Earth’s temperature rises 1C
Baku, November 16 (AZERTAC). The world is getting warmer. And scientists have got an alarming video to prove it. According to researchers from the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperatures project (BEST) from Berkeley University in California, the Earth’s average global land temperature has risen by 1C since the 1950s. Led by controversial physicist, Professor Richard Muller, they used data from 1800 to 2009 to present their “irrefutable” proof.
Professor Judith Curry was one of ten experts attempting to compile the definitive temperature data. She claimed it had been ‘tarnished’ by Prof Muller ‘overselling’ the results in favour of global warming - and she has threatened to quit the project.
Prof Curry, of the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at the Georgia Institute of Technology, in the U.S., said their data actually showed average world temperatures had ‘paused’ since the late 1990s.
She also said that a graph published on the project’s website depicting temperatures from 1850 to 2006 appeared to ‘hide the decline’.
Berkeley Earth’s land surface temperature (BEST) data was taken from 1.6 billion temperature archived records dating back to the 1800s from 15 sources around the world.
It shows deviation from the mean temperature over two centuries - and overall global warming since the industrial revolution.
The 1C rise in temperature matches estimates by the world’s respected climate watchers who maintain official records.
These include the Met Office with the University of East Anglia, Nasa’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York and the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
Muller’s survey - the biggest open database of temperature records - was focused on producing a transparent and independent assessment of global warming.
The Berkeley study found that the so-called “urban heat” which makes cities warmer than surrounding rural areas, did not significantly contribute to average land temperature rises.
This, said the Guardian, is because urban regions make up less than one per cent of the Earth’s land area. And while “poor” stations might be less accurate, they recorded the same average warming trend
The U.S. team includes Saul Perlmutter, joint winner of this year's Nobel Prize in Physics for the discovery that the universe is expanding at an increasing rate.
The research has won backing from Peter Thorne at the Cooperative Institute for Climate and Satellites in North Carolina and chair of the International Surface Temperature Initiative.