Global warming 'confirmed' by independent study

The Earth's surface really is getting warmer, a new analysis by a US scientific group set up in the wake of the "Climategate" affair has concluded.

The Berkeley Earth Project has used new methods and some new data, but finds the same warming trend seen by groups such as the UK Met Office and Nasa.

The project received funds from sources that back organisations lobbying against action on climate change.

"Climategate", in 2009, involved claims global warming had been exaggerated.

Emails of University of East Anglia (UEA) climate scientists were hacked, posted online and used by critics to allege manipulation of climate change data.

Fresh start
The Berkeley group says it has also found evidence that changing sea temperatures in the north Atlantic may be a major reason why the Earth's average temperature varies globally from year to year.


The group includes physicist Saul Perlmutter, a Nobel Prize winner this year
The project was established by University of California physics professor Richard Muller, who was concerned by claims that established teams of climate researchers had not been entirely open with their data.

He gathered a team of 10 scientists, mostly physicists, including such luminaries as Saul Perlmutter, winner of this year's Nobel Physics Prize for research showing the Universe's expansion is accelerating.

Funding came from a number of sources, including charitable foundations maintained by the Koch brothers, the billionaire US industrialists, who have also donated large sums to organisations lobbying against acceptance of man-made global warming.

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Our biggest surprise was that the new results agreed so closely with the warming values published previously”

Richard Muller
Berkeley group founder
"I was deeply concerned that the group [at UEA] had concealed discordant data," Prof Muller told BBC News.

"Science is best done when the problems with the analysis are candidly shared."

The group's work also examined claims from "sceptical" bloggers that temperature data from weather stations did not show a true global warming trend.

The claim was that many stations have registered warming because they are located in or near cities, and those cities have been growing - the urban heat island effect.

The Berkeley group found about 40,000 weather stations around the world whose output has been recorded and stored in digital form.

It developed a new way of analysing the data to plot the global temperature trend over land since 1800.

What came out was a graph remarkably similar to those produced by the world's three most important and established groups, whose work had been decried as unreliable and shoddy in climate sceptic circles.


The Berkeley group's record of global land temperature mirrors existing ones closely
Two of those three records are maintained in the US, by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (Noaa) and National Aeronautics and Space Administration (Nasa).

The third is a collaboration between the UK Met Office and UEA's Climatic Research Unit (CRU), from which the e-mails that formed the basis of the "Climategate" furore were hacked two years ago.

"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.

"This confirms that these studies were done carefully and that potential biases identified by climate change sceptics did not seriously affect their conclusions."

Since the 1950s, the average temperature over land has increased by 1C, the group found.

They also report that although the urban heat island effect is real - which is well-established - it is not behind the warming registered by the majority of weather stations around the world.

They also showed that in the US, weather stations rated as "high quality" by Noaa showed the same warming trend as those rated as "low quality".

Source:www.bbc.co.uk...

Looks like we have moved to the point where we can no longer deny that the Earth is warming, and that things are changing dramatically. Let's stop believing that pollution isn't going to change the Earth.

reply to post by samlf3rd


Nobody ever denied the Earth's temp was dynamic. Or at least shouldn't have.

Other thread.

reply to post by samlf3rd


We've known this for quite some time. The problem isn't that we don't know if it's really warming, but whether man is causing the warming. There is a lot of evidence showing that the rest of the solar system is undergoing the same temperature increase. There was a thread on it with sources right here on this site. www.abovetopsecret.com...

So while we know the entire solar system is rising in temperature, there is no solid proof that Earth's climate change is due to mankind.

We know the earth goes through a very steady cycle of climate change where it steadily warms then suddenly cools causing an ice age. It's theorized that we're reaching a climate maximum and will soon be entering into an ice age when the planet suddenly cools. www.skepticalscience.com...

So I leave it up to you guys to figure out whether man-made global warming is real or not. I'm in the camp that we may be having an effect, but it's negligible compared to the natural cycles the planet undergoes. Also from my basic understanding of the greenhouse effect, wouldn't the atmospheric pressure increase if there was in fact larger amounts of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere? I'll leave that question up to someone who knows more than I.

This issue on global warming etc is not really going to matter when oil reaches a price where no one can afford to even make tires to put on cars or to even drive period. This whole world will collapse without oil. The mail wont get delivered, food wont be getting delivered and people wont be going to jobs to study the earth and how warm it's getting.

Which in my mind would be the best thing for this world. Everyone standard of living will be on the same level and everything will reset. Just my opinion though.

While we should strive to minimize pollution, climate control on the level needed to sustain a more even global temperature is absurb, at least for our current civilizaton.