You must encountered many individuals in the past few years who would have argued that the whole ‘climate change’ clamor was one big political farce and that the ‘green taxes’ were just there to rob us of our money. And there are countless forums and threads which have argued that the cause of global warming is not conclusively human beings and that earth tends to go through warm and cold cycles. And to some extent these people were right. So far we have never had conclusive proof from a scientific perspective indicating that human activity and emission of greenhouse gases was the definitive reason for temperature increase globally. But the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature (Best) project founded by Prof Richard Muller has changed all that.
The project was founded by Professor Muller as he was in fact one of the climate change skeptics and believed that the current warmer weather was a natural cycle and not induced by human activity. But to his own shock, the data obtained from the project has forced him to change his mind. And like a good scientist who craws conclusions from proof available and data instead of searching for proof to support pre-determined conclusions, Professor Muller now believes that human activity is responsible for growing global temperatures.
The research has yielded data which showed that temperature of the Earth’s land has risen by 2.5F over the past 250 years, including an increase of 1.5 degrees over the most recent 50 years. And since all the data was automated and not done by hand, there is no scope of personal bias being induced in the process. The team collected 14.4 million land temperature observations from 44,455 sites spread across the planet and the pattern inferred from it is irrefutable and startling. Apart from the steep increase in land temperature in last 50 years, the next 50 years will post a similar raise in temperature and that could be hastened by growing Chinese use of coal.
And the biggest reason for this increase in land temperature has been traced to atmospheric carbon dioxide and the study has indicated a direct relation between both. A study conducted and led by a skeptic that has found conclusive evidence for climate change- Science might be ironic, but definetly does not lie.