British Met Office releases records in wake of email leak

BRITAIN’S Met Office yesterday released temperature records from more than 1,500 climate monitoring stations around the world in the latest efforts to debunk claims by sceptics that global warming data was manipulated by scientists.

The raw data comes from a network of individual stations which have been used by the World Meteorological Organisation to monitor global surface temperatures.

According to the Met Office, the records from the 1,500 sites show how temperatures have risen over the past 150 years.

The results from the monitoring centres released yesterday are very similar to the complete set of data records from around 5,000 stations which the Met Office’s Hadley Centre and the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit (CRU) use to measure global land temperatures in the ‘HadCrut’ record.

The data released yesterday, a subset of the total from the 5,000 sites, is not a new global temperature record and does not replace the HadCrut record or other analyses from NASA or the National Climatic Data Centre in the US.

The publication of the data comes in the wake of leaking of stolen emails taken from servers at the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit and posted on websites run by sceptics, possibly in a bid to undermine the climate summit in Copenhagen.

The emails, which include a reference to a “trick” to “hide the decline”, have been seized on by sceptics as evidence of scientists manipulating or suppressing data to back up a theory of man-made global warming.

Suggestions of a conspiracy to strengthen the evidence for man-made climate change have been dismissed as “nonsense” in the face of a broad scientific consensus that the world is warming largely as a result of human actions.