A global warming skeptic says global warming is real after concluding a two-year study funded in part by global warming deniers who profit from big oil.
In a Wall Street Journal column, physicist Richard Muller justified his former position as a global warming skeptic.
He reminded readers about problems related to temperature-recording stations and temperature studies – reasons for skepticism.
Only by studying the issue himself was he able to conclude that in fact the climate is warming. His study led him to write, “[L]et me explain why you should not be a skeptic, at least not any longer.”
Muller wrote, “When we began our study, we felt that skeptics had raised legitimate issues, and we didn’t know what we’d find. Our results turned out to be close to those published by prior groups. We think that means that those groups had truly been very careful in their work, despite their inability to convince some skeptics of that. They managed to avoid bias in their data selection, homogenization and other corrections,” wrote Muller.
“Global warming is real,” said Muller.
That statement is at odds with the usual position of the opinion page in the Wall Street Journal, a safe haven for deniers.
Muller’s work debunks the agenda of the Koch Foundation, which helped to underwrite the study. The Koch brothers are climate polluters.
Now, the ice under the global warming deniers and skeptics is thinning as fast as the ice is thinning from climate change in the Arctic.
Disregarding their increasingly precarious position, deniers and skeptics moved quickly to discredit Muller.
Fundamentalist theologian Calvin Beisner announced that physicist Muller’s study was irrelevant.
He called Muller’s position a “rhetorical sleight of hand.” He said the study had inherent flaws and criticized his papers for not being peer reviewed.
Beisner heads the Cornwall Alliance, a global warming denial group of right-wing Christians more committed to the free market than environmental stewardship.
Beisner, other fundamentalist Christians and profiteers from global warming pollution (big oil and dirty coal) will likely be the last outpost of climate change deniers.
Science and experience are working against them.
The extreme drought in Texas and the massive flooding in Thailand are only the most recent weather extremes; other events have left folk wondering what’s wrong with the weather.
As extreme heat waves, massive dust storms, torrential downpours and intense tornadoes sweep across the nation, Americans are intuitively recognizing that the normal cycle is broken.
This recognition will open the door to a more thoughtful consideration of what the scientific community has been saying for years.
Worsening extreme weather is likely, according to an upcoming report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, as reported by Associated Press.
Time works against the climate-change deniers.
Would that the faith community worked for the environment, recovering the compelling biblical vision that human beings have a responsibility to guard the garden.
RobertParham is executive editor of EthicsDaily.com and executive director of its parent organization, the Baptist Center for Ethics.
Robert M. Parham (1953 – 2017) was the founder and executive director of Baptist Center for Ethics from 1991 to 2017. He served as executive editor of EthicsDaily.com, BCE’s website, from its launch in 2002 until 2017.