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.
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“influential sceptics in other countries” I wonder who that could be?
I applaud the open process though.
How scary is this?
“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 government is trying to stop the science?
In this bizarre game of AGW Snakes and Ladders the warmers have landed on one big, fat, beautiful snake’s head. Does it spiral down to the third square from the Start or just to the foot of the ” It’s worse than we could have imagined” ladder?
Whatever the never-to-be-achieved accuracy of THE WORLD’S TEMPERATURE over time, CO2 is NOT THE CAUSATIVE AGENT to ANY “warming of the planet”! Neither is MAN the CAUSE of same! Nor are we in “imminent danger” if we “fail to act”!
It is GOOD to be “warmer” than “colder”, to which I can attest as a Northern resident. We can access many forms of evidence over geologic time which proves this.
Unfortunately, the “train has left the station.” The elite of the world have been setting up and investing in their wealth with their CO2/energy scheme for at least 40 years, and the transfer of wealth CONTINUES to be to the world-wide entities which engineer it all, and all the tag-alongs who can possibly jump on. The gap between “haves” and “have-nots” grows…
I do appreciate the huge efforts of the truly credible scientists who hang in there and who, through their efforts, have finally been able to effectively expose some of the scandalous methods and deceptions of those who have engineered this movement. It gives hope…
It really doesn’t matter who does the re-analysis or how long it takes (they probably said “three years” to give casual readers a feel for the scope of the problem and to dampen expectation of immediate results) as long as it really is “fully open”. If they reassemble the raw data from world met offices, create a grid, make their adjustment, etc, and the method is either open during the process or open at the end, they will either get it right or not and everyone with an interest either way will be able to check for themselves.
I’ve had two of my comments censored – meaning completely deleted at Realclimate. And a post mutilated by selective censorship.
I said that the constant stream of visitors thanking Gavin for posting (and ‘moderating’) at Realclimate should pause for a moment and thank the guy/gal who leaked the emails instead. A single-handed effort that resulted in all the debate. In Jones’ resignation, in the UN inquiry, in the UK Met review of data….
I’ll wear Gavin’s censorship like a badge of pride.
Let the globe warm up and let all of it drown and take us – at least we would have lived with integrity.
They know the “trick” they used to “add value” to their data, so if they really dumped the raw data they can subtract the “tricky added value” from the present values in their database and go back to the truth –if they really want to recover the original temperature data. Won’t be holding my breath, though.
But, who cares anyway? By 2012 according to the Mayans the end of the world will have put and end to this debate. At last!
Everybody will be happy, even Jones, Mann, Hansen, and Gore -if we find out that Hell doesn’t exist… 🙂
The pods are moving in, boys. Help.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/politics/6729833/Gordon-Brown-climate-change-sceptics-are-flat-earthers.html
I’d say that this is a stunning development. If the Met Office is sincere, it will invite participation by scientists who have no stake in either AGW or skepticism. It will establish a web site where all the material and all the analysis can be available to anyone who cares to down load it. There should be a mechanism to address issues raised by “citizen scientists”. At the same time we somehow need a mechanism to prevent ideologues from gumming up the analysis….
It’s not just reanalysis that’s needed, however: let’s take a billion or so and invest it in a REAL and robust climate monitoring network. We’ve been taking instrumental data that was never intended for the use to which it’s been put to monitor climate. How about a purely climate-oriented network?
Oddly enough, I’d agree that the type of research Micheal Mann has been doing is important. I think he let himself be seduced by the Dark Side. I’d advocate more money for dendroclimatology, but none for Mann.
Again I ask how can we see to it that Obama gets the message that we do not want anything to do with the Copenhagen treaty with its massive taxes, world government control and re-distribution of wealth?
Anthony, I’ve mentioned this before:
Tom in Texas (18:56:37) :
E.M.Smith (17:04:44) : The “raw” data is nowhere to be found… Maybe the raw dailies are on line somewhere? But Iv’e not found them yet…
E.M. – I tracked the U.S. raw data from the B91 forms to CLIMOD. The compiled raw data is available from the Regional Climate Centers (6?) for a fee. It is probably only useful for doing regional studies.
