When the best scientists, including some of the few skeptics among them, study the data--and study it carefully and thoroughly--they too recognize the truth. And that was certainly true in the case of Cal-Berkeley physics Professor Richard Muller when asked to chair the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature (BEST) project, set up for global warming skeptics. Now he too is among the unqualified believers. The evidence is strong and persuasive. And neither wishing it were not true, nor political spin, nor self-interested business denials, can change the truth of it at all. It's what the data and analysis tell us. nbcnews.com reports:
Global warming not only is real, but "humans are almost entirely the cause," a self-described former climate change skeptic has declared. "Call me a converted skeptic," Richard A. Muller, University of California, Berkeley physics professor said in an opinion piece posted online Saturday in The New York Times.
Muller in October released results from the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature (BEST) project, set up for global warming skeptics, that showed that since the mid-1950s, global average temperatures over land have risen by 0.9 degrees Celsius (1.6 degrees Fahrenheit).
In his new statement, Muller said, "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."
---"Ex-climate change skeptic: Humans cause global warming," NBC News (7.29.2012)
For a useful review of the scientific opinion on global warming and the role of humans in it--including all the major scientific bodies that have affirmed it--see this article on Wikipedia, and others cited by it: "Scientific opinion on climate change."
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