Physicist Richard Muller was skeptical of the whole climate change claim, but unlike most skeptics who are content to be just armchair critics, he did something about it.
In 2010, Muller and a team of scientists started the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature (BEST), a project to rigorously review more than 39,000 temperature measurement stations across the globe (in a way that addressed the main criticism of climate sceptics, namely that the data are homogenized or adjusted. Muller's method, on the other hand, relies on raw data).
Last week, BEST released its latest paper concluding that not only is climate change real, it's also caused by humans. Muller wrote in The New York Times:
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.
Climate change skeptics, however, remain unmoved.
From the wikipedia entry on skepticism:
"A scientific (or empirical) skeptic is one who questions beliefs on the basis of scientific understanding. Most scientists, being scientific skeptics, test the reliability of certain kinds of claims by subjecting them to a systematic investigation using some form of the scientific method."
This is exactly what Muller did, which resulted in him changing his mind. This is also exactly what other so-called climate "skeptics" do not do. Calling them skeptics is a huge compliment they don't deserve. They are simply deniers, and denying doesn't require any work.
Check out this link:
http://www.populartechnology.net/2012/06/truth-about-richard-muller.html