BTW, I have verified that it is raw by comparing it to B91 forms. Missing data indicates also that it is truly raw. (Looked at a lot of B91’s).
I have “collected” the raw data for San Antonio and all stations within 100 miles. Maybe I should expand the range.
Will the MET be able to identify and separate out the Urban Heat Island?
McKitrick and Michaels:
Quantifying the influence of anthropogenic surface processes and inhomogeneities on gridded global climate data Ross R. McKitrick and Patrick J. Michaels
JOURNAL OF GEOPHYSICAL RESEARCH, VOL. 112, D24S09, doi:10.1029/2007JD008465, 2007
Nicola Scafetta finds much larger solar influence than assumed by IPCC, and which projects well the older historic data.
N. Scafetta, “Empirical analysis of the solar contribution to global mean air surface temperature change,” Journal of Atmospheric and Solar-Terrestrial Physics (2009), doi:10.1016/j.jastp.2009.07.007.
Then Don Easterbrook finds a major influence by the PDO and projects consequent global cooling and warming cycles.
Ferenc Miskolczi finds the global atmospheric absorption trend is effectively zero for the last six decades.
With the Urban Heat Island causing half the increase, solar, PDO taking up the rest, and with no enhanced absorption, what is left of catastrophic anthropogenic global warming?
Maybe that is why the Met is taking so long to review the data.
For more details see the 2009 NIPCC report Climate Change Reconsidered.
“However, it says it wants to create a new and fully open method of analysing temperature data.”
This is the line they can be held to. Publish the data, and publish the methods by which they analyse the data.
evanmjones (20:11:11) :
I wouldn’t be surprised if it turns out its (drumroll) Worse Than We Thought.
If it turns out worse than we thought, then so be it. I’d rather be wrong and understand how I came to be there rather than right, but only because I followed the herd.
This is, if not an abject surrender, then at least a pell-mell retreat. The Met Office has as good as confessed that CRU’s stuff is hopelessly corrupt and useless. That is a major tactical victory!
Of course, that means that the warmmongers will have GISS as their only principal dataset. Now if we can shine some sunlight into that roach-nest….
I call bs on the ‘seized on by skeptics’ line. That is a completely bogus reason to ignore a completely relevant problem. If it weren’t ‘seized on’ then what? THEN it would be investigated? If everyone thought worthy of ignoring? What argument, exactly, is this?
This is like saying that a pharmaceutical company should be allowed to hide inconvenient data because lawyers might ‘seize upon it’ and sue the company. Is this really the best excuse so far?! It is just a ludicrous position to take and I think it shows how entrenched the bunker mentality is in climate science. If it damages the theory, it damages mankind? Wouldn’t it be good for us if this theory were bunk?!
I better stop here and go outside and get some fresh air.
If they do this we go back to what Anthony has been working on and what Steve M has been looking at for a long time. Those things are A: the quality of the station data to begin with and B: the “adjustments” applied to compensate for UHI.
Harold Vance (20:09:18) :
How do they know that they analysis will take three years? Why not two? Why not four?
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Perhaps three is the agreed upon severance package ??
“the Met Office will not be able to state with absolute confidence the extent of the warming trend until the end of 2012.”
How do they know it will be a warming trend ?? Oh yeah, of course I forgot that in bogus climate science land, the conclusions always precede the data.
Wouldn’t it be better to get these clowns out now and get some real scientists in to scoop up their excrement, throw it out and start again ??
By the way warmists (if there are any left on here), my point is not that it won’t be a warming trend, it’s that assuming such prior to analysing the data is below the level of science at which you can still tell your Mum you’re a scientist. So why do they put that in a fricking press release ?? Because they’re such sh!# scientists they can’t even comprehend what I’m talking about.
