This Koch-Head Climate-Change Denier Has Gone Rogue

Richard A. Muller, head of the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature Study, has accepted big money from the Charles G. Koch Charitable Foundation, and he was -- no surprise -- a dependable skeptic about global warming ... until now. He published an op-ed piece in the New York Times on Saturday with this title: "The Conversion of a Climate-Change Skeptic." Here's the money quote (hattip: The Progressive Pulse):

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. 

My total turnaround, in such a short time, is the result of careful and objective analysis by the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature project, which I founded with my daughter Elizabeth. Our results show that the average temperature of the earth’s land has risen by two and a half degrees Fahrenheit over the past 250 years, including an increase of one and a half degrees over the most recent 50 years. Moreover, it appears likely that essentially all of this increase results from the human emission of greenhouse gases.