ELEANOR HALL: To the new evidence on global warming now, and three research papers published today in the journal Science claim there’s now no room for debate about the issue, the planet is warming up.

Data gathered from weather balloons and satellites over the last 15 years – some of which had bolstered the arguments of sceptics – has now been found to have been faulty, with a correct reading of the data revealing unequivocally that the planet's atmospheric and surface temperatures are on the rise.

The re-evaluation comes as Siberia reports that its vast frozen Peatland is undergoing an unprecedented thaw.

This will release billions of tonnes of greenhouse-polluting carbon dioxide and methane gas into the atmosphere, which will then speed up the global warming phenomenon, as Karen Barlow reports.

KAREN BARLOW: Until now, temperature changes gauged on the ground have not matched the data collected in the sky.

A 1990 University of Alabama satellite data study found that the atmosphere's low-level troposphere was not warming in line with computer modelling predictions.

The study been used ever since by global warming sceptics, while over the years climatologists have unsuccessfully tried to the revise the data.

Now a Californian firm "Remote Sensing Systems" has found the satellite was collecting faulty data in the first place.

Dr David Jones from the Bureau of Meteorology's National Climate Centre explains.

DAVID JONES: You put a new satellite up hopefully before the old one dies, and you go through a very careful matching of one satellite set-up to the subsequent one. Every time you do that you have to compare instruments, you have to compare things like the time the satellite goes overhead and so on, and it's a very complex task. As it turns out, one particular satellite known as NOA 11 a number of years back was spliced slightly incorrectly. There was a mistake made in the correction for the time it actually travelled overhead, and that's just recently come to light. The correction's been made, and now we find the satellite data shows a much more rapid warming and warming which is very consistent with what see at the surface.

KAREN BARLOW: Two other studies have also revealed global warming miscalculations.

Yale University in Connecticut has found that the sensors on older weather balloons were either faulty or positioned wrong.

The researchers say the sensors read too warm in daylight, so the results could not be trusted.

And California's Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory has smoothed out discrepancies between 19 different climate models and measurements, ruling that the differences are due to human errors in calculations.

The National Climate Centre's Dr David Jones says the revision is a critical example of theory winning over data.

DAVID JONES: It's wrong to isolate just one individual piece of data and say, hey, this is inconsistent because we know all data's fallible, all data has problems, no data's perfect. So the broad picture for many years has been of a globe warming and a globe warming quite rapidly. But now really the last piece of the jigsaw has fallen into place and I guess there's really very little doubt about the realism of global warming.

KAREN BARLOW: Dr Jones say the focus of the global warming debate should now be on the warming's cause, whether it be manmade or a combination of human and natural causes.

In the meantime the effects are being felt now, and there are concerns that the Earth's warming is cascading.

Scientists have announced that a vast frozen peatland in Western Siberia is undergoing its first thaw since the end of the ice age, 11,000 years ago.

A peatland expert at the Australian National University, Professor Geoff Hope, says the thaw is in line with a one or two degree increase in global average temperatures.

He says a thaw will unlock massive amounts of greenhouse-polluting gases.

GEOFF HOPE: Once the peatlands are able warm up when the permafrost melts from below it, then it starts to rot away really, and basically the charming smell that you often get when you disturb the swamp is partly made up of methane, most of it's carbon dioxide, and the whole volume of the peatland shrinks away, it becomes more like a sort of a potting mix and less like a lot of fibrous material, and we release a whole pile of methane and CO2 into the air, millions and millions of tonnes of it.

KAREN BARLOW: Could you compare the amount that is going to be released from this melt to anything that humanity could produce through industry?

GEOFF HOPE: My guess is it's in the same order of magnitude, that's to say it's an equivalent sort of effect to the release of all our fossil fuel burning at the moment, so we're effectively – I won't say doubling – but it'll be something in somewhere between half and more than one times the effect of burning the fossil fuel for a decade or three. The process will probably continue, and of course it's self-feeding if it does increase global warming, then that in turn causes more permafrost to melt and we lose more of this carbon.

ELEANOR HALL: Professor Geoff Hope from the Australian National University ending that report from Karen Barlow.