To do this right will be a real nightmare, each site will have to be history corrected for equipment modifications and area build changes, and then each record aligned with others and then make educated wildass guesses on all the areas not sited.
No damn wonder Jones, Mann, Hanson and many others faked it.
As long as the reconstruction is open and public so the rest of us can see how this can of worms is untangled I see no problem, If it’s done behind closed doors they will be as discredited as the last group.
And wait a second! How are they going to review the data if it was thrown out?!
Oh, should have read the comments. Beat to it, but still!
If it turns out worse than we thought, then so be it. I’d rather be wrong and understand how I came to be there rather than right, but only because I followed the herd.
Yes, obviously. But what I am really saying is I Don’t Trust Them.
Unless it’s all out in the open (code, methods, reasons, documentation) and we have genuine raw data (as in “not reconstructed”), and unless it is done by impeccably honest folks (from either side of the debate), I ain’t buying.
I’d rather have a different institution, altogether, handling it.
Met Office, not the most trustworthy party to undertake this re-examination?
Three years of work meaning three years of “uncertainty”? No problem!
That’s why the precautionary principle was introduced as a political fail safe to continue Government induced CO2 mitigation policies no matter what!!!
We go to Copenhagen, set the agenda for the next meeting in Mexico and take on the open offer. Remember? Free Sex!
Hurrah.
Although your US readers might not appreciate it this is the most important news, despite political pressure the Met Office now knows it has been led up the garden path and isn’t having any. It is the oldest and most prestigious of all scientific weather recording and forecasting institutions and will not risk its reputation on a fraud: nor will it bow to political pressure to do so. Hence its refusal to do as the British government bids.
It may have made a mistake in putting its trust in the CRU, but we all make mistakes as the hedgehog said clambering off the hairbrush. And that happens in science too: especially if your trust that your colleagues are not forging the datasets. But the moment it becomes apparent they were you have to start again.
All it will say at the moment is that it now needs to check the data.
But that is hugely important. The very basis of the AGW/IPCC reports and claims that the science is settled depends on the Met Office data. Without it the whole thing falls apart especially in the UK.
Very interesting they announced it to the Times of London first, too late for the rivals to get it for the Saturday papers, expect the Sundays to be full of it. Very careful timing that: along with the statement that they had already written to all the other weather services asking to release the raw data.
So watch the fireworks flow? or should that be go up? It ain’t over till the fat lady sings. But I think she may be onstage soon.
Kindest Regards
this is hilarious….so is THIS big enough news to get a little more notice in the MSM?
Good to hear this on a very cool evening. Reassessing is the right course.
I wouldn’t be too alarmed at what seem to be differences from recent announcements. The gang at CRU and Met is baffled, they really aren’t up to making sense right now.
The cynic might note this gives them three more years of employment and gives them a big “do not disturb, science at work” sign too.
This will be another reason to not deliver data and methods beyond what is already revealed. For, they have moved on. They are going to need more money too. Wonder where that will come from?
But to be fair, what else can they do?
CRU and Met is not the law. They cannot toss any rascals in jail or alter policies involving energy to millions and the entire economy.
And tyey cannot defend the results to date because no one really understands them matter now.
That is, no one knows exactly what data was used, how it was corrected, and which versions of which code was used.
No doubt some of that original data, even that not destroyed, used obsolete encoding, on obsolete magnetic or paper formats, and was processed by computer and operating systems long gone. Using compilers and/or languages now only memories.
The last alternative to reassessing would be to suspend activity at CRU, fire a lot of people near the top, and rebuild rom scratch. They certainly won’t do that.
Downstream this will lead to revisiting the published papers that used the data and deciding what the papers would have said with that data excluded or suspect.
All eyes and ears on Copenhagen. CRU, a big science institution, has had a setback. Politicians and bureaucrats and administrators will not pause so readily. We are talking of taxes, power, and their prestige.
US and Australia? Isnt it supposed to read US and Canada? 🙂