Quite a bit different from their November 24th statement, which you can read here. For those that still think Climategate has no significant impact on climate science, this revelation tells another story.
Met Office to re-examine 160 years of climate data
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.
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“influential sceptics in other countries” I wonder who that could be?
I applaud the open process though.
Update:
Met office spokesperson on BBC news this morning stating that the headline that they are to re-evaluate data is wrong. They do not intend to do so. Then he was given a couple of uninterrupted minutes to trash climategate. The usual only one univeristy, other “independent” sets of data exist and confirm the scientific consensus. Sea temperature rises, air temperatures at sea, melting ice caps, retreating glaciers, etc, etc. Move along, nothing to see here.
R. Stevenson 01:25:35:
There are large cracks appearing in the UK Conservative Party’s pro-AGW stance, led by David Davis and others. See today’s Telegraph, which also has a strongly sceptical article by heavyweight commentator Simon Heffer.
But now President Obama will attend the final session at Copenhagen not the opening session. That suggests they have made a deal. He would only go to the end announcement if there were something to sign!
And note that the AGW warmists language is being rathceted up. Ouor own PM Gordon “Saviour of the World” Brown is on record today (or yesterday) as saying:
“With only days to go before Copenhagen we mustn’t be distracted by the behind-the-times, anti-science, flat-earth climate sceptics. We know the science. We know what we must do. We must now act and close the 5bn-tonne gap. That will seal the deal.”
ANd then there’s our own envireonment/climate change minister, the hapless Ed Milliband saying that sceptocs are now to be classified as “climate saboteurs”. Insults is all they have left. The argument in the UK goes like this:
Q: What about the profound concerns that you should now have as a result of Climategate?
A: You are wrong, you are evil, you are stupid, you are a heretic. We know best.
Pathetic.
How is CRU able to give the data to the Met Office to analyse if CRU was not able to give it to M&M (and plenty of others who asked) because of intellectual property restrictions imposed by the various weather bureaux around the world who owned bits of the original data? And how is it that the CRU data was made available to many scientists (who then used it to prove Jones, Mann’s etc analyses were correct)? What am I missing here? Or do IP restrictions only apply to people who are ‘not one of us’?
Here’s a question; there has been a lot of work done (www.surfacestations.org) on weather stations with some alarming results.
Naturally enough it is important to standardise the instruments and the location parameters. It is also important to review the instruments periodically (and it is a crime that it took the Surface Stations volunteers to discover the dangerously negligent way in which data was gathered).
When it comes to proxy data, we are using various bore holes and trees as crude weather stations but we don’t seem to have a profile for what constitutes a suitable tree or bore hole to choose.
If they’d thought of it, I’m sure that the plants in the glass house at Kew would feature prominently in the AGW proxy data and this is probably the case with a Yamal outlier tree…. that in some way it had some pretty unique conditions (maybe people used this tree to set up camp under on regular intervals).
If such standards do exist I’d be glad to hear of them
So if I understand this right, in three years’ time we may have some data to enable (real) scientists to START investigating the pattern of global temperatures and possible causes of any fluctuations. It’s not quite what the guys at Copenhagen are basing their work on, is it?
TonyB (00:03:48)
Your LIA web page is a great resource, exactly what I needed for my project.
Thanks
I think we will see the polite and mild-mannered word “errors” used, rather than the word “fraud.”
Fraud is a crime, and focusing on “errors” is in some ways a side-track.
If we investigate fraud, it will eventually lead the howling hounds away from air-headed scientists in some lab, to treed politicians.
Watergate began with some bungling burglars, and eventually led to Nixon. The same sort of step-by-step process could occur here.
If fraud is a crime, are not some in the media guilty of being part of the crime? If media emails were looked at, over the past decade, would the emails not show an active effort to only stress Alarmism, and an active effort to repress information that cast doubt on alarmism? And does that not make them part of a fraud?
There are some who will be very glad if everyone spends the next three years going over numbers looking for “errors,” and very dismayed if everyone spends the next three years searching for the origins of a massive fraud.
If the methodology is not transparent and the data public the Met will simply be conducting a PR campaign.
they should just let it out to Steve M, Jeff ID, A Watts, et al, it will get done quicker than 3 years
E. M. Smith,
“But I could be wrong… So just tell me the SI units for this physics concept”
Watts per metre squared I believe.
