New Study Confirms Climate Change
Debunks claims of the deniers
Climate change skeptics, mostly funded by big fossil fuel corporations like Exxon, have long sought to poke holes in the very complex data that’s used to examine global temperatures. But a new study, funded and supervised in part by climate skeptics, confirms what most scientists have been concluding for a long time: the planet is heating up.
One of those skeptics, Professor Richard Muller, a physicist at the University of California, Berkeley, who has been an outspoken critic of the science underpinning global warming, said that there is little doubt in his mind the phenomenon of rising land temperatures is real.
Over the past two years, Muller has chaired a group of scientists who have carried out an exhaustive analysis of more than 1.6 billion temperature recordings collected from more than 39,000 weather stations at land sites around the world.
The purpose of the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature Study (BEST) was specifically to test the findings of other studies. It was part-funded by US billionaire brothers Charles and David Koch, who have generally leaned toward the side of the climate change deniers.
“When we began our study,” Professor Muller said, “we felt that skeptics had raised legitimate issues, and we didn’t know what we’d find. Our results turned out to be close to those published by prior groups. We think that means that those groups had truly been very careful in their work.”
For a more detailed report on the study, check out this article in the Christian Science Monitor.
The Economist also explains the study in some detail.
A well-known climate change denier tries to debunk the BEST report in the London Telegraph.
And a Huffington Post writer debunks the debunker in this article.