Science Starting to Win Climate Change Debate

Climate change convert Richard Muller with his daughter Elizabeth at home in Berkeley, California. Photo credit: AP.

Global warming is real and humans are causing it. That greenhouse gas emissions are contributing to climate change is as accepted among mainstream scientists as the earth revolving around the sun. A recently published story on climate change denial in Australian current affairs magazine The Monthly cites a survey that found 97.4 percent of climate scientists agree that "human activity is a significant contributing factor in changing mean global temperatures."

But what about the few scientists still skeptical of climate change? They are starting to come around as evidenced by the highly publicized conversion of UC Berkeley physics professor and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory faculty senior scientist Richard A. Muller. On the well-read pages of The New York Times, Muller explained his conversion was a result of research done on the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature Project, which concluded that global land temperatures have increased by 2.5 degrees Fahrenheit (1.5 degrees Celsius) over the past 250 years, including an increase of 1.5 degrees F (0.9 degrees C) over the past 50 years. And that "it appears likely that essentially all of this increase results from the human emission of greenhouse gases."