In a US newspaper opinion piece, Prof Richard Muller says: “Call me a converted sceptic.”
Muller leads the Berkeley Earth Project, which is using new methods and some new data to investigate the claims made by other climate researchers. ….
In a piece authored for the New York Times, Prof Muller, from the University of California, Berkeley, said: “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.” ….
Prof Michael Mann, director of the Earth Science System Center at Penn State University, said that there was “a certain ironic satisfaction” in seeing a study funded by the Koch Brothers “demonstrate what scientists have known with some degree of confidence for nearly two decades: that the globe is indeed warming, and that this warming can only be explained by human-caused increases in greenhouse gas concentrations”.
“Ex-sceptic says climate change is down to humans“, BBC News, 30 July 2012.
Muller’s team of 10 scientists includes Saul Perlmutter, who shared the 2011 Nobel Prize in Physics with two other physicists. Their funding came in part from the Koch brothers, billionaire US industrialists who contribute large sums to organisations lobbying against acceptance of human-caused global warming.
The full text of Muller’s op-ed can be downloaded here.
The report of the Berkeley Earth Land Temperature Project, “A New Estimate of the Average Earth Surface Land Temperature Spanning 1753 to 2011”, can be downloaded here.
Below is a chart, from page 7 of the report, showing 10-year moving averages of estimated land surface temperatures. The shaded areas are one- and two-standard deviation uncertainties.
