Australia: The Land Where Time Began

A biography of the Australian continent 

Climate Change Science - The Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature Study – BEST

A new method for obtaining a new Earth surface average temperature was sought, BEST, has been developed that could be compared with existing studies that have been undertaken government agencies in the US and the UK. The study was carried out by a physicist at the University of California (Berkeley) who was previously described as a climate change/global warming sceptic.

More than 39,000 unique stations were used in the study, 5 times the 7,280 stations comprising the Global Historical Climatology Network Monthly data set (GHCN-M).

A preliminary merged data set was created by the BEST Study that combined 1.6 billion temperature reports from 15 preexisting different data archives.

Concerns raised by sceptics and deniers, such as the urban heat island effect, poor quality of stations, and the risk of bias in the selection of data, were addressed by the BEST study. It was concluded by the BEST group that there was indeed a real warming trend, the land surface having warmed by 0.911^oC over the past 50 years, and that the results of their study mirrored the results of previous studies that had been carried out by the NOAA in the US, the Hadley Centre in the UK, the GISS Surface Temperature Analysis of NASA, and the Climate Research Unit (CRU), East Anglia in the UK. It was also found by the BEST study that the results obtained by these earlier studies had not been biased by either the urban heat island effect or the poor station quality.

Sources & Further reading

Farmer, G. Thomas & Cook, John, 2013, Climate Change Science: A modern Synthesis, The Physical Climate Vol.1, Springer Dordrecht