Forgive me IPCC, for I have sinned...
...Except, like many a modern faith healer’s performance, there’s something dodgy about this widespread interpretation. For starters, Muller was hardly what you would call a climate-change sceptic. By and large, he has been very accepting of the IPCC’s view of the problem of climate change. His claim to being a sceptic seems to relate to his acceptance that the famous ‘hockey stick’ graph, which was the centrepiece of the IPCC’s 2001 report and suggested that current temperatures are unprecedented, was simply the product of some sloppy science.

But even then, Muller still put the case for the ‘consensus’ view. In 2004, he wrote: ‘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.’ Another article from 2006 quotes Muller as saying that the odds that humans are to blame for global warming are ‘two in three’....

...It’s worth noting in passing that Muller’s work has not been published in a peer-reviewed journal and that one reviewer, the hockey-stick critic Ross McKitrick who Muller has agreed with in the past, has now published the critical reviews of Muller’s work he provided for the Journal of Geophysical Research. Sadly, Muller seems to have ignored McKitrick’s criticisms. (For more on this, see Andrew Orlowski’s latest article in the Register.) Hypocritically, climate-change alarmists – who are normally utterly dismissive of anything that has not been published in a peer-reviewed journal – are only too happy to proclaim Muller’s results.

Moreover, another piece of research released in the past few days, led by meteorologist Anthony Watts, claims that the corrupting of those weather stations by urbanisation has gone much further than Muller and others have accounted for. Essentially, Watts – with the support of many volunteers – went out to check America’s weather stations and reclassify them according to the degree to which changes in their surroundings might affect their readings. Watts and his colleagues conclude that when these effects are taken into account, the rise in US temperatures has been only about half that suggested by the previous datasets...