TWO NEW STUDIES, conducted separately, have suggested that global warming is a scientific reality – with one of the two suggesting that it is already too late to stop temperatures from rising irrevocably.

BBC News reports that the Berkeley Earth Project has concluded the same broad trend in warming that has already been declared by the likes of NASA – despite having used different methods and data to arrive at that conclusion.

The project was established in the wake of the ‘Climategate’ affair – when it was reported that some scientific ‘proof’ for climate change had actually been fabricated – and is partially funded by lobbyists who oppose action against climate change.

The Berkeley project, unusually, also claims to have discovered a reason why the average global temperature can vary from year to year – attributing this fluctuation to the sea temperature in the waters of the north Atlantic.

Separate research by Swiss researchers, reported by Science Magazine, appears not only to confirm that climate change is a pressing threat – but goes even further and states that it’s probably an irretrievable disaster.

The Swiss team trawled through previous academic writing on the topic and isolated 193 individual simulations of how the Earth’s temperature can be kept within 2°C of current levels – the threshold beyond which many think the sea levels could rise at catastrophic levels.

By using those models and inputting the most recent records of the global temperature, they found only three which would still be likely to maintain the sea level.

All three of those scenarios are only viable if energy systems are developed which actively remove greenhouse gases from the atmosphere – such as massive investment in biofuels which consume carbon dioxide.