Koch funded climate scientist reverses thinking - climate change IS REAL!

The verdict is in: Global warming is occurring and emissions of
greenhouse gases caused by human activity are the main cause.

This, according to Richard A. Muller, professor of physics at UC
Berkeley, MacArthur Fellow and co-founder of the Berkeley Earth
Surface Temperature project. Never mind that the United Nations
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and hundreds of other
climatologists around the world came to such conclusions years ago.
The difference now is the source: Muller is a long-standing, colorful
critic of prevailing climate science, and the Berkeley project was
heavily funded by the Charles Koch Charitable Foundation, which, along
with its libertarian petrochemical billionaire founder Charles G.
Koch, has a considerable history of backing groups that deny climate
change.

In an opinion piece in Saturday’s New York Times titled “The
Conversion of a Climate-Change Skeptic,” Muller writes: “Three years
ago I identified problems in previous climate studies that, in my
mind, threw doubt on the very existence of global warming. 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.”

The Berkeley project’s research has shown, Muller says, “that the
average temperature of the Earth’s land has risen by two and a half
degrees Fahrenheit over the past 250 years, including an increase of
one and a half degrees over the most recent 50 years. Moreover, it
appears likely that essentially all of this increase results from the
human emission of greenhouse gases.”

He calls his stance now “a total turnaround.”

[Updated, 4:17 p.m., July 29: Tonya Mullins, a spokeswoman for the
Koch Foundation, said the support her foundation provided, along with
others, had no bearing on the results of the research. "Our grants are
designed to promote independent research; as such, recipients hold
full control over their findings," Mullins said in an email. "In this
support, we strive to benefit society by promoting discovery and
informing public policy."]

Some leading climate scientists welcomed Muller’s comments, proof,
they argued, that the science is so strong that even those inclined to
reject it cannot once they examine it carefully. Michael E. Mann,
director of the Earth System Science Center at Pennsylvania State
University, said that Muller’s conversion might help shape the
thinking of the “reasonable middle” of the population “who are
genuinely confused and have been honestly taken in” by attacks on
climate science.


Full story:
http://www.latimes.com/news/politics...,7372823.story