WASHINGTON — The verdict is in: Global warming is real and
greenhouse-gas emissions from human activity are the main cause.
This, according to Richard A. Muller, professor of physics at
the University of California, Berkely, a MacArthur fellow and
co-founder of the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature project.
The United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and
hundreds of other climatologists around the world came to such
conclusions years ago, but the difference now is the source:
Muller is a long-standing, colorful critic of prevailing climate
science, and the Berkeley project was heavily funded by the
Charles Koch Charitable Foundation, which, along with its
libertarian petrochemical billionaire founder Charles G. Koch,
has a considerable history of backing groups that deny climate
change. In an opinion piece in Saturday’s New York Times, Muller
wrote: “Three years ago I identified problems in previous
climate studies that, in my mind, threw doubt on the very
existence of global warming. Last y