It’s officially official! The Earth is heating up. This is the conclusion of the most up-to-date and comprehensive study into recent changes in Earth’s land surface temperatures. The Berkeley Earth Project (BEP), based at the University of California, was developed by a group of climate scientists and statisticians in response to criticisms by climate sceptics of existing surface temperature records. The project combined over 1.6 billion measurements from the last two hundred years from over 39,000 weather stations globally, and utilised new statistical algorithms to integrate the multiple fragmented data sets available from the historical record. Their results reveal an 1°C increase in average global temperature since the 1950’s, a conclusion that is supported by multiple existing temperature records produced by the Met Office, NASA, the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the Climate Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia.

So you may ask why is this news worthy, if the scientific community already knew the Earth was heating up? Well, unless you have had your head stuck in a bucket over the last few years, you will know that the climate science community has had a pretty rough time of it lately. Death threats, slander and the risk of a ruined career are all possibilities climate scientists must face today. Despite an overwhelming consensus held by the vast majority of climate scientists that the Earth is warming, there is still a palpable disparity between this agreement and the views held by a small but very vocal and influential group of climate change sceptics.

No one is resistant to their often overblown criticism: the Nobel Prize winning Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which serves as a platform for climate scientists to communicate their findings in a format directly accessible to policy makers, politicians, business leaders and the public, was heavily criticised last year for accidentally including a small piece of literature in one of their reports that had not been subjected to peer review. Another example of attack was the ‘Climategate’ ‘scandal’ in 2009, when hackers released thousands of personal emails written by scientists based at the CRU into the public domain. The emails were forensically analysed by climate sceptics for evidence of data manipulation and falsification, causing a huge slew of global governmental inquires into climate science, and resulting in untold damage to the public’s opinion of the field.

Surface temperature records such as those produced by the hacked CRU scientists have long been an easy target for climate change sceptics – criticisms include data falsification, sample bias, large degrees of errors on temperature estimates, poor spatial coverage and increasing urban development. It is no small coincidence that some of the scientists involved in the BEP are considered as some of the most vocal climate change sceptics in the academic world, with the project developed to address these very concerns. The ultimate irony, therefore, lies in the fact that despite the criticisms of existing records, the attempt to produce a more ‘robust’ temperature record has produced the exact same results as the previous records.

Another possible issue is the BEP’s decision to release their findings to the public before subjecting them to peer review – they argue that an open access wiki-style forum is better for the scientific process than independent reviews by academic peers, an opinion that may be more damaging to the robustness of their conclusions than they realise. Another less publicised concern, though bordering in the conspiracy realm, are questions being asked about the motivations behind the funding sources of the BEP – in particular, the Novim Group, a charitable NGO who funds the BEP and only one other research program investigating climate engineering in response to dramatic climate change.

The basic notion that we are performing a very dangerous experiment with our planet now seems difficult to refute

Professor Sir Brian Hoskins, director of the Grantham Institute of Climate Change and a climate change advisor to the government, agrees that the findings of the Berkeley Earth Project are not particularly groundbreaking: “The overall message – that by using a different technique the same answer is produced that others have found – is not usually seen as significant enough for a paper in a major journal.” As recognised by the BEP group, one of the complaints held by some non-specialists critical of how climate science is produced is the isolated and potentially closed off nature of the formal peer review process. Without getting into the philosophy behind the ensuring scientific rigour, there is no doubt that, by and large, independent review by peers is an excellent form of improving the quality of scientific publications. Professor Hoskins expressed some concern about the BEP’s decision to hold back on subjecting their findings and methods to peer review before releasing them into the public realm. “After all of the criticism of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, I am really surprised that they have done this. I am sure that most academics feel that their papers are improved through the formal and informal peer review process and I do not think we should circumvent this.” He agreed that whilst it is possible that the closed-off nature of the peer review process can damage the public’s perception of climate change research, the reaction should not be to get rid of it. “It is healthy for climate science to be treated in a sceptical manner: like all science it should be continually probed and tested. Hopefully this work will help us move on to discuss the really challenging science of climate variability and change and the implications of it. However the basic notion that we are performing a very dangerous experiment with our planet now seems very difficult to refute.”

Whilst it seems that sceptics can now finally agree with the scientific community that the Earth is indeed warming dangerously, they still have many questions that they feel remain unanswered, such as whether rising greenhouse gas emissions are in fact causing climate change. Time is running out to convince the world that this is the case, and despite its foibles and motivations, programs like the BEP are certainly a step in the right direction.