Big news today for the planet – a huge research project triggered by climate sceptic claims of 'dodgy data' has underlined a key truth: our planet is warming dangerously fast – by a whole degree in the last 60 years.
Significantly, the study was part-funded by the Koch Brothers, the darkest of corporate fossil fuel lobbyists, while some of the heavies in the climate sceptic world lent their support to the research, launched in the wake of the so-called 'climategate' affair.
The billionaire Kochs are some of the most notorious climate sceptics out there and have piled stacks of money into astroturfing campaigns in the US to try and scupper green laws (read the Koch report by our colleagues in the US). That's why today's report is so important – the truth has been confirmed in research part-funded by climate sceptics.
One of the main sceptic claims that the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature project was investigating is the claim that weather stations near cities are skewing the data in existing studies, since urban areas are warmer than surrounding areas.
However that theory was rubbished after the research group analysed 40,000 weather stations around the world and concluded that the 'Urban Heat Island' effect on global temperatures was "nearly negligible" or "spurious".
The results of the research project plot a chart of global temperature rise that matches that of the previous scientific efforts – from NASA to the UK Met Office.
So any way you look at this, it's big news.
All of those people – from energy tycoons to politicians, journalists to bloggers – who prefer to ignore the glaring signs of climate change and hide behind flimsy theories have got nowhere else to go.
Climate change is real and our planet is warming dangerously fast. Today even the sceptic-supported research is saying so.
