“Converted skeptic” physicist influences New York Times on climate science
DOI: 10.1063/PT.5.8017
In May , the editors of the New York Times warned—as they would again in June —about “rising sea levels, floods, droughts and other devastating consequences of a warming planet.” But what about tornadoes? Democratic senators Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island and Barbara Boxer of California have famously asserted a causal connection. But the Times has been more cautious, as seen in its evolving special relationship with physicist, climate researcher—and climate pundit—Richard A. Muller .
In a July 2012 posting , Andrew Revkin, the Times‘s online Dot Earth climate columnist, called Muller “a cantankerous but creative physicist” at the University of California, Berkeley, who had formerly “derided climate change research.” Concerning that deriding, Revkin had earlier called Muller a “strident critic of climate campaigners.”
Revkin described media developments that began with Muller’s October 2011 Wall Street Journal op-ed headlined “The case against global-warming skepticism.” Muller began that piece by arguing that a faulty surface-temperature record had justified skepticism, but continued, “now let me explain why you should not be a skeptic, at least not any longer.” At the end, he asserted, “Global warming is real,” but stipulated that he couldn’t answer the question “How much of the warming is due to humans and what will be the likely effects?”
An answer came in Muller’s July 2012 Times op-ed “The conversion of a climate-change skeptic.” It began this way:
Call me a converted skeptic. Three years ago I identified problems in previous climate studies that, in my mind, threw doubt on the very existence of global warming. Last year, following an intensive research effort involving a dozen scientists, I concluded that global warming was real and that the prior estimates of the rate of warming were correct. I’m now going a step further: Humans are almost entirely the cause.
But Muller’s scientific switch had limits. He also wrote, “I still find that much, if not most, of what is attributed to climate change is speculative, exaggerated or just plain wrong. I’ve analyzed some of the most alarmist claims, and my skepticism about them hasn’t changed.”
The Times really does see those “rising sea levels, floods, droughts and other devastating consequences of a warming planet.” But when it comes to attributing tornadoes to human-caused climate disruption, the newspaper respects Muller’s concern about what’s “speculative, exaggerated or just plain wrong.”
Revkin has consistently presented tornado attribution as entirely unproven, but as a worthy research question. In a May posting , he cited a Union of Concerned Scientists webpage that states, “The effect of climate change on tornadoes and hurricanes is an active area of research. Scientific confidence with observed data is currently low, though the underlying mechanisms of climate change are expected to play a role.” His 18 November posting specified tornadoes alongside hurricanes as important topics for reporters covering climate change, but also linked to a May posting in which he reported that no evidence connects tornadoes to climate change.
Revkin has also engaged what he sees as the possible ill effects of tornado-climate overstatements in the technopolitical climate wars. In May he wrote , “Some climate scientists see compelling arguments for accumulating heat and added water vapor fueling the kinds of turbulent storms that spawn tornadoes. But a half century of observations in the United States show no change in tornado frequency and a declining frequency of strong tornadoes.” He lamented, “assertions that all weird bad weather is, in essence, our fault are not grounded in science and, as a result, end up empowering those whose prime interest appears to to be sustaining the fossil fuel era as long as possible.”
To illustrate that empowerment, Revkin first linked to a Daily Caller article that began, “California Democratic Sen. Barbara Boxer blamed the tornado that devastated Oklahoma on global warming during a Senate floor speech Tuesday, using the opportunity to push her own plan to tax carbon dioxide emissions.” Then he linked to a posting condemning that claim with this statement:
Will a carbon tax prevent tornadoes?! U.S. Senators Boxer and Whitehouse and other global warming activists have descended into buffoonery trying to exploit a natural disaster in Oklahoma. Have you no sense of decency, Senators? At long last, have you left no sense of decency or understanding of science?
Revkin, no sympathizer with climate skepticism, had chosen carefully to make his technopolitical point. That posting, with its obvious allusion to the fiercely contentious Army–McCarthy politics of the 1950s, appeared at Climate Depot from Marc Morano, whom Media Matters named “Climate Change Misinformer of the Year.”
Revkin’s August posting “Could climate campaigners’ focus on current events be counterproductive?” elaborated on his worry that to attribute extreme weather conjecturally or unscientifically to climate change is to lend strength to skeptics’ arguments:
To me, it conveys how environmental campaigners, in trying to engage a public for which global warming has little salience, may be helping sustain the still-common view that greenhouse-driven warming remains uncertain science.
My reasoning? According to the latest science, in most cases (outside of extreme heat waves) the connections between today’s extreme weather events and human-driven climate change range from weak (hurricanes) to nil (tornadoes)—and the dominant driver of losses in such events is fast-paced development or settlement in places with fundamental climatic or coastal vulnerability.
Also in recent months, the Times has twice relied on Muller, the converted skeptic, for further enlightenment on climate topics. In a September op-ed , he described an apparent lull in global warming—"the planet’s average surface temperature has remained pretty much the same for the last 15 years"—but said he found it consistent with historic temperature variability, and not a justification for skeptics’ “full attack mode.”
And on 21 November, the Times published Muller’s op-ed “The truth about tornadoes.” The subhead says, “Global warming is real. But it is not causing more twisters.” The opening paragraph asks, “Does global warming weaken tornadoes?” The second paragraph answers:
Yes, you read that correctly. Despite the recent spate of deadly twisters, including those that tore through the Midwest over the weekend, the scientific evidence shows that strong to violent tornadoes have actually been decreasing for the past 58 years, and it is possible that the explanation lies with global warming.
Muller quotes Sen. Boxer expressing certainty that human-induced climate disruption intensifies the tornado threat. Then he quotes climatologist Michael Mann: “If you’re a betting person—or the insurance or reinsurance industry, for that matter—you’d probably go with a prediction of greater frequency and intensity of tornadoes as a result of human-caused climate change.” Then Muller declares that the evidence shows the opposite. He stipulates, “I am not talking about global warming per se, which I am convinced is real and caused by man-made emissions of greenhouse gases.” He adds, “But not everything attributed to global warming has a scientific basis.” He presents a summary analysis of the data on tornadoes, then declares that “global warming does not obviously lead to increased or more violent tornadoes.”
The op-ed ends this way:
It is possible, for instance, that the increased energy brought by the higher temperatures of global warming is less significant than global warming’s reduction in the north-south temperature difference (the poles warm more than the Equator). The latter could reduce the kind of hot-cold weather fronts that generate severe storms. The current climate models are simply unable to make a clear prediction, and reduced tornadoes from global warming are just as plausible as increased ones.
One thing is clear, however: The number of severe tornadoes has gone down. That is not a scientific hypothesis, but a scientific conclusion based on observation. Regardless of the limitations of climate theory, we can take some comfort in that fact.
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Steven T. Corneliussen, a media analyst for the American Institute of Physics, monitors three national newspapers, the weeklies Nature and Science, and occasionally other publications. He has published op-eds in the Washington Post and other newspapers, has written for NASA’s history program, and is a science writer at a particle-accelerator laboratory.