By Pete Spotts
Updated
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/44996377/ns/us_news-christian_science_monitor/#
A
new climate study shows that since the mid-1950s, global average temperatures
over land have risen by 0.9 degrees Celsius (1.6 degrees Fahrenheit),
confirming previous studies that have found a climate that has been warming –
in fits and starts – since around 1900.
Most
climate scientists attribute warming since the mid-1950, at least to some
degree, to carbon dioxide emissions from human activities – burning coal, oil,
and to a lesser extent gas, and from land-use changes.
The latest results
mirror those from earlier, independent studies by scientists at NASA's Goddard
Institute for Space Studies in
These
previous efforts, however, came under fire from some climate-change skeptics
who said they had detected serious flaws in the analytical methods and
temperature records the three groups used.
The new research,
which has yet to be formally published but which appears in four papers posted
on BerkeleyEarth.org, uses new analytical techniques and a much larger set of
records than the previous studies did.
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Indeed, the new
approach to analyzing temperatures records allowed the team to make use of
partial and older records previous studies had rejected as unusable, explains
Richard Muller, a physicist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory who
coordinated the effort.
In
the end, the team's result shows that the earlier studies "were done
carefully and that potential biases identified by climate-change skeptics did
not seriously affect" the conclusions these studies reached, said Dr.
Muller, who some climate activists have labeled a global-warming skeptic.
The approach
embodied in the main work "is very valuable, but may also need some
refinement," says Kevin Trenberth, a climate
scientist at the
Besides
confirming the temperature trend, the
And
it was able to show that even with a large number of critical
In essence, any
given measuring station may be off compared with surrounding stations. But if
it's off by a consistent amount, long-term trends will still show up.
The
study also highlighted the regional differences in temperature trends that can
lead people to say: What global warming?
Over
the past 70 years, the team found that about one-third of the measuring stations
in its global sample indicated cooling trends. Two-thirds showed warming
trends, with warm regions more than offsetting cool regions in developing a
global average.
Money for the new
study, dubbed the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature project, came from five
foundations, including one established by Microsoft founder Bill Gates and
another from the Charles Koch Charitable Foundation, widely seen as a source of
money for conservative organizations and initiatives that have fought efforts
to curb greenhouse-gas emissions.
The
work makes no attempt to attribute the rising temperatures to any particular
cause. Nor does it include ocean temperatures, the subject of a future study.
Still,
this confirmation could help move the discussion toward solutions, suggests Caspar Ammann, another climate
scientist at NCAR.
With
minor differences, trends in all four independent study group's temperature
records match up well from about 1900 on, with the Brekeley
and NOAA analyses showing a slightly higher level for the mid 2000s than the
NASA and Hadley analyses.
"The
rather irrational doubt and claims of a hoax simply don't make sense, and this
work might help restart the discussion about what is next," Dr. Ammann says.
The team Muller assembled is not built from the
usual cast of climate-science suspects, although Judith Curry, who head's
Georgia Tech's department of earth and atmospheric sciences, is a member of the
team.
Instead, Muller says
he drew heavily on scientists from astrophysics and particle physics with
expertise in teasing convincing, reproducable
evidence from enormous masses of hard-to-analyze data.
Among
them: Saul Perlmutter, who earlier this month shared
a Nobel Prize in Physics with two other scientists for discovering that the
universe is expanding at an increasing pace. The data Dr. Perlmutter
and his colleagues used to stun the world of cosmology – results that others
later confirmed – were far less abundant and far harder to analyze than
temperature records, Muller says.
The
team's independence and its willingness to devise its own analytical methods to
provide a reality check on the three other groups' results sold the Koch
foundation on the project, Muller adds.
Beyond the immediate
results, the group is trying to make such work more transparent to other
scientists than critics say has been the case in recent climate science.
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The team posted the
four papers on the BerkeleyEarth.org web site in advance of their publication,
or even acceptance for publication, in peer-reviewed journals. In addition, the
team posted the data and the computer programs used to process and analyze
them.
That
move has drawn criticism from some climate skeptics who intially
supported the group's efforts, arguing that the team was more interested in
publicity than in following proper scientific protocol of submitting to a
journal and awaiting the verdict of anonymous reviewers.
But
for more than a decade, researchers in physics, astrophysics, astronomy, and
other disciplines have routinely posted papers-in-progress on public websites for
review by colleagues. It's a way of getting an initial reality check on
research before engaging the formal publication process.
Some
researchers say they doubt this approach will work well for climate science,
despite criticisms surrounding what some see as the difficulty of getting other
researchers' data or access to the programs they used.
Although
the approach can lead to overloaded email inboxes, "I'm quite in favor of
these new ways of getting work out and allow a broader set of eyes to provide
feedback," says Ammann at NCAR.
This article, "Koch brothers accidentally fund study that proves
global warming," first appeared
on CSMonitor.com.
© 2011 The Christian Science Monitor