Before I say anything else in this post, I will start off right away and say that the results I'll be discussing here have not yet been published in a peer-reviewed journal. Because of that, the results need to be taken with a grain of salt. However, due to the nature of the study's foundation and funders, which I will get to in a moment, the results are most definitely news-worthy. The study is called the Berkeley Earth Project (BEP), and what they found was stated simply and beautifully in their own two-page summary:
Global warming is real, according to a major study released today. Despite issues raised by climate change skeptics, the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature study finds reliable evidence of a rise in the average world land temperature of approximately 1° C since the mid-1950s.