Global warming is man-made problem - Citizens Voice

Many people who have rejected scientific evidence of rapid global warming are probably a little hot themselves because the leading champion of their skepticism has conceded that global warming is real and, more important, that humans play a huge role in it.

Richard Muller, a climate scientist at the University of California, Berkeley and the Lawrence Berkely National Laboratory, founded the Berkely Earth Surface Temperature Project. It has been funded partially by the Koch Foundation, which also has funded many groups that deny global warming.

Muller began his research in 2009, after hacked emails between leading climate research scientists raised a furor over the validity of some of their data. (The data subsequently has been verified by the National Science Foundation and in multiple inquiries by several universities where the scientists work, including Penn State.)

Last fall Muller reported that his analysis of data matched that of the scientists who had concluded that climate change is real and rapid. And last week, he wrote in a column for The New York Times that his research had isolated vast increases in greenhouse gases - the result of industrial activity - as the driving force.

"Humans," he wrote, "are almost entirely the cause."

Ideally, Muller's science-based conversion also will lead to another climate change, switching the debate from the purely political realm into that of science, from whether human-driven climate change exists to what to do about it.