According to Santer, the only group to previously analyze satellite data on the troposphere -- the lowest layer in Earth's atmosphere -- was a research team headed by Roy Spencer from University of Alabama in 1992.

"This was used by some critics to say 'We don't believe in climate models, they're wrong,'" Santer told LiveScience. "Other people used the disconnect between what the satellites told and what surface thermometers told us to argue that the surface data were wrong and that earth wasn't really warming because satellites were much more accurate."

The Alabama researchers introduced a correction factor to account for drifting in the satellites used to sample Earth's daily temperature cycles.

But in another Science paper published today, Carl Mears and Rank Wentz, scientists at the California-based Remote Sensing Systems, examined the same data and identified an error in Spencer's analysis technique.

After correcting for the mistake, the researchers obtained fundamentally different results: whereas Spencer's analysis showed a cooling of the Earth's troposphere, the new analysis revealed a warming.