Editor:

When a prominent climate change sceptic 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 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 United Nations 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 of his research is that natural causation alone cannot explain the changes in climate.

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.

We need to think about the legacy we’re creating for future generations and step up our efforts to bring clean, green, renewable energy sources online.

Pamela Gardner

Burnaby