Funded by skeptics, new US study warms to climate change

Oct 22, 2011, 19:14 GMT

San Francisco - A new climate study released Friday and partly funded by skeptics of global warming has reaffirmed mainstream findings that the planet is getting hotter.

Researchers at the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperatures project found reliable evidence that temperatures around the globe had risen by an average of one degree Celsius since the mid-1950's.

The analysis of 1.6 billion temperature records going back 200 years also refuted the claims of climate change skeptics that much of the increase in temperature was due to the siting of monitoring stations in urban areas where the preponderance of roads and building causes urban 'heat islands.' Stations in rural areas also indicated rising temperatures, the group found.

The average annual temperatures plotted out by the project were remarkably similar to those calculated by NASA, the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the Intergovernmental Study on Climate Change.

'Our biggest surprise was that the new results agreed so closely with the warming values published previously by other teams in the United States and the UK,' professor Richard A. Muller, Berkeley Earth's scientific director, said in a statement.

Muller had been a climate change skeptic before the study, for which tope scientists like recent Nobel Prize winner Saul Perlmutter were recruited. Funding for the study included a 150,000-dollar grant from the Charles G Koch Charitable Foundation, a notable backer of rightwing causes.

US President Barack Obama has pushed for Congress to adopt controls on carbon emissions blamed for global warming. But among both Democrats and Republicans, sceptics have doubted the threat and argued that capping emissions will further hurt an already sluggish economy.

The US and China, which together produce at least 40 per cent of the world's carbon emissions, have refused to support international efforts for a new round of limits. Upcoming UN climate talks in Durban, South Africa, will provide another round of negotiations in late November and early December.