the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature project: <blockquote> 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.</p> </blockquote> 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. On July 28, 2012, he stated, "[G]lobal warming [is] real .... Humans are almost entirely the cause." Foreign Policy named Muller one of its 2012 FP Top 100 Global Thinkers "for changing their minds". 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. 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