Global warming is no longer a fresh topic for people nowadays, on which different stakeholders have different views. On May 29th, Philip Douglas Jones the first proposer of the concept "Global warming” and a member of  Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), an organization which won the 2007 Nobel Prize for Peace, was invited to give a lecture on global temperature estimation and related topics in USTC. 
Before the lecture, Prof. FU Yunfei from School of Earth and Space Sciences gave a brief introduction IPCC, which was established jointly by WMO and UNEP, for which work Prof. Jones won the Nobel Peace Prize. Also, Prof. Fu presented some content from IPCC Fifth Assessment Report (AR5), which emphasized that the impact of global warming is pervasive and irreversible. 
From K?ppen climate classification in the 1880s, Prof. Jones began the lecture with different kinds of global temperature estimation methods. In his opinion, a limited number of stations to get local details may be as effective as a huge number of stations to measure large scale averages. For lands, Prof. Jones demonstrated the newest methods such as the use of Google Earth to obtain temperature data with technology development. Over oceans, he introduced the history of sea surface temperature record derived from bucket early to drifting buoys, and satellite and reanalysis at present. Moreover, he discussed the impact of station homogeneity, Urban Heat Island (a metropolitan area is significantly warmer than its surrounding rural areas) and other factors on the consistency and continuity of long-term global temperature datasets. During the lecture, Prof. Jones showed lots of figures about global and local temperature variations from observation data, which visually reveal the fact of climate change and global warming. 
During the Q&A section, Prof. Jones answered several questions related with the acquisition of global temperature data and the way to control global warming, which may make some new views and ideas for listeners.

(YU Deguang, USTC News Center)