For Professor Sherwood, it's just another example – along with the "global warming hiatus" that has been deemed this month by US scientists to be a data error – of how so-called climate sceptics can divert or distort debate. "The models predict that if, and only if, man is the cause of warming, the tropical upper air, six miles above the ground, should warm up to thrice as fast as the surface, but this tropical upper troposphere "hot spot" has not been observed in 50 years of measurement," Christopher Monckton, a prominent British sceptic, wrote in 2010. That the upper troposphere hadn't warmed compared with the surface would be a major surprise for science, Professor Sherwood said. Surface temperatures have been rising at about 0.15 degrees per decade. As air rises over the tropics, a lot of water vapour condenses, releasing latent heat, that warms up the air. "It would have been truly astonishing if the temperatures in the upper troposphere hadn't been going up faster than at the surface," Professor Sherwood said.

"If it didn't appear, it would have nothing to do with whether humans are causing climate change, but it would mean there is something about the way air mixes in the atmosphere that we didn't know," he said. "And the ramifications for climate change could go either way." Professor Sherwood's paper found data issues were to blame for not detecting the hot spot that really was there. One source of the bad data was the result of weather balloons becoming more accurate by making the monitors less susceptible to warming by the sun. We found the global warming signal is stronger than we thought it would be. Climate researcher Steven Sherwood "Over time, it has happened less, so it has made the temperatures appear not to rise when they really did rise," he said.

Professor Sherwood said he hadn't bothered to follow how sceptics had responded to his paper, saying that scientist had merely identified a problem and worked to resolve it. He is more critical, though, of the role played by the sceptics in proclaiming an apparent slowdown in surface temperature warming over the past decade or so. Even this so-called hiatus is now being viewed by the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration as largely the result of instrument misreadings. "A lot of scientific effort went into the hiatus although none of us believed it was very significant just because the sceptics were making so much hay out of it," he said "It's an example of where the sceptics are succeeding to some extent in distracting scientists away from perhaps more important work that they could be doing." Sceptics' interest in "hot spots" they believed weren't there and the fact they couldn't account for the additional heat being trapped by the Earth from its increased greenhouse gases, pointed to a contrast in approaches, he said.

"They're not aiming for a self-consistent and reasonably comprehensive description of the world. What they are aiming at is to discredit something," he said. Resolving issues such as the hot spot removed one more data dispute for sceptics to pick over, he said, adding, "the inconsistencies don't go on forever".