Climate Skeptic Recants

Sometimes you think you know what’s going on, but then discover that reality is completely different.

Dr. Richard Mueller, who has been supported by the conservative Koch Brothers on climate change denial, has just announced that he has ceased to be a skeptic and now agrees that global warming is real and is caused primarily by human activity. Was it the Greenland melt (pictured on this story) that finally changed his mind?

His work is at the core of climate change denial, and he has been wrong for 20 years, Hopefully, this is not too late.

One thing that would help enormously is for China to accelerate its shale gas projects, which would reduce their dependence on coal, the same as is happening here. But they have to do it cleanly, so that it doesn’t result in methane emissions caused by the process itself, and become counterproductive. For them, it would be an immense undertaking, far beyond the capacity of even their very well-funded private sector to finance. This is because they do not have the kind of transport infrastructure for gas that we do, and would have to build it from scratch.

In the July 30th edition of the Los Angeles Times, Neela Banerjee quotes former skeptic Richard A. Muller as saying, "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 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."

In the July 30th edition of the New York Times, Richard A. Muller HIMSELF says, "Call me a converted skeptic. How definite is the attribution to humans? The carbon dioxide curve gives a better match than anything else we’ve tried.

"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% 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."

Believe it or not, Whitley Strieber used to be climate skeptic as well–until he met the Master of the Key in 1998, when burst into his hotel room and alerted him about the upcoming climate change which has now ARRIVED.