The Heat Is On

For more than a century, weather stations and ships have kept temperature records, and three major compilations of mean global temperatures have suggested that steady warming is underway. The Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature group, physicists and others new to climate science, with support from the conservative Koch Foundation, set out in early 2010 to review the science. Skeptics have long pointed to inconsistencies and manipulations in the US National Oceanic Atmospheric Administration and other studies to compensate for weather gauges located near growing cities, airports, asphalt and other sources of heat. “The Berkeley Earth papers suggest their analysis is able to accommodate these biases,” reports the Economist. For example, one innovation included geospatial correlations, known as kriging, to estimate temperatures at points between weather stations. The group reports that its findings largely concur with those of the NOAA: Over the past 50 years, land surface has warmed by about 0.9°C. – YaleGlobal