Two minute video that 'shows how the Earth's temperature has risen 1C since the 1950s'

• Controversial physicist Richard Muller believes his findings will 'address the issues of legitimate sceptics'
• But he stands accused of 'overselling' global warming

By Daily Mail Reporter

Last updated at 10:36 AM on 13th November 2011

The world is getting warmer. And scientists have got an alarming video to prove it.
According to researchers from the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperatures project (BEST) from Berkeley University in California, the Earth's average global land temperature has risen by 1C since the 1950s.
Led by controversial physicist, Professor Richard Muller, they used data from 1800 to 2009 to present their 'irrefutable' proof.
However, mutiny within the BEST ranks has cast doubt on their findings - much to the delight of climate change sceptics.
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Warming up: The temperature of the Earth in 2009 with the hot spots illustrated on the glowing world map and the cooler areas in blue

Colder: The world in 1800 was cooler. Scientists at Berkeley University, led by controversial physicist Richard Muller, gathered a billion weather reports in the past 200 years

Professor Judith Curry was one of ten experts attempting to compile the definitive temperature data.
She claimed it had been ‘tarnished’ by Prof Muller ‘overselling’ the results in favour of global warming - and she has threatened to quit the project.
Prof Curry, of the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at the Georgia Institute of Technology, in the U.S., said their data actually showed average world temperatures had ‘paused’ since the late 1990s.
She also said that a graph published on the project’s website depicting temperatures from 1850 to 2006 appeared to ‘hide the decline’.
Berkeley Earth's land surface temperature (BEST) data was taken from 1.6 billion temperature archived records dating back to the 1800s from 15 sources around the world.
It shows deviation from the mean temperature over two centuries - and overall global warming since the industrial revolution.
To highlight their findings, BEST researchers put all the data into one alarming video of a warming world visualising surface temperature records.

How the Earth was in 1850 with huge swathes of the world cool

Fifty years on: Earth in 1900 starting to show signs of heating up (just like the climate change debate would many years later)

The 1C rise in temperature matches estimates by the world's respected climate watchers who maintain official records.
These include the Met Office with the University of East Anglia, Nasa's Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York and the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
Prof Muller told the Guardian: 'My hope is that this will win over those people who are properly sceptical.

Poles apart: BEST team leader Prof Richard Muller, left, says the latest findings settle the climate debate once and for all. But Prof Judith Curry says such a claim is 'a mistake'

'Some people lump the sceptical in with the deniers and that makes it easy to dismiss them, because the deniers pay no attention to science.'
Muller's survey - the biggest open database of temperature records - was focused on producing a transparent and independent assessment of global warming.
Global warming doubters have always criticised official figures on the grounds that many temperature stations are poor quality and that data is tweaked by hand.
But the Berkeley study found that the so-called 'urban heat' which makes cities warmer than surrounding rural areas, did not significantly contribute to average land temperature rises.

Rising temperature: The world in 1950. Scientists wanted transparent data to counter doubts by climate change sceptics

Here we glow: The way the world was in 2000 with heat spots shown in burning red

This, said the Guardian, is because urban regions make up less than one per cent of the Earth's land area. And while ' poor' stations might be less accurate, they recorded the same average warming trend
The U.S. team includes Saul Perlmutter, joint winner of this year's Nobel Prize in Physics for the discovery that the universe is expanding at an increasing rate.
It has gone public before publication by submitting four papers to the journal Geophysical Research Letters.
Muller said: 'We have looked at these issues in a straightforward, transparent way, and based on that, I would expect legitimate sceptics to feel their issues have been addressed.'
The research has won backing from Peter Thorne at the Cooperative Institute for Climate and Satellites in North Carolina and chair of the International Surface Temperature Initiative.
He told the paper: 'This takes a very distinct approach to the problem and comes up with the same answer, and that builds confidence that pre-existing estimates are in the right ballpark.
'Openness and transparency is a must, particularly now with climate change being so politicised.'
But one U.S. climate sceptic, Anthony Watts, claimed he had identified a 'basic procedural error' concerning time periods used in the research, and urged the authors to revise the paper.
And the project has been attacked by some climate bloggers, who point out that one of the sponsors runs a company Greenpeace have branded a 'financial kingpin of climate science denial'.