Lots of interesting Muller/BEST stuff here; new Muller quote: "90 per cent of what's said about climate change is nonsense"

The BEST is yet to come - Richard Muller on the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature Project, whether he's a 'skeptic', and BEST’s climate policy ambitions | Carbon Brief

We talk to Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature (BEST) project co-founder Richard Muller about plans to branch out into climate policy studies, and why he's confident BEST will encourage consensus between skeptics and mainstream climate scientists in the end.
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Professor Muller's phone hasn't stopped ringing since his op-ed in the New York Times over the weekend, where he stated that BEST's new research has answered his own doubts about whether humans are causing global warming. His self-described conversion to the mainstream scientific view linking human activity to climate change has captured the imagination of a media often wary of reporting on climate change.
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Asked if it's really accurate to say he was ever a skeptic, Muller replies: "I have considered myself only to be a properly skeptical scientist. Some people have called me a denier - no, that's completely wrong. If anything, I was agnostic.
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That's not to say he still doesn't have problems with sweeping statements about climate change: "90 per cent of what's said about climate change is nonsense. That when people attribute Hurricane Katrina, or dying polar bears, that's not based on any science whatsoever. In fact in many cases, it's wrong. So there's plenty of room for skepticism.

[Muller]: "...we discovered that station quality does not affect the results. Even poor stations reflect temperature changes accurately."

"...The UK group purposefully hid the discordant data, and they did it in order to make sure that people drew the same conclusions that they drew. To me, that's misconduct."
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Muller says Curry distanced herself from the paper because she disagrees with the findings, and that she has an alternative theory - that the climate is random, so any correlation between increases in carbon dioxide and warming is an accident. His response: "'I've said to her that the unfortunate aspect of her theory is that it's untestable. Now a theory that's untestable is not something I consider to be a theory."
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But Muller dismisses the suggestion that Watts released his work to counter the new BEST study. "[Watts] didn't even know about our work," he says. "Our work on station quality agreed with [previous work Watts] published," he adds. "Now he's saying: 'If I use a different criterion I find that the uncorrected data can yield a bias'. Well, that sounds reasonable - if a station moves and you don't take that into account, yeah, you're likely to get a bias. I don't see any really strong objection to that. What he has done was interesting, but it doesn't affect our new conclusions."
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Again, Muller is sanguine: "There were no mistakes in that paper. McKitrick had comments and found things he thought were mistakes, but we wrote back to him and told him he was wrong." He adds: "I think the conclusion that urban heat islands contribute essentially zero to the warming we see is on very solid ground." Indeed, due to BEST and studies that went before it, Muller says that the question of whether urban heating skews warming data is no longer a legitimate quibble with data that shows warming.
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Meanwhile Elizabeth Muller, Professor Muller's daughter and the co-founder of the BEST project, is interested in "starting a new section to look at policy," Professor Muller says, to examine "in an objective scientific manner what can be done".

In a follow-up email, Elizabeth Muller, who is a former OECD policy advisor, fleshes out the plans. She says the idea is to focus on policy that could have an impact on future greenhouse gas emissions. These policies, she says, must be "low cost, cost-neutral or, ideally, profitable." Two examples she lays out in an op-ed article in the San Francisco Chronicle are clean fracking - making extracting unconventional natural gas greener - and energy efficiency.

This new direction - no matter how transparent the work - raises the possibility of a conflict between scientific objectivity and advocacy.

Daily Kos: Berkeley Physicist Flim Flams on Fracking

The same day (Monday, July 30) his daughter Elizabeth had a piece in the opinion section of the San Francisco Chronicle titled, "Fracking Helps Reduce Polluting Emissions." There she claims to be a co-founder with her father of this Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature organization. She goes through some nice green-sounding statements like energy efficiency, that we need to do things at low cost, etc. But she says that we need to get developing nations to switch to natural gas.

She then plugs her fathers book,"Energy for Future Presidents," and claims that, "Though some environmentalists still oppose fracking," it has helped lower greenhouse gas emissions- blah, blah, blah. Then today (July 31) the Chronicle comes out with a front-page article about this scientist who has changed his mind on global warming and touts how his research helped him reach this conclusion--years after most of the world's scientists--but there is not one word there about fracking.

Now I have had some expreience as an editor dealing with PR spin and this smells very much like it.