[media-credit name=”Berkeley Earth Surface Temperture” align=”alignnone” width=”300″][/media-credit]

For decades, scientists have debated amongst each other whether global warming truly exists in the world. On Oct. 20, the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature group, a U.C. Berkeley organization, released new data which shows that global warming does exist.

“Global warming is real,” the team stated in a press release. The study finds evidence of a rise in the average world land temperature of 1° C since the mid-1950s.

Organized under the support of Novim Group, a non-profit organization, and fundings from donors such as Bill Gates’ Fund for Innovative Climate and Energy Research, the Berkeley Earth group were able to analyze temperature data from 15 sources.

According to Professor Richard A. Muller, Berkeley Earth’s founder and scientific director, concluded that earlier studies conducted by other teams in the United States and Britain had almost equivalent data.

“Our biggest surprise was that the new results agreed so closely with the warming values published previously by other teams in the U.S. and the U.K.,” Muller said. “This confirms that these studies were done carefully and the potential biases identified by climate change skeptics did not seriously affect their conclusions.”

Other studies regulated by NASA, NOAA, and the Hadley Center, also found that the average world land temperature was approximately 1° C.

“The Berkeley Earth analysis is the first study to address the issue of data selection bias, by using nearly all of the available data, which includes about five times as many station locations as were reviewed by prior groups,” stated Robert Rohde, lead scientist of Berkeley Earth.

Elizabeth Muller, the co-founder and Executive Director of Berkeley Earth, said she hopes the Berkeley Earth findings will help “cool the debate over global warming by addressing many of the valid concerns of the skeptics in a clear and rigorous way.”