climate change denialist blogger who popularized several of

3965-565: The various corrections made to temperature records, in particular those relating to the urban heat island effect. He discovered a discontinuity in some U.S. records in the Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) dataset starting in January 2000. He emailed GISS advising them of the problem and within a couple of days GISS issued a new, corrected set of data and thanked McIntyre for "bringing to our attention that such an adjustment

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4030-569: Was acquired by Iamgold Corporation in June 2012. In 2002, McIntyre became interested in climate science after a leaflet from the Canadian government warning of the dangers of global warming was delivered to his residence. McIntyre states that he noticed discrepancies in climate science papers that reminded him of the false prospectus that had duped investors involved in the Bre-X gold mining scandal. The Canadian government pamphlets were based on

4095-411: Was entirely due to human caused greenhouse gas emissions . His opening paragraph stated: 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

4160-445: Was not an abstract interest, but a specific interest in whether GISS adjustment procedures were equal to the challenge of "fixing" bad data. If one views the above assessment as a type of limited software audit (limited by lack of access to source code and operating manuals), one can say firmly that the GISS software had not only failed to pick up and correct fictitious steps of up to 1 deg C, but that GISS actually introduced this error in

4225-528: Was offered a graduate scholarship, McIntyre decided not to pursue studies in mathematical economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology . McIntyre started work for Noranda and worked for 30 years in the mineral business, the last part of these in the hard-rock mineral exploration as an officer or director of several public mineral exploration companies. He was the president and founder of Northwest Exploration Company Limited and

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