PR disaster?
He who lives by the media spin cycle dies by the media spin cycle. Just over a week ago, in an article in the Wall Street Journal, Richard Muller of BEST claimed that you couldn’t possibly be sceptical of global warming alarmism any more (see here), thanks to his temperature data set showing that the planet had indeed warmed – knock me down with a feather.
But now, in a new interview, he’s back-pedalling fast, as Tom Nelson reports:
Around the 2:45 mark of Part 1, referring to his recent Wall Street Journal article, Muller says “I never said you shouldn’t be a skeptic. I never said that.”
From his article:
Without good answers to all these complaints, global-warming skepticism seems sensible. But now let me explain why you should not be a skeptic, at least not any longer.
Just before the 5-minute mark, Muller is asked if he’s in the Al Gore camp. Muller: “Al Gore camp? That’s ridiculous…what I point out is that most of what appears in An Inconvenient Truth is absolutely either wrong, exaggerated, or misleading.”
At the 8:45 mark, he says scientists will “endorse Al Gore, even though they know what he’s saying is exaggerated and misleading. He’ll talk about polar bears dying even though we know they’re not dying…”.
In Part 2, he’s asked about Eugene Robinson’s Washington Post piece.
[Q] It says “What Dr Muller says proves that the skeptics are wrong and they’ve got to get on the cap and trade train”.
Muller: “That’s ridiculous. I mean, some people say I proved that there was no ClimateGate. No. NO! The ClimateGate thing was a scandal. It’s terrible what they did. It’s shameful the way they hid the data.”
Muller is trying very hard to have a foot in both camps, but it’s getting harder and harder to maintain.
Australian Climate Madness 
Doesn’t sound like anything new with Muller. In earlier interviews he had trouble making up his mind.. and this guy was in charge of an independent review of the temperature record; make of that what you will.
Remember when the ABC and The Age were drooling over a survey which they thought said only 5% of people were skeptics. They had tightened their criteria to claim that skeptics were an “endangered species”. With Muller however, they have expanded their criteria to as to classify him as a former skeptic.
Easy fix. He just needs a “communications director”.
Doesn’t he have Bob Ward on speed dial?
Is Muller actually a full on believer in AGW or does he just believe that in his temperature graph. I just don’t know where this guy is coming from. I would think most skeptics also accept the graph and that it is possible that greenhouse gases may cause some warming.But that is a far cry from what the alarmists are trying on ie solely attributing any warming or drought or flood or cyclone or sea level rise or anything else they can think up, to carbon dioxide.
Andrew Bolt & Steve Price spoke with Professor Muller on 1 November and here’s what he had to say here at 31:27 on MTR :
Price: ‘How do you think you’d feel if you were living in Australia where we’re going to introduce a carbon tax to bring the temperature down?”
Muller: “… according to all the projections, virtually all of the global warming of the future is going to come from China and India and the developing world … not the US, not Australia. Anything you do in Australia, if it’s not something China will later emulate, then it’s doing no good …”
Muller- a proponent of Australia’s carbon dioxide tax … definitely not!