I hope they do note where the mesurement points are situated so that the effect of the urban surroundings are clearly distictable. They should´t try to correct the data before hand, just use the original numbers. Then we can se where global warming is occurring, my bet is that it´s all from the mesurement stations in the heavily urbanized areas.
Here is some of this supposedly raw data from the Met office for Armagh Observatory (Northern Ireland)
http://climate.arm.ac.uk/averages.html
Where is the hockey stick?
alleagra,
“said in a speech yesterday that “People who doubt that human activity contributes to global warming are “flat-earthers” and “anti-science”.
Well, nobody doubts that people contribute to global warming – or cooling for that matter. Farming and forest clearance cause changes in the albedo, a fact that has been documented by researchers such as Roger Pielke sr. Even CO2 must cause some warming, as Lindzen recognises. So like the moron he is, Brown has taken aim – and shot at the wrong target completely.
“REPLY: you can look at the B91 forms in PDF form from the observer here:
http://www7.ncdc.noaa.gov/IPS/coop/coop.html
Choose California then Weaverville RS – Anthony”
just looking at some of the older records i could probably easily drop the older temps by a few degrees and blame it on typos and not being able to read the forms. How could anyone expect there to be QC in this process with out 100% transparency.
“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.”
Neomarxist chaps of global warming: you have three more years to re-assault CRU.
Meanwhile, pray for nature to hide the decline itself.
I smell a fix.
The whole concept of the meaning of “global temperature” and its “anomalies” will have to be rethought by future true climate scientists.
In my opinion, as far as physics is concerned, the global number has as much physical meaning as averaging the telephone catalogue, or opening a camera and talking continuous pictures on the same film. Particularly the anomaly number where anomalies over average temperatures of -60C degrees ( poles) are averaged with anomalies of over average temperatures of 30C degrees ( tropics).
The basic reason is that temperature has a thermodynamic meaning that connects it to radiated energy only if the gray body constant that goes in front of the T^4 dependence is known, and only if there is no convection or ocean currents to move swaths of energy around. This is not the situation on earth. Temperature maps have meaning in the same way that maps have a meaning : here there be tigers, here it is too cold, here it is too hot and hurricanes may happen.
So I hope that in this great effort of the UK meteorological office they will record temperatures, high and low,time of recording and geographical coordinates so as to have a data base that could be useful for some researchers in the future. Who knows, it might be that chaotic based models may reach the point where they could use the temperature input, the gray body constants and the maps, to get a climate output.
As for the present GCmodels, I have been from the beginning saying that they are completely inadequate to describe the nonlinear solutions of the innumerable fluid equations that belong to the problem. They just are fits to data ( bad data as we know) and their predictions are worth less then the bits that carry them.
In http://www.worldscinet.com/ijmpb
Volume: 23, Issue: 3 (30 January 2009)Page: 275-364
The review paper “Falsification of the atmosmpheric CO2 greenhouse effects within the frame of physics”
by Gerhard Gerlich and Ralf D.Tscheuschner goes into these matters from the point of view of physics in detail.
a pdf image copy exists in
http://arxiv.org/PS_cache/arxiv/pdf/0707/0707.1161v4.pdf
It seems obvious that the Met office is simply attempting to muddy the waters and add confusion. They’ll just re-release some temperature records, carefully selected for their warming bias, and claim that CRU were right all along.
Unfortunately for them, this issue is not going away. The more they try and propagandise the science with lies, the more they will fan the flames of this conflagration. No power on earth can stop it now.
BBC Front Page News. Protests “expected” following Climategate “row” and ahead of Copenhagen. Tough new deal demanded on cutting emissions.
Odd that the first front page acknowledgment of Climategate on BBC web page is an article that discusses protests against it…
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/8396696.stm
The BBC so conspicuously a biased propaganda machine – pravda would be proud.
A note of caution. It is probable that the various collectors of past data have frequently adjusted their country’s data before passing it on to CRU, GISS etc. It can be more complex than that, because some countries have adjusted some stations many times, with various starting dates for the readjustments. So the CRU type reconstructions of the past might have been based on some early country versions, some later country versions and at times have gone further to repeat adjustments already made at home, doubling the effect.
There are some anomalous features to explain. Refer to the CRU country quarterly data on http://strata-sphere.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/idl_cruts3_2005_vs_2008b.pdf
Why is the year 1998 so hot in some places and not in others? Why is there a deep cold year about 1975 in about half of the reporting countries – see Costa Rica for a good example? Why do the graphs of some countries look almost identical to others, e.g. Turmenistan versus Uzbekistan – or Syria vs. Jordan? Of course some are neighbours, but then look at other pairs of neighbours and you see much bigger differences.
