ENVIRONMENT: Global warning skeptic changes stance
After years of denying global warming, physicist Richard Muller now says "global warming is real and humans are almost entirely the cause."
The admission by Muller, a professor of physics at the University of California, Berkeley and founder of the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature project, has gained additional attention because some of his research has been funded by Charles Koch of the Koch Brothers, the right-wing billionaire known for funding climate skeptic groups like the Heartland Institute. "We can make the scientific case more solidly than had been made in the past," Muller claims. "I think this does say we do need to take action, we do need to do something about it."
Professor Muller spent two years trying to prove the earth warming community wrong. In the end, he determined they were right: temperatures really are rising rapidly.
He pursued long-held skeptic theories in analysing the data. He was spurred to action by a British scandal involving hacked emails of scientists.
Yet he found that the land was 1C warmer than in the 1950s. Those numbers match those by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and NASA. Professor Muller said he went even further back, studying readings from Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson.
His ultimate finding of a warming world, to be presented at a conference overnight, is no different from what mainstream climate scientists have been saying for decades.
