Sir
According to your Special Feature on global warming (Nature 408, 896; 2000), a scientific report issued by the US National Academy of Sciences1 concluded that the discrepancies between temperature measurements made at the surface (showing a warming trend since 1979) and from satellites (showing little if any tropospheric trend) “were now reconciled and that they pointed to a warming planet”.
To be precise, the NAS panel, which included some of the severest critics of the satellite data, could not reconcile the disparity between the two trends. In fact, the disparity is opposite in direction to expectations based on climate models: climate models all predict a stronger warming trend for the mid-troposphere than for the surface.
References
National Research Council/National Academy of Sciences Reconciling Observations of Global Temperature Change (National Academy Press, Washington DC, 2000).
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Singer, S. Difficulty in reconciling global-warming data. Nature 409, 281 (2001). https://doi.org/10.1038/35053324
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/35053324
