The Berkeley Earth Project has confirmed that global warming is a reality, with the average global land temperature rising by around 1C since the mid-1950s.

The project compiled more than a billion temperature records from 15 sources around the world, some dating back to the 1800s.

University of California physics professor Richard Muller set up the project partly in response to "climategate", when emails from the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia were hacked and claims were made that researchers had not been open with their data.

This new data is completely out in the open, available for us all to read on the Berkeley team’s website, leading to some critics claiming it is wrong to release the findings before they have been peer reviewed.

But it is hardly surprising news; all the data concurs with the findings of other major groups who have chronicled the world’s climate, including Nasa’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York, the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and the Met Office’s Hadley Centre.

Perhaps surprisingly, some of the funding for this project came from those who so far have been sceptical about global warming, including billionaire US industrialists the Koch brothers.

The team has been keen to draw distinctions though between sceptics and deniers. It seems deniers will always deny, whereas sceptics can be persuaded through the use of good science.

Here at BigGreenSmile, being neither sceptics nor deniers, we’re not surprised by the report. But we do welcome the clarity it provides, once and for all, that global warming can be scientifically quantified. Now let’s do something about it.

[Image: Simon Hickson]