I've been something of a concerned skeptic regarding CO2 emissions and
greenhouse effect on climate change. There's been a fair amount of
hard evidence that the earth is warming up but there has been plenty
of room for doubt whether or not the cause was man made or not.

This new study is significant for a number of reasons: 1) The
scientists conducting the study have heretofore regarded themselves as
skeptics; and 2) Much of their funding comes from the petroleum
industry, in fact, a particularly conservative part of the industry.
In short, this is not good news and we should pay attention regardless
of political beliefs.

http://www.wunderground.com/blog/Jef...s/article.html

Excerpts from the findings:

"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."

"Despite the special interest of their funders, BEST has made it
clear, both on their web site and in the results they've come to, that
funding sources will not play a role in the results of their research,
and that they "will be presented with full transparency."

"Just as important, our record is long enough that we could search for
the fingerprint of solar variability, based on the historical record
of sunspots. That fingerprint is absent. Although the I.P.C.C. allowed
for the possibility that variations in sunlight could have ended the
Little Ice Age, a period of cooling from the 14th century to about
1850, our data argues strongly that the temperature rise of the past
250 years cannot be attributed to solar changes."

More he

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/30/opinion/the-conversion-of-a-climate-change-skeptic.html?_r=1