Sorry to suggest, but the whole exercise will need going right back to individual metadata sheets for each station, for each country, then starting with a clean sheet and doing only adjustments that can be supported by a neutral panel as “justified.”
If you wish to work with some problem examples, see the Australian summary at Niche Modeling blog of David Stockwell http://landshape.org/enm/australian-temperature-adjustments-ii/, and try plotting some of the data from the files
ftp://ftp2.bom.gov.au/anon/home/bmrc/perm/climate/temperature
Within the last URL there is a section named 08/02/1999 12:00AM 26,328 alladj.utx.Z (This is one higher directory level up from the page that opens, under “annual”).
Annual step changes range from +7deg C at one station to -5.5 deg C at a couple of others. I do not know how much further adjustment has happened after these files were made.
It has become surreal. “Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast”. (Carroll, Throught the Looking Glass, 1872, ch 5).
E.M. Smith:
…
“4) Have a professional computer programmer do the programming, preferably with a professional computer project manager involved.”
You called? 🙂
“5) Do it in a relational database product, please. Flat files is so 1970…”
I have to respectfully disagree here (in a kind of vi vs. emacs kind of way ;-)… For the actual data, flat files with proper metadata are human-readable, fast, simple, transportable, checkable, source-controllable and easily mungeable in any language. Stick it all in SQL and you slow everything down, have to trust the DBA not to mess anything up, and you lose the universal access and transparency.
I’m not against SQL per se (great for customer, transaction, product data etc – I’m writing one now), it’s just not great for something very open and accessible.
Juraj. V: “Comparing HadCRUT with UAH/RSS shows, that during the last 30 years HadCRUT risen by 0.1- 0.2 deg C more than those two”.
Sorry, I see no evidence for this, at least with RSS:
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/hadcrut3vgl/from:1979/offset:-0.15/mean:12/plot/gistemp/from:1979/offset:-0.24/mean:12/plot/rss/mean:12/plot/hadcrut3vgl/from:1979/offset:-0.15/trend/plot/gistemp/from:1979/offset:-0.24/trend/plot/rss/trend
You can’t conflate UAH and RSS here because there is a marked trend difference between them – something that has nothing to do with HADCRUT3:
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/uah/from:1979/mean:12/plot/rss/mean:12/plot/uah/from:1979/trend/plot/rss/trend
Many people seem to be taking this (possible?) Met. Office announcement as an admission that HADCRUT3 is fatally flawed. I don’t think you can assume that, it was just a (rather naive, and almost certainly counterproductive) attempt at recovering some high ground in the war of words going on in the UK media.
In general, I still can’t see the case for casting doubt on HADCRUT3, not only because it matches so well with other series, but because nothing in the “files” indicates anything bad having been done to it.
Sure, “Harry” had his share of pain trying to sort out the data – which is why it should be looked at in the open – but there is no “smoking gun” for HADCRUT3 there; all the e-mails and code that everyone is making noise about is to do with the tree-ring proxy reconstructions – and any debate about the validity of that there goes much deeper than a few lines of IDL.
My word, I can’t quite believe how immensely insulting the AGW lobby [and our own PM/Environment Sec] have been in the last 24hrs.
So far they’ve compared my views to those of swivel-eyed cranks, Hitler-sympathisers, criminals, pro-fox hunting/seal clubbers.
I think the expression ‘losing the plot’ is the underestimate of the century so far. Hyperbole clearly gets to 11 on their amp.
Oh and of course someone who thinks the same thing as ‘an arsehole’. Sophiscated debating techniques or what.
They do say that insulting voters is a bad idea, well it’s certainy a novelty to be name-called like this. [snip]are they thinking of?
Congratulations to the Met Office for washing their hands of political interference. They have just told the politicians that they are not going to Copenhagen.
I read the Met statement in terms of an internal war being fought at bureaucratic political and scientific levels. Their initial Nov 24th release was a typical CYA corporate memo designed to give the lawyers time to come up with excuses. As this time goes by, however, the CRU mess starts to spiral out of control. Politicians like Gordon Brown are furious at the scientists for not being more supportive of the party line, while more than a few scientists whom have bit their tongues over the politicization of their profession are starting to make staff meetings more than interesting. The new “consensus” shows the Met will provide no political cover for the foreseeable future. The debate is not over, but the way we were told it was, is.