Yahoo News 5 Dec 09;
LONDON (AFP) – Britain's Met Office national weather service said Saturday it would publish data from weather stations worldwide and had "every confidence" it would show temperatures had risen in the last 150 years.
The decision comes in the wake of claims that British scientists sought to suppress data backing climate change sceptics' views.
"The Met Office does intend to release data from more than 1,000 weather stations," a spokesman said.
"It will be available on our website."
He said the Met Office had "every confidence" in the data which would show that global temperatures had warmed up over the last 150 years.
The Met Office wrote to 188 countries for permission to publish the remainder of the historic data.
The Met Office works closely with the University of East Anglia's Climatic Research Unit, a world-leader in the field, which is at the centre of the data row.
A top United Nations panel is to probe claims that CRU scientists sought to suppress data backing climate change sceptics' views, its head said Friday ahead of the landmark Copenhagen summit, which starts Monday.
Rajendra Pachauri, head of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, said the claims were serious and needed to be investigated.
Computer hackers penetrated the CRU and posted online thousands of emails from researchers. The emails allegedly called into question the scientific basis for climate change.
The university has launched an investigation into the leaked email exchanges to see if there was any evidence of manipulation or suppression of data which would call cast doubt on the research findings of the centre.
Met Office to re-examine 160 years of climate data
Ben Webster, Times Online 5 Dec 09;
The Met Office plans to re-examine 160 years of temperature data after admitting that public confidence in the science on man-made global warming has been shattered by leaked e-mails.
The new analysis of the data will take three years, meaning that the Met Office will not be able to state with absolute confidence the extent of the warming trend until the end of 2012.
The Met Office database is one of three main sources of temperature data analysis on which the UN’s main climate change science body relies for its assessment that global warming is a serious danger to the world. This assessment is the basis for next week’s climate change talks in Copenhagen aimed at cutting CO2 emissions.
The Government is attempting to stop the Met Office from carrying out the re-examination, arguing that it would be seized upon by climate change sceptics.
The Met Office works closely with the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit (CRU), which is being investigated after e-mails written by its director, Phil Jones, appeared to show an attempt to manipulate temperature data and block alternative scientific views.
The Met Office’s published data showing a warming trend draws heavily on CRU analysis. CRU supplied all the land temperature data to the Met Office, which added this to its own analysis of sea temperature data.
Since the stolen e-mails were published, the chief executive of the Met Office has written to national meteorological offices in 188 countries asking their permission to release the raw data that they collected from their weather stations.
The Met Office is confident that its analysis will eventually be shown to be correct. However, it says it wants to create a new and fully open method of analysing temperature data.
The development will add to fears that influential sceptics in other countries, including the US and Australia, are using the controversy to put pressure on leaders to resist making ambitious deals for cutting CO2.
The UN’s Intergovernmental Panel of Climate Change admitted yesterday that it needed to consider the full implications of the e-mails and whether they cast doubt on any of the evidence for man-made global warming.
