In 1999, he received a distinguished teaching award from UC Berkeley.[9] His "Physics for Future Presidents" series of lectures, in which Muller teaches a synopsis of modern qualitative (i.e. without resorting to complicated math) physics, has been released publicly on YouTube by UC Berkeley and has been published in book form. It has been one of the most highly regarded courses at Berkeley. In December 2009, Muller officially retired from teaching the course, although he still occasionally gives guest lectures.
For several years, he was a monthly columnist with MIT's Technology Review. In his August 2003 column on the polygraph machine used in lie detection examinations, Muller asserted that "the polygraph procedure has an accuracy between 80 and 95 percent".[11] The National Academy of Sciences found that there is "little basis for the expectation that a polygraph test could have extremely high accuracy".[12]
In his April 2002 column on the anthrax attacks, Muller claimed "I think it likely that the anthrax terrorists were working for Osama bin Laden, and intended to murder thousands of people."[13]
In an October 2004 Technology Review article, Muller discussed blog postings by McIntyre and McKitrick alleging that Mann, Bradley and Hughes did not do proper principal component analysis (PCA).[15] In the article, Richard Muller stated:
McIntyre and McKitrick obtained part of the program that Mann used, and they found serious problems. Not only does the program not do conventional PCA, but it handles data normalization in a way that can only be described as mistaken.
Now comes the real shocker. This improper normalization procedure tends to emphasize any data that do have the hockey stick shape, and to suppress all data that do not. To demonstrate this effect, McIntyre and McKitrick created some meaningless test data that had, on average, no trends. This method of generating random data is called "Monte Carlo" analysis, after the famous casino, and it is widely used in statistical analysis to test procedures. When McIntyre and McKitrick fed these random data into the Mann procedure, out popped a hockey stick shape!
That discovery hit me like a bombshell, and I suspect it is having the same effect on many others. Suddenly the hockey stick, the poster-child of the global warming community, turns out to be an artifact of poor mathematics. How could it happen?[15]
He went on to state "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."[15]
In an article on the RealClimate blog on various myths about the graph, Mann mentioned Muller's article as parroting the claims of McIntyre and McKitrick.[16] Muller's opinion piece in the reputable MIT journal helped to spread the idea that the hockey stick shape was a statistical artifact, but several peer reviewed studies showed that the PCA methodology had little effect on the shape of the graph.[17][18] By 2006 there was general acceptance of the conclusion of the graph that recent warming was unprecedented in 1,000 years.[19]
When we began our study, we felt that skeptics had raised legitimate issues, and we didn't know what we'd find. Our results turned out to be close to those published by prior groups. We think that means that those groups had truly been very careful in their work, despite their inability to convince some skeptics of that. They managed to avoid bias in their data selection, homogenization and other corrections.
Global warming is real. Perhaps our results will help cool this portion of the climate debate. How much of the warming is due to humans and what will be the likely effects? We made no independent assessment of that.[20]
While the BEST project did not delve into the proxy data sets used in the "hockey stick", the importance of the work regarding the modern temperature record is explained on the BEST web site:
Existing data used to show global warming have met with much criticism. The Berkeley Earth project attempts to resolve current criticism of the former temperature analyses by making available an open record to enable rapid response to further criticism and suggestions. Our results include our best estimate for the global temperature change and our estimates of the uncertainties in the record.[21]
On July 28, 2012, he stated, "[G]lobal warming [is] real .... Humans are almost entirely the cause."[4]
Foreign Policy named Muller one of its 2012 FP Top 100 Global Thinkers "for changing their minds".[22]
Trends in tornado activity
In November 2013 Muller wrote an op-ed in The New York Times arguing that strong to violent tornado activity decreased since the 1950s and suggesting that global warming is the cause. Atmospheric scientists Paul Markowski, Harold E. Brooks, et al., replied that Muller made substantial methodological flaws and was ignorant of long established findings in severe storms meteorology. They argue that there is no discernible decrease in significant tornado activity and that attribution of tornadic activity to global warming is premature although changes, especially in regional character, are likely as the atmospheric environment changes.[23]
Shale gas and hydraulic fracturing
In a report for the Centre for Policy Studies, Muller (and Elizabeth Muller of Berkeley Earth, his daughter) wrote that the benefits of shale gas, displacing harmful air pollution from coal, far outweigh the environmental costs of fracking. According to the Mullers, air pollution, mostly from coal burning, kills over three million people each year, primarily in the developing world. The Mullers state that "Environmentalists who oppose the development of shale gas and fracking are making a tragic mistake."[24]
The Three Big Bangs: Comet Crashes, Exploding Stars, and the Creation of the Universe (with coauthor Phil Dauber, Addison-Wesley 1996) ISBN0-201-15495-1
^Goldhaber, Gerson (February 20, 2008). The Acceleration of the Expansion of the Universe: A Brief Early History of the Supernova Cosmology Project (SCP). Dark Matter 2008. Marina del Rey, California. pp. 53–72.
^Perlmutter, Saul; Crawford, Frank S.; Muller, Richard A.; Sasseen, Timothy P.; Pennypacker, Carlton R.; Smith, Craig K.; Treffers, R.; Williams, R. (July 13–24, 1987). "The Status of Berkeley's Realtime Supernova Search". In Robinson, L.B. (ed.). Instrumentation for Ground-Based Optical Astronomy, Present and Future. The Ninth Santa Cruz Summer Workshop in Astronomy and Astrophysics. Lick Observatory: Springer-Verlag. p. 674. Bibcode:1988igbo.conf..674P. ISBN0-387-96730-3.
^Perlmutter, Saul; Muller, Richard A.; Newberg, Heidi J. M.; Pennypacker, Carlton R.; Sasseen, Timothy P.; Smith, Craig K. (June 22–24, 1991). "A doubly robotic telescope - The Berkeley Automated Supernova Search". Robotic telescopes in the 1990s. 103rd Annual Meeting of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific. University of Wyoming, Laramie. pp. 67–71. Bibcode:1992ASPC...34...67P.
