Thursday, August 02, 2012
Richard Muller (photo-Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory, UC Berkeley)
After spending years trying to debunk global warming, scientist Richard Muller has come to the conclusion that the earth really is heating up—and that humans are to blame.
Muller, a UC Berkeley physicist, co-founded the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature Project three years ago to prove global warming was nonsense. His effort was supported with $150,000 from Charles G. Koch Charitable Foundation, which backs conservative, business-friendly causes (and is noted for supporting those who deny global warming).
But after gathering and analyzing considerable data, Muller determined the planet’s temperature was rising, and not for natural reasons.
In an opinion piece published by The New York Times, Muller described himself as a “converted skeptic.”
“Three years ago I identified problems in previous climate studies that, in my mind, threw doubt on the very existence of global warming,” Muller wrote. “Last year, following an intensive research effort involving a dozen scientists, 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.”
Studies performed by the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature Project showed the earth’s average temperature had increased by 2.5 degrees Fahrenheit over the past 250 years, according to Muller. Furthermore, they found temperatures had risen 1.5 degrees over the most recent 50 years.
Muller attributed the changes to “the human emission of greenhouse gases.”
-Noel Brinkerhoff
To Learn More:
The Conversion of a Climate-Change Skeptic (by Richard A. Muller, New York Times op-ed)
Koch-Funded Climate Scientist: I Was Wrong, Humans Are to Blame (by Jonathan Terbush, RawStory)
UC Climate-Change Skeptic Changes Views (by David Perlman, San Francisco Chronicle)
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