I Was Blind But Now I See

The conversion of climate change skeptic and UC Berkeley physics professor Richard Mueller to a believer in the overwhelming data supporting man-made climate shifts was to be expected, but let's remember that his skepticism was turned into a cause celebre' by the wingers and the Koch Foundation, who gave him a lot of money in order to test his skepticism.  He did and found that it's the deniers on the right who have always been full of hot air.

My total turnaround, in such a short time, is the result of careful and objective analysis by the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature project, which I founded with my daughter Elizabeth. Our results show 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. 

These findings are stronger than those of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the United Nations group that defines the scientific and diplomatic consensus on global warming. In its 2007 report, the I.P.C.C. concluded only that most of the warming of the prior 50 years could be attributed to humans. It was possible, according to the I.P.C.C. consensus statement, that the warming before 1956 could be because of changes in solar activity, and that even a substantial part of the more recent warming could be natural. 

Our Berkeley Earth approach used sophisticated statistical methods developed largely by our lead scientist, Robert Rohde, which allowed us to determine earth land temperature much further back in time. We carefully studied issues raised by skeptics: biases from urban heating (we duplicated our results using rural data alone), from data selection (prior groups selected fewer than 20 percent of the available temperature stations; we used virtually 100 percent), from poor station quality (we separately analyzed good stations and poor ones) and from human intervention and data adjustment (our work is completely automated and hands-off). In our papers we demonstrate that none of these potentially troublesome effects unduly biased our conclusions. 

I'm hoping that this will put an end to the debate and allow the country and the world to move on to try to do anything before it's too late.   Sadly, there's little to no chance of that as long as Republicans and the uncaring corporate masters remain in power over our political process.  Mueller too calls for action:

What about the future? As carbon dioxide emissions increase, the temperature should continue to rise. I expect the rate of warming to proceed at a steady pace, about one and a half degrees over land in the next 50 years, less if the oceans are included. But if China continues its rapid economic growth (it has averaged 10 percent per year over the last 20 years) and its vast use of coal (it typically adds one new gigawatt per month), then that same warming could take place in less than 20 years. 

Science is that narrow realm of knowledge that, in principle, is universally accepted. I embarked on this analysis to answer questions that, to my mind, had not been answered. I hope that the Berkeley Earth analysis will help settle the scientific debate regarding global warming and its human causes. Then comes the difficult part: agreeing across the political and diplomatic spectrum about what can and should be done. 

Sadly, as long as our politics are controlled by people who believe that evolution never happened and that the Earth is 6,000 years old, we will continue to do absolutely nothing.  Another 1.5 degrees in 20 years would be a catastrophe.  And yet if nothing changes, the summer of 2012 here in the US will be considered mild by comparison very very soon.