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."

Is Obama Serious About Climate Change Action?

President Obama speaking recently at the Solar Panel Field at the Copper Mountain Solar 1 Facility in Boulder City, Nevada, the largest photovoltaic plant operating in the country.

(Cross-posted at Winning Progressive)

When it comes to climate change action, the Obama Administration is feeling the heat. Literally. All the president needs to do is step outside the White House doors and spend some time in the Rose Garden to feel Washington’s warmest winter on record. And cities across the United States have been experiencing record high temperatures this winter. Obama’s campaign headquarters is in Chicago, where the Windy City last Wednesday hit a high of 87 degrees Fahrenheit. The next day the temperature at O’Hare Airport was 83 degrees, capping nine straight days of record-breaking or record-tying high temperatures in Chicago.

While there is a difference between daily weather changes and climate patterns over time, the “summer in March” has climatologists concerned. “Global warming boosts the probability of really extreme events, like the recent U.S. heat wave, far more than it boosts more moderate events,” climate scientists Stefan Rahmstorf and Dim Coumou wrote recently in the RealClimate blog.