Met to publish 150 years of global weather data to counter sceptics

The British Meteorological Office (MET) has said it will release 150 years' worth of weather data from around the world in support of mainstream opinion on global warming.
 
The move by the Met is in response to a damaging email leak from the University of East Anglia's Climatic Research Unit (CRU), which is being used by climate change deniers to promote their agenda that the accepted position on climate change has been over exaggerated or is plain wrong.

 
Hackers - or possibly an insider at the university - stole and posted thousands of emails between the unit's scientists on a Russian-based server in November.

Some of the emails appear to express the scientists' frustrations at their inability to explain what they describe as a temporary slowdown in global warming. Others discuss ways of countering the campaigns of the climate change deniers.
 
The Met Office, which works closely with the CRU, responded over the weekend saying it would publish data this week from weather stations worldwide and had "every confidence" it would show temperatures had risen in the past 150 years.
 
The University of East Anglia has launched an independent inquiry into the source of the leak, which has been dubbed "Climategate".
 
Hardcore naysayers

While the easiest way to have accessed the data would have been by a disgruntled insider, the fact that the information was posted on Russian servers has led to suspicions that a highly sophisticated operation funded by hardcore climate naysayers is behind the ‘leak’.
 
Jean-Pascal van Ypersele, the vice-chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), said he believed the theft of the emails was not the work of amateur climate sceptics.
 
“It’s very common for hackers in Russia to be paid for their services,” he told The Times. “If you look at that mass of emails a lot of work was done, not only to download the data but it’s a carefully made selection of emails and documents that’s not random at all."
 
On the back of the scandal, an ICM poll commission by the Sunday Telegraph showed that almost half of Britons deny that climate change is man-made, while 7% do not believe climate change is happening at all.

Questioning Copenhagen

On Monday, as the Copenhagen conference opened, the Saudia Arabian delegate said that trust in climate science had been "shaken" among experts and called for an independent probe.

"The level of trust is definitely shaken, especially now that we are about to conclude an agreement that ... is going to mean sacrifices for our economies," said Mohammed al-Sabban, the kingdom's top climate negotiator

Global call for action

Some 56 newspapers from 45 countries ran an unprecedented joint editorial Monday calling for decisive action in the face of a "profound emergency", saying that global warming will "ravage the planet".

UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown, in an article in Monday's Guardian, which ran the joint editorial, said he was determined to "take on with evidence, argument and moral passion all the anti-science and anti-change environmental Luddites who seek to stand in the way of progress" and accused the hackers of deliberately trying to destabilise and undermine the Copenhagen conference.

"Let no one be in any doubt about the overwhelming scientific evidence that underpins the Copenhagen Conference," he writes. "Its landmark importance cannot be wished away by the theft of a few emails from one university."