BERKELEY, CALIFORNIA - University of California physicist, Richard Muller, teaches a class at Berkeley titled “Physics for Future Presidents.” The class, which was voted the best class at UC Berkeley in 2008, has a waiting list of plus or minus 100 students. Let’s hope President Obama is one of those anxiously standing in line to get into Muller’s class.

Muller has been attracting a lot of attention in public policy circles of late, so much so that he was the subject of a two-page expose in the March 30 edition of Forbes magazine. It is his insistence that public policy be rooted in some sort of scientific basis that has tongues wagging. Muller concedes that the earth is warming and that carbon dioxide levels are up too, but he says the whole discussion about what to do about it has been distorted by the “deniers” and the “exaggerators,” including former Vice President, Al Gore, and New York Times reporter, Tom Friedman, whose book, “Hot, Flat and Crowded,” argues that global warming is to blame for recent increases in the number of hurricanes, tornadoes and floods.

Muller also puts the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in the exaggerators column. “No one actually pays attention to the IPCC,” he told Forbes writer, Kerry Dolan. Muller’s chief concern is that too few people in the policy arena pay even the slightest attention of science or the role it could play in crafting solutions to problems ranging from terrorism to nuclear power, energy and global warming.

It is likely that Muller knows whereof he speaks. He worked for the government for 34 years as an advisor on national security issues. “I was painfully aware hat scientific issues were not understood by top officials,” he told Dolan. “So many important issues have a high-tech angle to them.”

Although his views on energy alternatives – he deplores the “cleaner than thou” crowd – are enjoying increasing visibility, Muller insists that he isn’t trying to influence anyone, including President Obama, though he does insist that the time has come for the “green bickering” to stop. In all of his years of advising government he says, “the most valuable thing I taught them was how to understand the issues so hat they could see the conclusion themselves, and then convince other people.”