According to anyone’s political instincts, what I’m about to do is ass-backward stupid.
You don’t begin a book in Berkeley, California. Not if you’re trying to win converts to the Democratic Party. It’s too liberal, too alienating for moderates.
You only begin in Berkeley if you are shilling for Republicans. Then it’s an easy case to make. You talk about the college town’s unbridled hedonism, a modern-day Sodom. You mention the braless students . . . the hydroponic marijuana farms . . . the flag-burning rallies . . . the classes in pansexual theory. And you punctuate it with a classic “Thanks, Obama.”
I get it. Berkeley can be seen as the embarrassing nephew for Democrats like me. Never mind that I grew up in the farthest place from Berkeley. In Louisiana we were so deep in the sticks they had to pipe in sunlight. Still, I can hear my editors saying, “Why not swap out California for Ohio? Why not begin with a midforties factory worker? Or a white mother of 2.5 children? That’s the demographic sweet spot. That’s what all the presidential candidates do! Don’t begin in Berkeley.”
Well, tough shit. Here we are anyway.
The truth is: We have to begin in Berkeley because if you want to understand American politics right now, you have to first understand the story of Richard Muller. And Berkeley is where he lives.
Chances are you don’t know Richard Muller. You’ve probably never heard his name. You should not feel bad about this. I’ve been polling people—columnists, reporters, my students at Tulane, the professors there. Nobody else has heard of Muller either.
This is strange because for a brief moment at the beginning of the decade Muller was the great hope of conservatives, maybe among the most important people in politics. Muller wasn’t a politician, though. He was—and is—a scientist, a physics genius at UC Berkeley straight out of central casting. He’s got the tweed jacket, and he looks like he goes to the same barber as Einstein.
But there was one way Muller wasn’t like your typical scientist: In 2010 he was unconvinced that the Earth was warming. Muller was a climate change “skeptic.” He had looked at the data from the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change—the group that won a Nobel Prize with my old buddy Al Gore—and he’d found it lacking. The weather stations they’d used to measure temperatures were falling apart, and they’d tossed out a lot of the data. Muller wanted to double-check the work, to discover whether climate change was real for himself.
Muller wasn’t an ideological guy. In fact, he took pains to be as evenhanded as he could about his project. “We don’t have a political agenda,” he told me. “All we are trying to do is to reach an objective conclusion about climate.”1
Nevertheless, it’s easy now to see why he became the high-IQ’d darling of the Right. He was among the very few scientists who publically questioned the reality of climate change, and as Muller put it, “People who ignore the science will point to anybody that is on their side.”2
And so, in early 2010, Muller witnessed one of the strangest phenomena in American politics: a flood of right-wing support into arguably the most liberal square mile in the country. Charles Koch—who, with his brother, had funneled roughly $40 million to groups that denied climate change—wrote Muller’s project a six-figure check.3
Even the Internet’s most popular climate change skeptic, a guy named Anthony Watts, became Muller’s biggest fanboy. Watts had been denying the climate science for years, and he thought Muller’s study would bring some intellectual firepower to his cause. Finally, a skeptic like him was leading the project. “When has that ever happened in climate science,” wrote Watts. Then he made Muller a promise. “I’m prepared to accept whatever result [you] produce,” he said, “even if it proves my premise wrong.”4
There it was. Muller’s project was going to crack open the global warming debate. Or call the fight.
Muller got to work. With his daughter, he founded the Berkeley Earth Science Temperature Project and set up headquarters in his house. He assembled a crack squad. The Nobel Prize winner Saul Perlmutter was advising him. So was Art Rosenfeld, who was once the ace student of Enrico Fermi, aka “the father of the nuclear age.” These were some smart, smart gentlemen, and for two years, they pored over 1.6 billion data points. They built their models. They ran their numbers. And when they finished, Muller published a summary of his findings in The Wall Street Journal, whose editorial board had recently called global warming a “fad-scare.”5
Now, I have never been invited inside the offices of The Wall Street Journal. (I cannot imagine why.) So I don’t know if they adhere to the age-old newspaper tradition of drinking no matter the hour. But if they do, I can tell you they weren’t popping champagne on the morning of October 11, 2011.
