New analysis confirms global warming

Economist : Recent findings by the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature project (BEST) confirm the warning of climatologists at three prominent research organizations: Earth is warming up. From data gathered over the past 150 years, NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) in the US, and the University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit in the UK, independently had determined that global temperatures have risen about 0.9 °C in the past half century. To challenge those findings, the BEST team, led by Richard Muller of the University of California, Berkeley, used a novel statistical methodology “that incorporates more data than other climate models and requires less human judgment about how to handle it,” according to an article in Mother Jones. Nevertheless, BEST reached much the same conclusion as the other three organizations. “Our biggest surprise was that the new results agreed so closely with the warming values published previously by other teams in the US and the UK,” said Muller in an article for the BBC.