Richard Muller on "Hide the Decline"

Japan: See shocking interactive before/after pictures of the devastation in Japan...

Richard Muller is a well-known physics professor at Berkeley and a key figure behind the B.E.S.T. database - the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature, an emerging possibly superior surface record that could supersede NOAA, GISS, and HadCRUT sometime in the future.

Now, some skeptics have claimed that Richard Muller isn't really a skeptic, and so on. I don't really care. Videos similar to this one make me believe that he is an honest scientist who can see a clear bug or deception if there exists one:



In recent three days, I spent lots of time in an online discussion under an interview with your humble correspondent. The most frequent opposing side was another LM guy, namely Mr Ladislav Metelka, the current boss of the Czech branch of the IPCC and a top Czech climate alarmist - in some sense, the only Czech alarmist among professional climatologists.




He still continues to insist that the hockey stick papers were right. Unlike his Facebook friend called Mr Aleš Raidl (whose FB account had to be deleted) who "works" at my Alma Mater in Prague and suffers from a serious psychiatric disorder (Mr Aleš Raidl has posted lots of nasty anonymous comments under numerous nicknames), Mr Metelka is comparably polite to your humble correspondent. So the discussion was tense but tolerable.

However, that can't change the fact that the exchange has strongly suggested that our national IPCC boss - who has only been judged by non-expert government officials since he left the college - has simply no clue about maths, physics, or climatology.

In the context of the hockey stick, he would deny that a linear combination of proxies determines which proxies influence the final result strongly and which of them influence it weakly; he would deny every step of a very trivial explanation of the hockey stick fallacies. Instead, he would produce lots of gibberish that contained jargon but that didn't make any sense.

When he was defending climate models, he argued that there was nothing to adjust about them because there is nothing to adjust about Newton's laws, conservation laws, and the laws of thermodynamics. When I was explaining him dozens of other processes, branches of physics, assumptions, and equations that are essential for the climate models and that don't belong to the three categories he mentioned, and that have lots of uncertainties, he would continue to deny that anything besides Newton's laws etc. is relevant for the climate models.

After hours, he would realize that his position was indefensible and he suddenly decided that he had never argued that the climate models only depended on those three things - even though this had been his main argument for the robustness of climate models for several hours.

And this pattern got repeated in every partial discussion. Mr Metelka had the remarkable ability to make every sentence incorrect even if the sentence had nothing to do with the bigger picture he clearly wanted to defend. He would write wrong numbers; claimed that some papers used a method they didn't use, and so on, and so on. The Internet makes it very easy to post links to papers etc. that instantly prove him wrong, and he more or less silently accepted that he was wrong about every single controversial point of our exchange.

A similarly uncontrollable gibberish that he posted in that discussion has clearly been enough for him to impress the non-expert bureaucrats at the environment ministry but when he encounters someone "in the know", it just looks way too bad.

Via Mark Duchamp

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Bonus: Richard Müller in Slovakia

I forgot to mention another positive fact about Richard Müller: he is one of the 3 most successful male Slovak singers in the last 30 years.



This is his song "On the Staircase": on the stairs, he's able to use the sounds to figure out what kind of people we are: English version. If you like it, try other songs by Richard Müller. ;-)

There are many songs in Czech, too. Two of his songs show Richard Müller's special skills in atmospheric sciences: "Snow" (in Czech) and "Low Pressure/Depression/Cyclone" (in Slovak).

Oh, in fact, he even recorded the English version: "The Pressure Is Low". ;-)

Another recommended Czech song is "Happiness is a beautiful thing" that you can't buy for money - but many other things remain that can be bought for the money, he explains. ;-)