this year will be the 31st year of mcarthur genius grants, 31 years. our guest for the interview received his mcarthur genius grant 30 years ago, in the second year that they were giving them out. as a professor of physics at uc berkley, as a senior scientist at the lab, as a physicist, it was a big deal that someone as highly esteemed and accomplished as professor richard muller described himself as a skeptic on the issue of climate change. he argued there were problems and he doubted whether global warming was happening. because of those views, it was not necessarily a surprise when he launched a new project to study the voracity of global warming data, his single largest private backer was the charles g.koch foundation. it provided almost a quarter of the foundation. that's koch as in charles and david koch, the conservative billionaires who got that way by inheriting their father's oil company fortune. they're oil zillionaires. while, of course, their funding of this project did not come