Met Office to re–examine climate data

The Met Office plans to re-examine 160 years of temperature data after admitting that public confidence in the science on human-made global warming has been shattered by leaked emails. 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. The Met Office works closely with the University of East Anglia's Climatic Research Unit (CRU), which is being investigated after emails 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 emails 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.