Koch-Funded Climate Skeptic: Oops, Humans Are to Blame

Physicist Richard Muller co-founded the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature project three years ago to debunk global warming fears, even getting a hefty grant from the conservative Koch brothers for his work. Last fall, he backtracked a bit, admitting the evidence for global warming was solid, but denying you could prove humanity was the cause. Today, however, even that last caveat is gone, he writes in the New York Times. "Call me a converted skeptic," Muller writes. "Humans are almost entirely the cause."

Muller is still skeptical about alarmists, though, and thinks there is no connection between global warming and Hurricane Katrina or dying polar bears or anything like that. But he is certain that people are causing the world to heat up, a process that will go much faster in the future as China continues to develop. Not everyone is so impressed by Muller's conversion. "I am glad that Muller et al. have taken a look at the data and have come to essentially the same conclusion that nearly everyone else had come to more than a decade ago," one climatologist tells Think Progress. Click for Muller's full column. (More climate change stories.)