New US analysis concludes climate change is happening
Fri 21 October 2011
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The Berkeley Earth Project - a US-based study of climate interactions - says that the Earth's surface is getting warmer. The study, by scientists at the University of California, Berkeley, is the most comprehensive independent review of historical temperature records to date. It confirms the warming trend observed by the UK Met Office and Nasa. Meanwhile a separate report by UK scientists, published in Nature, says that global temperature increase could exceed the two degrees regarded as 'safe' within the lifetime of some people living today.
The Berkeley Earth Project found that found that the average global land temperature has risen by around 1 degree Celsius since the mid-1950s. The Berkeley group used data from about 40,000 weather stations around the world whose output has been recorded and stored in digital form.
The project's findings are significant as they counter recent challenges to the mainstream view of climate science which involved claims that global warming had been exaggerated.
The Berkeley Earth Project 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.
Muller 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.
Richard Muller said (quoted by the BBC): "Our biggest surprise was that the new results agreed so closely with the warming values published previously. I was deeply concerned that the group [at UEA] had concealed discordant data."
Climate change sceptics have claimed 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.
Notably, according to the BBC, the Berkeley Earth Project has also received funds from sources that back organisations lobbying against action on climate change. These included charitable foundations maintained by the Koch brothers, the billionaire US industrialists, who have also donated large sums to climate sceptic campaigns.
Meanwhkle, the results of a UK-based study published in the journal Nature, suggest that global temperature rise could exceed "safe" levels of two degrees Celsius in some parts of the world in many of our lifetimes if greenhouse gas emissions continue to increase.
Emissions levels need to be reduced soon and quickly, according to the study by academics at the universities of Reading and Oxford, the UK's Met Office Hadley Center and the Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand.
Next month, nations will meet for the next U.N. climate summit in Durban, South Africa, where a binding pact to reduce emissions looks unlikely to be delivered.
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