Finding a climate change scientist who does NOT believe that people are responsible for global warming is pretty hard (the commonly-reported estimate is that 98% of climate change scientists are in agreement that people are mostly responsible for climate change)…and it’s getting harder. One of the more prominent skeptics, Richard Muller, has accepted the scientific evidence and is no longer a skeptic…he was part of a team of more than a dozen scientists at the University of California, Berkeley that have been studying global warming, specifically with respect to how global warming correlates to human and natural events, to try to determine the cause. What they found was that the average land temperature has increased by 1.5C over the last 250 years, and that “”the most straightforward explanation for this warming is human greenhouse gas emissions.” Most of that increase has been in the past 50 years, too.
I think former skeptic Muller put it best when he said, “While this doesn’t prove that global warming is caused by human greenhouse gases, it is currently the best explanation we have found, and sets the bar for alternative explanations.” This is what science is all about. Recognizing the facts, but also maintaining an open mind, for science is rarely 100% certain about anything. Perhaps some new hypothesis will be put forth that shows that CO2 is NOT responsible for global warming, but until such a hypothesis is presented and proven, we need to stop this media debate over global warming and report the scientific facts. The media needs to stop giving air time to climate change skeptics who don’t have the science to back up their claims…for doing so only works to legitimize their ideas in the mainstream public’s minds.
The project’s official website is here, where you can view full results of this study. Or, read more about it over at The Guardian.