Saturday, July 28, 2012

It's official: Muller's NYT Op-Ed is out

He has, as was rumored, caught up to 1988:

CALL me a converted skeptic. Three years ago I identified problems in previous climate studies that, in my mind, threw doubt on the very existence of global warming. Last year, following an intensive research effort involving a dozen scientists, I concluded that global warming was real and that the prior estimates of the rate of warming were correct. I’m now going a step further: Humans are almost entirely the cause.
It's nothing spectacular, as conversion experiences go, more of a dry reciting of of the basic points of the IPCC assessment, with more confidence that the earlier warming, from 1850 to 1970, was probably human-caused as well.

He even touched upon the Great Heresy:
Science is that narrow realm of knowledge that, in principle, is universally accepted. I embarked on this analysis to answer questions that, to my mind, had not been answered. I hope that the Berkeley Earth analysis will help settle the scientific debate regarding global warming and its human causes. Then comes the difficult part: agreeing across the political and diplomatic spectrum about what can and should be done.
 This is why the denial machine tolerates the hits to its credibility when its fake "experts" are outed. Actual scientists bring gravitas to the enterprise, but they are a little . . . politically unreliable.

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