ARGUMENTS have again broken out over whether the Earth’s troposphere is warming. At issue is whether human activity drives climate change.
Sceptics often cite a 10-year-old analysis of satellite data by John Christy at the University of Alabama in Huntsville, which apparently shows negligible warming of the troposphere – the lowest 14 kilometres of the atmosphere. If greenhouse gases were having an impact, this region would heat up.
But mainstream climate scientists claim that Christy’s analysis ignored biases in the data, for example those due to the decaying orbits of the satellites and uncertainties in calibrating different satellites.
Now a second…
