Nov
04
04
Following the furore surrounding "Climategate" in 2009 (including claims that global warming had been exaggerated), a new independent study was initiated to re-examine the issues of anthropogenic (man-made) global warming. According to the BBC, The study was funded in part by sources that have backed organisations lobbying against climate action.
The results from the study have now been released – and: surprise! The Earth's surface really is getting warmer, the study concluded.
The Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature Study set out to resolve criticism of former temperature analyses to help open a more transparent dialogue about the science of climate change by making their data, methodologies, and findings public. The team of 10 scientists, headed by Richard Muller, were concerned that other climate projects had deliberately concealed discordant data. "Science is best done when the problems with the analysis are candidly shared," said Saul Perlmutter, one of the scientists on the project and recent Nobel Physics Prize winner.
Their journey involved combining 1.6 million temperature reports (raw unedited data) from 15 pre-existing data archives for a total of nearly 40,000 weather stations worldwide. They then identified dubious data and merged identical data, and analysed it all using new algorithms to plot the global temperature trend over land since 1800. The objectives of the study were as follows:
- To merge existing surface station temperature data sets into a new comprehensive raw data set with a common format that could be used for weather and climate research
- To review existing temperature processing algorithms for averaging, homogenization, and error analysis to understand both their advantages and their limitations
- To develop new approaches and alternative statistical methods that may be able to effectively remove some of the limitations present in existing algorithms
- To create and publish a new global surface temperature record and associated uncertainty analysis
- To provide an open platform for further analysis by publishing our complete data and software code as well as tools to aid both professional and amateur exploration of the data
Their findings confirm what other climate scientists have been saying for some time:
- Annual land-surface average temperature has increased by 1 degree Celsius since the 1950s.
- They acknowledge that anthropogenic global warming driven by greenhouse gas emissions sent up by human activity is definitely partly to blame for rising temperatures.
- Previous studies on land temperature were done carefully and that biases did not impair the conclusions.
"Our biggest surprise was that the new results agreed so closely with the warming values published previously by other teams in the US and the UK," said Prof Muller. The group has initially published their results on their website and are looking for comments and feedback, after which they will likely publish in a peer-reviewed journal.
