Global Warming is a Fact

A recent editorial in the Charleston Gazette points out that there are still many decision makers that doubt the relationship between greenhouse gases in the atmosphere and the warming of the earth. “What’s next?  No science of any sort allowed in public schools?”

Shawn Lawrence Otto, author of Fool Me Twice: Fighting the Assault on Science in America, has written that reputable biologists agree that evolution is a bedrock fact of biology — just as all reputable climatologists agree that global warming is real. The Los Angeles Times has said that the doubting scientists are “fossil-fuel-industry-funded ‘experts’ who tend to have little background in climatology and who publish non-peer-reviewed papers in junk magazines.”

Study: Global Warming is Real

“Global warming is real,” a team of scientists at the University of California at Berkeley have reported. Since the 1950s, the earth has warmed about 1° C. Richard Muller and a team of colleagues, including Saul Perlmutter, 2011 Nobel Prize winner in physics, started the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature study to review and assess the accuracy of existing land temperature data. The team looked at temperature data from 15 previous studies—amounting to some 1.6 billion combined records dating back to 1800—on the subject. 

Muller says that concerns raised by global warming skeptics were specifically addressed, including the urban heat island effect, poor station quality, and data selection bias. The group’s results aligned closely with previous studies’ findings, including ones carried out by groups such as NASA, the Hadley Center, and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. 

“Our biggest surprise was that the new results agreed so closely with the warming values published previously,” Muller said in a statement. “This confirms that these studies were done carefully and that potential biases identified by climate change skeptics did not seriously affect their conclusions.”