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Studies estimate that the impacts of air pollution account for upwards of 5% of annual global GDP, and yet annual funding to address air quality averages around only $30million annually. As April marks the beginning of Earth Month, Berkeley Earth is focusing on the significant role that air quality data and analysis plays in improving […]

We sit down with social entrepreneur, environmental policy innovator, Berkeley Earth Board Director, and In This Together Co-Founder Bill Shireman to discuss the important role of independent climate science in taking a data-driven approach to climate solutions.

Berkeley Earth released our annual Global Temperature Report for 2020, including findings that 2020 was the second warmest year on record. Thanks to our partners in the media, the independent research, data, and findings we presented in this report have reached an audience of nearly 400 million worldwide. One highlight of our impact: Berkeley Earth’s […]

Berkeley Earth Global Temperature Update: 2020 Was Second Warmest Year Since 1850 Berkeley, Calif. — Berkeley Earth today released its Global Temperature Report for 2020, concluding that the year was nominally the second warmest on Earth since 1850 based on land and ocean data. Globally, 2020 was slightly cooler than and nearly tied with 2016. […]

The following is a selected list of third-party data visualizations that have used data from Berkeley Earth. Climate Data Data explorer map of past and future temperature change produced by Carbon Brief. Local changes in the number of hot days produced by The New York Times. Temperature change in major cities produced by the BBC. […]

2016 was the warmest year since humans began keeping records, by a wide margin. Global average temperatures were extremely hot in the first few months of the year, pushed up by a large El Nino event. Global surface temperatures dropped in the second half of 2016, yet still show a continuation of global warming. The […]

by: Zeke Hausfather, Berkeley Earth zeke@berkeleyearth.org The relationship between greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and future warming is complex, depending on the atmospheric lifetime of gases, their radiative forcing, and the thermal inertia of the Earth, particularly our oceans. Many non-CO2 GHGs have shorter atmospheric lifetimes, and the global warming-equivalent values commonly used for analysis of emission […]

On May 1, 2016, a fire began southwest of Fort McMurray,  Canada. It swept through the community destroying over 2000 structures. You can read about the latest developments here. Since 2014 Berkeley Earth has been expanding its real time database of air pollution. Our original focus was on China, but we have continued to add other regions of […]

By Zeke Hausfather In recent weeks we’ve seen a political controversy over NOAA’s adjustments to temperature records, with accusations from some in congress that records are being changed to eliminate a recent slowdown in warming and to lend support to Obama administration climate policies. This makes it sound like the NOAA record is something of […]

Over the past few days we have been publishing the first major update of our data since early 2015. The data can be found here on our data page. Given the time of year and the wide ranging discussion about whether or not 2014 was a record year, it seemed a good time to asses […]

As the AP  reports  Lelieveld has published a paper in Nature  on the mortality associated with outdoor air pollution that  confirms what BerkeleyEarth found in its study of air pollution in China. By their estimate   ~1.357M deaths in China are caused by air pollution. By our estimate there are ~1.6 Million deaths per year in China […]

In our study of air pollution in China, we stumbled upon two extraordinary days.  The first, which we initially thought was a fluke, turned out to be a single day when air pollution across China was more extensive than we had seen in a years worth of data.  It was a mystery until  lead scientist, […]

Can natural gas help us reduce climate change by acting as a bridge fuel away from coal? New research from Berkeley suggests that it can, even if it modestly delays the date at which we switch to renewables. The U.S. is in the midst of a natural gas boom. The combination of horizontal drilling and […]

There has been much discussion of temperature adjustment of late in both climate blogs and in the media, but not much background on what specific adjustments are being made, why they are being made, and what effects they have. Adjustments have a big effect on temperature trends in the U.S., and a modest effect on […]