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Prominent physicist no longer a climate change skeptic

UC Berkeley physics professor Richard Muller, a long-time climate change skeptic, now believes that global warming is real and happening.

UC Berkeley physics professor Richard Muller, a long-time climate change skeptic, now believes that global warming is real and happening. Not only that, but he's being very vocal about it.

"Three years ago I identified problems in previous climate studies that, in my mind, threw doubt on the very existence of global warming." Muller wrote in a recent New York Times op-ed. "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."


Muller appeared on Monday's The Rachel Maddow Show to discuss his conversion. "If we are a cause, we can do something about it," he said about the importance of recognizing man-made global warming. "I personally am concerned not with the current global warming, which I think has been quite small. It's with the future global warming where the danger lies."

"I'm hoping we can settle the science," he said, "so the more contentious issue, what to do about it, can then be debated."