Global Warming: Still Not A Hoax! Richard Muller is a man
climate scientists love to hate. Among other things, the
Berkeley physicist has questioned the professional integrity of
people like Penn State's Michael Mann, one of the creators of
the so-called "Hockey Stick" graph showing that temperatures
shot up dramatically and unprecedentedly in the 20th century.
Mann has been cleared of such accusations many times over; so
have the main actors in the so-called "Climategate" affair,
another of Muller's targets. More broadly, though, Muller has
also questioned the very fact of global warming itself. Like
other doubters, he thought the appearance of warming might come
partly from the fact that weather stations are often located in
or near cities, where waste heat from buildings and cars, plus
heat absorbed and re-emitted from roads and rooftops can cause
artificially high temperature in a small area (it's known as the
"urban heat island effect"). In principle, that could certainly
be a problem: climate scientists