Oil industry-funded “BEST” study finds global warming is real, manmade

By Angela Fritz

Published: 12:21 AM GMT on July 30, 2012

The Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature (BEST) group is in the news again, surprising climate change skeptics with results from a new study that shows the earth has warmed 2.5 °F over the past 250 years, and 1.5 °F over the past fifty years, and that “essentially all of this increase results from the human emission of greenhouse gases.” Dr. Richard Muller, who heads the BEST team, now considers himself a “converted skeptic,” which he wrote about in a New York Times op-edon Saturday:

“Call me a converted skeptic. 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.”

Not only is the lead scientist of the project a former climate change skeptic, BEST itself is funded by the Charles G. Koch Charitable Foundation, an organization that is rooted deep in the oil industry and the manufactured doubt industry.