October 1, 2010 Berkeley, California

Professor Richard Muller, author of Physics for Future Presidents, spoke at a CITRIS sponsored event at the University of Calfornia Berkeley: Copenhagen Global Warming — The Current Status: The Science, the Scandal, the Prospects for a Treaty.

His discussion of the certainties and uncertainties of climate science was both entertaining and refreshingly candid.

Some key points:

• The IPCC report states that there is uncertainty about possible cloud cover increase due to increased carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. If cloud cover were to increase by two percent in the next fifty years we wouldn’t have global warming.
• Clean energy solutions in the U.S. that are too expensive to employ in China and other developing countries are rendered irrelevant by the projected scale of increased carbon emissions around the world.
• Muller mentioned several examples of attention grabbing overstatements and questionable scientific results. Data manipulation in one temperature chart which came to light in ‘climategate’ was clearly an example of bad science which wouldn’t pass peer review. Muller said he will be conducting his own completely transparent climate study.

see the full CITRIS video with slides

Report by James George