Berkeley Earth

The Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature project ( "BEST" ) is a project for the quantification of global warming, which was founded by Richard A. Muller ( University of California, Berkeley ) and his wife Elizabeth at the beginning of 2010 to life. After public criticism of existing projects should provide a scientifically sound representation of the situation.

Procedure

For this purpose, a fundamentally new, much larger data base ( 5x bigger than before ) was analyzed consisting of temperature data from globally distributed ground stations with the specially designed mathematical methods. Known objections (such as that so-called " heat island effects " or incorrectly applied statistical methods would simulate a warming) were specifically taken into account in the development of methods to arrive at robust conclusions in these areas.

Remarkably, be made on the official website of the project, all components for public discussion and offered for download: from the raw data on the descriptions of mathematical or statistical methods specifically developed to the source code of the software everything is open and completely transparent, eliminating any criticism in this direction of house is withdrawn from the bottom.

In March 2014 BEST announced that the record for oceanic data has been expanded.

Team

The team, consisting of a skeleton crew of eleven people, including next two statisticians - claims to be specialists in the normalization of large, inconsistent amounts of data - including six physicists, including Nobel Prize winner Saul Perlmutter physics. Further part of the research team, the climatologist Judith A. Curry.

It is worth mentioning that R.Muller had expressed in the past skeptical about results of climate research.

Result

The investigation confirmed previous findings largely so that the criticism of the latter has been ruled indirectly. On 20 October 2011, the result was published as ' preliminary results ' for discussion, and there were five articles to the Journal JGR Atmosphere submitted. All 5 news articles went through the peer review in the following period and were accepted ..

Criticism

Criticism of the study was put forward by Ross McKitrick, of the urban heat island effect doubted (which is discussed separately in a paper by BEST) due to methodological error results concerning.