Corresponding author : Richard A. Muller, Berkeley Earth Project 2831 Garber St. Berkeley CA, 94705, USA, Tel: 510 735 6877; E-mail: RAMuller@LBL.gov
Received: September 24, 2012 Accepted: December 02, 2012 Published: December 07, 2012
Citation:Rohde R, Muller RA, Jacobsen R, Muller E, Perlmutter S, et al. (2013) A New Estimate of the Average Earth Surface Land Temperature Spanning 1753
to 2011. Geoinfor Geostat: An Overview 1:1.. doi:10.4172/2327-4581.1000101
We report an estimate of the Earth’s average land surface
temperature for the period 1753 to 2011. To address issues of
potential station selection bias, we used a larger sampling of stations
than had prior studies. For the period post 1880, our estimate
is similar to those previously reported by other groups, although
we report smaller uncertainties. The land temperature rise
from the 1950s decade to the 2000s decade is 0.90 ± 0.05°C (95%
confidence). Both maximum and minimum daily temperatures have
increased during the last century. Diurnal variations decreased
from 1900 to 1987, and then increased; this increase is significant
but not understood. The period of 1753 to 1850 is marked by
sudden drops in land surface temperature that are coincident
with known volcanism; the response function is approximately
1.5 ± 0.5°C per 100 Tg of atmospheric sulfate. This volcanism,
combined with a simple proxy for anthropogenic effects (logarithm
of the CO2 concentration), reproduces much of the variation in
the land surface temperature record; the fit is not improved by the
addition of a solar forcing term. Thus, for this very simple model,
solar forcing does not appear to contribute to the observed global
warming of the past 250 years; the entire change can be modeled
by a sum of volcanism and a single anthropogenic proxy. The
residual variations include interannual and multi-decadal variability
very similar to that of the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation (AMO).
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