Richard Muller. muller.lbl.gov UC Berkeley physicist, and longtime climate skeptic, Richard Muller has finally gone on the offensive, publicly admitting he was wrong to doubt global-warming data in a piece for The Wall Street Journal.

The outspoken professor, who gained notoriety in the climate-denial community for his rants against Al Gore and fueling the fire on Climategate, decided to take matters into his own hands earlier this year by creating an independent study to assess specific objections raised by climate skeptics.

Muller and a team of researchers working under the Berkley Earth Surface Temperature Project, analyzed more than 1.6 billion data points collected from more than 39,000 temperature stations around the world to find that their results were "close to those published by prior groups," including estimates from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

The evidence proved convincing, even to a habitual climate disbeliever.

"Global warming is real. Perhaps our results will help cool this portion of the climate debate," Muller concluded.