Richard Muller of UCB Changes His Tune on Global Warming

Richard Muller was funded by the Koch brothers to examine global warming.  Below is a snippet from NY Daily News on October 31st, 2011.

"One of the most prominent global warming skeptics is changing is his tune.   Richard Muller, a physicist who spent two years trying to see if mainstream climate scientists were wrong about the earth's climate changes, determined that they were right, the Associated Press reported.  His findings showed the temperature had risen about 1.6 degrees since the 1950s."

Read more: http://www.nydailynews.com/news/national/richard-muller-koch-brothers-funded-scientist-declares-global-warming-real-article-1.969870#ixzz1eICqrWGL

It sill absolutely amazes me the number of people who insist the global climate change is not real.  They need to stop watching Fox News.  Of the current Republican candidates, only Jon Huntsman seems to have the courage to embrace science when he tweeted, "To be clear. I believe in evolution and trust scientists on global warming. Call me crazy."  Too bad that the Republican base is so anti-science, because Jon Huntsman seems a very capable candidate who could capture the all important central part of the voting block.


Below is a snippet from a Washington Post editorial. 

A bad month for climate-change skeptics

A Washington Post Editorial, Published: November 18, 2011

THE PAST MONTH hasn’t been good for climate-change skeptics. At a congressional hearing Monday, Richard Muller, a former global-warming skeptic at the University of California, Berkeley, told lawmakers that, after a two-year review of historical world temperature data, he has verified the scientific consensus that the earth is warming — by about 1.6 degrees Fahrenheit over the past 50 years. This is not surprising; as the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration reported last year, the warming of the planet, detected in multiple, independent lines of evidence, is “unequivocal.”

Mr. Muller said that exactly how much humans contribute to such warming is difficult to calculate. But, as the Economist pointed out last year, even if the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is off by a factor of five in its reckoning of the climate’s sensitivity to an eventual doubling of the amount of carbon in the atmosphere, that still leaves only a 50 percent chance of relatively minor temperature change. The developed world and large developing nations, meanwhile, continue to pump immense amounts of carbon into the atmosphere. The Energy Department released an analysis this month concluding that global carbon emissions in 2010 increased by the largest amount ever, to a higher level than the IPCC’s worst-case projection.