Decrepit Old Fool

Well good for you, Richard Muller 

Richard Muller, a cantankerous but creative physicist at the University of California, Berkeley, who once derided climate change research, then dove in with his own reconstruction of terrestrial temperature changes and confirmed substantial warming, has now concluded that recent warming is “almost entirely” human caused.”

Slow clap…

Sorry, but what we learn from Muller’s op-ed is that he’s finally caught up with the rest of the class. Yes, he’s a physicist, and he didn’t believe in anthropogenic global warming, but you would never have heard of him if it weren’t for the Koch brothers’ money.

Denialist think tanks are always looking for guys like Muller

It’s a fact that even if the scientific community has pretty much figured something out, you can always find a few scientists to say the opposite. The tobacco companies did just that, hiring the Marshall Institute to spread uncertainty about the evidence for tobacco harm.

The oil companies have done the same, finding science spokesmen – and even pouring money into the Heartland institute and other con think tanks. Their mission is to spread doubt about the very solid body of cross-disciplinary evidence that humans are warming the planet by releasing gigatonnes of long-buried carbon.

He did a meta-study to find out what most scientists have been saying all along is correct

Now one of their scientists has gone rogue, and caught up with what climate scientists were saying back in, oh, about the mid 1990’s. Maybe he’ll catch up the rest of the way. I guess we should be excited.

Bully for him. Thanks to oil-money driven denialists like him, we’re only about, oh, 20 years late getting started doing something about an approaching global catastrophe. Before it’s all done with, there will be flooded cities, collapsed agriculture, refugees, a crashed global economy, probably a few wars, and a lot of dead people.

And Muller’s just one denialist of many. I wonder how they’re going to spin this?

NOTES:

• Climate Progress Bombshell: Koch-Funded Study Finds ‘Global Warming Is Real’, ‘On The High End’ And ‘Essentially All’ Due To Carbon Pollution
• National Geographic Science Blogs: Muller is still rubbish
• New York Times: “Converted” skeptic: Humans driving recent global warming
• Mike the Mad Biologist: Dear Former Climate Skeptic: the coalition of the sane does not need your validation
  “Look assholes, it’s not about you. It was never about you. It was about doing the right thing, and when it mattered you stood in the way. So get out of the way, and let us fix things. And everyone else, please remember their track record sucks. It will save us trouble in the long run.”