Dear Editor:
When a prominent climate change skeptic publishes a study that concludes global warming is real, it's time for people to stand up and take notice.
And that's exactly what has happened: Physicist Richard Muller, a prominent climate change skeptic, has publicly stated that he no longer doubts global warming is real or that it is caused by humans.
Muller spent two years intensively researching the question and confirmed that, over the last 50 years, global temperature has risen 0.9 degrees Celsius, or 1.6 degrees Fahrenheit, which is exactly the same figure the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change arrived at.
While he expressed a degree of caution regarding how much climate change is occurring naturally and how much is human-caused, the bottom line finding of his research is that natural causation alone cannot explain the changes in climate that have been observed.
This means that every ton of greenhouse gas we pump into the atmosphere increases the risks of dangerous climate change impacts, and a significant amount of the carbon dioxide we emit today will still be in the atmosphere causing problems a thousand years from now.
Given information like this, we need to think very carefully about the legacy we're creating for future generations and then step up our efforts to bring clean, green, renewable energy sources online, not just here in British Columbia but around the world.
Pamela Gardner, Burnaby
