Berkeley Earth

Berkeley Earth team members include:[11]

• Richard A. Muller, founder and Scientific Director. Professor of Physics, UCB and Senior Scientist, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. Muller is a member of the JASON Defense Advisory Group who has been critical of other climate temperature studies before this project.[12][13]
• Elizabeth Muller, Founder and Executive Director
• Robert Rohde, lead scientist. Ph.D. in physics, University of California, Berkeley. Rohde's scientific interests include earth sciences, climatology, and scientific graphics. Rohde is the founder of Global Warming Art.
• Zeke Hausfather, scientist
• Steven Mosher, scientist, co-author of Climategate: The Crutape Letters
• Saul Perlmutter, Nobel Prize-winning astrophysicist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and Professor of Physics at UCB.
• Arthur H. Rosenfeld, professor of physics at UCB and former California Energy Commissioner. The research he directed at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory led to the development of compact fluorescent lamps.
• Jonathan Wurtele, professor of physics
• Will Graser

Former team members[14]

• Sebastian Wickenburg, Ph.D. Candidate in Physics
• Charlotte Wickham, statistical scientist
• Don Groom, physicist
• Robert Jacobsen, Professor of Physics at UCB and an expert in analyses of large data sets.
• David Brillinger, statistical scientist. Professor of Statistics at UCB. A contributor to the theory of time series analysis.
• Judith Curry, climatologist and Chair of the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at the Georgia Institute of Technology.
• Pamela Hyde, Communications and Project Director
• John Li, Energy Geoscience intern

Board of Directors[15]

• Elizabeth Muller, president and chair, managing partner of Global Shale.
• Will Glaser, Treasurer, founded Pandora Music
• Bill Shireman, Secretary "He develops profitable business strategies that drive pollution down and profits up."
• Richard Muller, Board Director
• Art Rosenfeld, Board Director
• Marlan W. Downey, Board Director, Former President of the international subsidiary of Shell Oil; founder of Roxanna Oil; former president of Arco International
• Jim Boettcher, Board Director; investments

After completing the analysis of the full land temperature data set, consisting of more than 1.6 billion temperature measurements dating back to the 1800s from 15 sources around the world, and originating from more than 39,000 temperature stations worldwide, the group submitted four papers for peer-review and publication in scientific journals. The Berkeley Earth study did not assess temperature changes in the oceans, nor try to assess how much of the observed warming is due to human action.[9] The Berkeley Earth team also released the preliminary findings to the public on October 20, 2011, in order to promote additional scrutiny. The data sets and programs used to analyze the information, and the papers undergoing peer review were also made available to the public.[7][8][9]

The Berkeley Earth study addressed scientific concerns raised by skeptics including urban heat island effect, poor station quality, and the risk of data selection bias. The team's initial conclusions are the following:[7][8][9][10]

• The urban heat island effect and poor station quality did not bias the results obtained from earlier studies carried out by the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), the Hadley Centre and NASA's GISS Surface Temperature Analysis. The team found that the urban heat island effect is locally large and real, but does not contribute significantly to the average land temperature rise, as the planet's urban regions amount to less than 1% of the land area. The study also found that while stations considered "poor" might be less accurate, they recorded the same average warming trend.
• Global temperatures closely matched previous studies from NASA GISS, NOAA and the Hadley Centre, that have found global warming trends. The Berkeley Earth group estimates that over the past 50 years the land surface warmed by 0.911 °C, just 2% less than NOAA's estimate. The team scientific director stated that "...this confirms that these studies were done carefully and that potential biases identified by climate change sceptics did not seriously affect their conclusions."[7]
• About 1/3 of temperature sites around the world with records of 70 years or longer reported cooling (including much of the United States and northern Europe). But 2/3 of the sites show warming. Individual temperature histories reported from a single location are frequently noisy and/or unreliable, and it is always necessary to compare and combine many records to understand the true pattern of global warming.
• The Atlantic multidecadal oscillation (AMO) has played a larger role than previously thought. The El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO) is generally thought to be the main reason for inter-annual warming or cooling, but the Berkeley Earth team's analysis found that the global temperature correlates more closely with the state of the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation index, which is a measure of sea surface temperature in the north Atlantic.

The Berkeley Earth analysis uses a new methodology and was tested against much of the same data as NOAA and NASA. The group uses an algorithm that attaches an automatic weighting to every data point, according to its consistency with comparable readings. The team claims this approach allows the inclusion of outlandish readings without distorting the result and standard statistical techniques were used to remove outliers. The methodology also avoids traditional procedures that require long, continuous data segments, thus accommodating short sequences, such as those provided by temporary weather stations. This innovation allowed the group to compile an earlier record than its predecessors, starting from 1800, but with a high degree of uncertainty because at the time there were only two weather stations in America, just a few in Europe and one in Asia.[8][16]

Since the publication of its papers in 2013, Berkeley Earth has broadened its scope. Berkeley Earth has three program areas of work: 1) further scientific investigations on the nature of climate change and extreme weather events, 2) an education and communications program, and 3) evaluation of mitigation efforts in developed and developing economies, with a focus on energy conservation and the use of natural gas as a bridging fuel.[22][23][24]

In an op-ed published in The New York Times on 28 July 2012, Muller announced further findings from the project. He said their analysis showed that average global land temperatures had increased by 2.5 °F (1.4 °C) in 250 years, with the increase in the last 50 years being 1.5 °F (0.8 °C), and it seemed likely that this increase was entirely due to human caused greenhouse gas emissions. His opening paragraph stated:

Call me a converted skeptic. Three years ago I identified problems in previous climate studies that, in my mind, threw doubt on the very existence of global warming. Last year, following an intensive research effort involving a dozen scientists, I concluded that global warming was real and that the prior estimates of the rate of warming were correct. I'm now going a step further: Humans are almost entirely the cause.[13]

He said that their findings were stronger than those shown in the IPCC Fourth Assessment Report. Their analysis, set out in five scientific papers now being subjected to scrutiny by others, had used statistical methods which Robert Rohde had developed and had paid particular attention to overcoming issues that skeptics had questioned, including the urban heat island effect, poor station quality, data selection and data adjustment. In the fifth paper which they now made public, they fitted the shape of the record to various forcings including volcanoes, solar activity and sunspots. They found that the shape best matched the curve of the calculated greenhouse effect from human-caused greenhouse gas emissions. Muller said he still found "that much, if not most, of what is attributed to climate change is speculative, exaggerated or just plain wrong. I've analyzed some of the most alarmist claims, and my skepticism about them hasn't changed."[13]

• Novim Projects; Surface Temperature
• Global warming controversy

• Berkeley Earth home page
• Papers submitted for review (as of October 2011):

1. Berkeley Earth Temperature Averaging Process
2. Influence of Urban Heating on the Global Temperature Land Average
3. Earth Atmospheric Land Surface Temperature and Station Quality in the United States
4. Decadal Variations in the Global Atmospheric Land Temperatures