Environment, Climate | featured news

Carbon dioxide emissions hit an unexpected 20-year low earlier this year, mainly because utilities have switched from coal to natural gas.

In an opinion piece in Saturday’s New York Times titled “The Conversion of a Climate-Change Skeptic,” Muller writes: “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.”

Global emissions of carbon dioxide from fossil-fuel burning jumped by 5.9 percent, upending the notion that the brief decline during the recession might persist.