Hello! My name’s Jo and I’m one of the fantastic, new volunteers here at Project Dirt. With barely a few days in, they already have me writing blogs for you lovely dirters to read. I was chucked an article from the Guardian about climate change and was banished from the office until I had blogged about it. Well...maybe it wasn’t quite that mean. But here it is, my very first blog, enjoy!
The great climate change debate. Does climate change exist? Or is it another trendy theory that will soon fade out of fashion and only remain dear to a few ever-lasting believers like velvet flares and platform shoes with live goldfish? Richard Muller intends to find out once for all.
As a professor of physics at Berkeley University and well respected for his work on the big bang theory, ice ages and moon craters, Muller is pretty much a Top Dog when it comes to science stuff. Appealing to all demographics by spending 30 years advising the US government on defence and also writing award winning lectures that became a YouTube phenomenon, if anyone is up to the job of answering this question, Muller is the man to do it.
His project is called The Berkley Earth Project. It’s simple enough. He wants to provide an un-biased, non-political, independently researched assessment of global warming. See, simple.
Starting from scratch he and his team are researching over a 100 years of data from thousands of different instruments all around the world. They will connect them all together and generate the planets temperature changes. Now I know what you’re thinking, this doesn’t sound particularly new and groundbreaking. So let me explain. All the 1.6 billion data points of information that Muller and his team find are being published online for anyone to look at, challenge and discuss. No hiding places, no excuses and no political spinning.
"We are bringing the spirit of science back to a subject that has become too argumentative and too contentious," Muller says, over a cup of tea. "We are an independent, non-political, non-partisan group. We will gather the data, do the analysis, present the results and make all of it available. There will be no spin, whatever we find."
This mass production of results isn’t new. Nasa, The National Oceanic and Asmospheric Administration (Noaa) and the Met Office all collect readings from around the world to determine the earth’s average temperature. However, each organisation produces a different set of results due to how they do their workings out. The overall results is roughly the same though: we’re 0.75C hotter now than pre-industrial times.
So why produce another set of results? Muller believes that Nasa, Noaa and the Met Office is not using up to date data and their findings are misrepresented. Big errors such as the 2009 ‘Climategate’ email fiasco certainly don’t install trust into the public and their belief in global warming either. Whatever the reason, these organisations haven’t convinced everyone that climate change is a real threat. Or indeed that it is no threat at all.
So step up Muller and team. Working for a year already and gathering records from 39,340 individual stations worldwide so far the Berkeley team still have a lot of work to do; including encouraging belief in their project from other scientists. For every believer in Berkeley Earth there is a sceptic, with many not having heard of the project or claiming he is doing no more or less than any other research group out there. Either way, his research can only improve and extend our knowledge of climate change, whatever the end result. With universal agreement on theories being the stuff that scientist’s dreams are made from, I believe that we should all keep on avoiding plastic bags, cycling to work and composting to our hearts content. Just in case. And because velvet flares always have the potential to come strutting back onto the catwalk.
http://projectdirt.com/profiles/blogs/definitive-proof-of-climate
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