A $600,000 study funded in part by fossil fuel industrialists like Charles Koch to disprove evidence that global warming is man made has backfired. Instead, Richard Muller convinced himself that climate change is indeed a consequence of spewing heat trapping carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.

A prominent physicist and skeptic of global warming spent two years trying to find out if mainstream climate scientists were wrong. In the end, he determined they were right: Temperatures really are rising rapidly.

The study of the world’s surface temperatures by Richard Muller was partially bankrolled by a foundation connected to global warming deniers. He pursued long-held skeptic theories in analyzing the data. He was spurred to action because of “Climategate,” a British scandal involving hacked emails of scientists.

Yet he found that the land is 1.6 degrees warmer than in the 1950s. Those numbers from Muller, who works at the University of California, Berkeley and Lawrence Berkeley National Lab, match those by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and NASA.

He said he went even further back, studying readings from Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson. His ultimate finding of a warming world, to be presented at a conference Monday, is no different from what mainstream climate scientists have been saying for decades.

Rather than motivating tighter regulations and enforcement of harmful emissions, Muller is now receiving criticism from the denier camp for having broken ranks with industrial interests and last year the US emitted record levels of CO2.

The world pumped about 512 million more tonnes of carbon into the air in 2010 than it did in 2009. That’s an increase of six per cent. That amount of extra pollution eclipses the individual emissions of all but three countries — China, the United States and India, the world’s top producers of greenhouse gases.

It is a “monster” increase that is unheard of, said Gregg Marland, a professor of geology at Appalachian State University, who has helped calculate Department of Energy figures in the past.

Extra pollution in China and the U.S. account for more than half the increase in emissions last year, Marland said.

“It’s a big jump,” said Tom Boden, director of the Energy Department’s Carbon Dioxide Information Analysis Center at Oak Ridge National Lab. “From an emissions standpoint, the global financial crisis seems to be over.”
Fossil fuel use main contributor

Boden said that in 2010 people were traveling, and manufacturing was back up worldwide, spurring the use of fossil fuels, the chief contributor of man-made climate change.

India and China are huge users of coal. Burning coal is the biggest carbon source worldwide and emissions from that jumped nearly eight percent in 2010.

These emission rates are forecast to raise the global temperature at least four degrees by the end of the century. At the same time, efficient carbon sinks like the Elliott State Forest are being cut down at an ever increasing rate to satisfy one industry component while ignoring the value of recreation, habitat and carbon sequestration.