That morning, Muller’s findings hit the Journal’s opinion page. “There were good reasons for doubt,” he wrote, “until now.”6
The Earth was warming, Muller said. You could not deny the evidence.
At this point, it seems to me that Muller’s backers started getting a bit snippy. Charles Koch’s foundation released a statement. They pointed out that Muller had only studied air temperatures—not ocean temperatures—and that he hadn’t specifically said humans were to blame.7
Fortunately, Muller was already tackling that question. He went back to the data. He measured the ocean temperatures. He studied what could be causing the warming. And after six months, he had his answer.
This time, Muller published in The New York Times. “Last year,” he wrote, “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.”
“Call me,” Muller said, “a converted skeptic.”8
—
Let’s stop here for a second. Pour yourself a Maker’s Mark on the rocks. (That’s what I do when I think about what might have been.) Because you can guess what’s coming next for Dr. Muller—Republicans are about to turn on him—but wouldn’t it be wonderful if something else happened?
—
Here is Richard Muller. A smart man doing a good thing. An American thing. He’s properly skeptical of what he’s told. Listens to his momma. Doesn’t believe everything he reads. So he tests it himself. He goes out and gets some backers. This happens to add credibility to his endeavor. After all, if a Koch-funded study says climate change is real, what else is there to debate? And that is exactly what Muller finds. Climate change is real. And humans are the cause.
Imagine a country that accepts that. Imagine a Republican Party that accepts that. Imagine Dr. Muller showing up at the White House in his tux. Imagine the president clapping him on the shoulder and hanging the National Medal of Science around his neck. Imagine Senate Republicans are in the East Room, and they’re clapping because they’re the ones who pushed for Muller to get the award.
By the way, you still got that bourbon? Good. Drink up.
Because that is not what happened to Dr. Richard Muller.
After Muller released his findings, it turns out that Anthony Watts, the influential blogger who promised to accept Muller’s conclusion, wasn’t prepared to accept it.9 And while the Kochs did admit global warming is occurring, they didn’t see it as a big problem—and still don’t.
I spoke to Dr. Muller on the phone not long ago. He’s an incredibly diplomatic individual and is the first to say that he’s not in the business of telling politicians what to do (although I think our country would be a heckuva lot better if he did). But even Muller admits that there is a group of people, especially those in politics, who just aren’t swayed by the evidence.10
As I write this, Muller’s data has been public for four years, and the GOP hasn’t moved on climate change. Hell, they’ve slid backward. Their presumptive presidential nominee claims that the concept of global warming was “created by and for the Chinese to make U.S. manufacturing non-competitive.”11 Trump believes climate change is a Chinese hoax! Had The Donald been around in the sixteenth century, he’d be saying that the Earth is round was just a theory to help the Ming dynasty sell souvenir globes. Then he’d demand Galileo’s execution.
It’s not like Muller has been quiet about his study. He went to Washington. He testified before Congress. But it didn’t make much of a difference. In 2015, when the Senate took a vote on whether global warming was man-made, every Republican—except three—voted nay.12
One of the “nay” votes was from Jim Inhofe. Heard of him? He’s a Republican from Oklahoma and the most vocal climate change denier in Washington. He also happens to be chairman of the Senate Committee on the Environment and Public Works. One winter he went to the Senate chamber to give a speech about why global warming was a hoax and held up his evidence: a clump of snow he’d picked up outside.13
Muller had 1.6 billion data points. The Republicans had a goddamn snowball.
He was right. They were wrong. But it didn’t matter.
That’s why this book is for Dr. Richard Muller. He may not identify as a political guy, but more and more, American politics is starting to identify with his predicament.
I’ll tell you why . . .