Berkeley Earth

Berkeley Earth

Berkeley Earth logo
Founded	2010
Founder	Richard Muller and Elizabeth Muller
Focus	Climate science, education/communication and global warming mitigation
Location	Berkeley, California
Area served	Global
Method	Scientific analysis
Website	BerkeleyEarth.org
Formerly called	Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature

Berkeley Earth is a Berkeley, California-based independent 501(c)(3) non-profit focused on land temperature data analysis for climate science. Berkeley Earth was founded in early 2010 (originally called the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature project) to address the major concerns from outside the scientific community regarding global warming and the instrumental temperature record. The project's stated aim was a "transparent approach, based on data analysis."^[1] In February 2013, Berkeley Earth became an independent non-profit. In August 2013, Berkeley Earth was granted 501(c)(3) tax-exempt status by the US government. The primary product is air temperatures over land, but they also produce a global dataset resulting from a merge of their land data with HadSST.

Berkeley Earth founder Richard A. Muller told The Guardian

...we are bringing the spirit of science back to a subject that has become too argumentative and too contentious, ....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. We are doing this because it is the most important project in the world today. Nothing else comes close.^[2]

Berkeley Earth has been funded by unrestricted educational grants totaling (as of December 2013^[update]) about $1,394,500.^[3] Large donors include Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, the Charles G. Koch Foundation, the Fund for Innovative Climate and Energy Research (FICER),^[4] and the William K. Bowes Jr. Foundation.^[5] The donors have no control over how Berkeley Earth conducts the research or what they publish.^[6]

The team's preliminary findings, data sets and programs were published beginning in December 2012. The study addressed scientific concerns including the urban heat island effect, poor station quality, and the risk of data selection bias. The Berkeley Earth group concluded that the warming trend is real, that over the past 50 years (between the decades of the 1950s and 2000s) the land surface warmed by 0.91±0.05 °C, and their results mirror those obtained from earlier studies carried out by the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), the Hadley Centre, NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) Surface Temperature Analysis, and the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia. The study also found that the urban heat island effect and poor station quality did not bias the results obtained from these earlier studies.^{[7][8][9][10]}