Scientists find that we are living through a record-setting ‘period of significant warmth’
We just lived through the 4 hottest years on record, says scientific nonprofit first funded by billionaire polluter Charles Koch.
In 2018, a remarkable 29 countries plus Antarctica set individual records for the hottest year ever. Meanwhile, no country saw a record cold year.
That’s the finding of the Berkeley Earth scientific team, which points out that 2015 through 2018 were the four hottest years since records began in 1850 — “a period of significant warmth well above all previous years since 1850. This reflects the long-term trend towards global warming.”
Berkeley Earth, a nonprofit research organization, provides independent analysis of global temperature records, but its findings of record global warming are especially noteworthy because the group was originally founded with $150,000 from the Charles G. Koch Charitable Foundation. Billionaire Charles Koch is a long-time funder of climate science denial.
In fact, Berkeley Earth’s founder and scientific director, physicist Richard Muller, was a long-time climate skeptic who became a “converted skeptic” in 2012 after his team independently reviewed more than 150 years of data.
The team, however, no longer receives Koch funding.
For its latest findings, the team analyzed “19 million monthly-average temperature observations from 46,000 weather stations” on land since 1850, including 205,000 monthly averages in 2018 alone. They combined that with ocean-based data, some “374 million measurements collected by ships and buoys, including 19 million observations obtained in 2018.”Advertisement
Berkeley Earth had been planning to announce its findings on January 17 with NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). But the partial government shutdown — which lasted 35 days — thwarted that plan, so last Thursday the Berkeley team went forward on their own.
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