UK Met Office on the defensive in wake of climate change scandal

After initially dismissing the Climategate scandal, Britain’s primary source for climate data has been forced to acknowledge the event and is working hard to restore its public image. The UK’s Met Office, Britain’s equivalent of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in the United States, says it will be releasing its climate data to the public and will be reanalyzing 160 years worth of data to ensure it is accurate.

In a statement on its website, the Met Office announced that this week it will release temperatures records from more than one thousand stations. This represents only a subset of the data from approximately 5,000 stations that the office holds however as the agency must seek approval from other agencies to release all of its records.

The office said, “This subset will continue the policy of putting as much of the station temperature record as possible into the public domain.” Those in the public eager to see the data have questioned the statement wondering why, if the agency was committed to openly sharing data, it wasn’t done before the scandal erupted.

With public confidence waning, the Met Office also said that it would be going back through 160 years of data to ensure it is accurate, a process expected to take up to three years. As one of only three primary sources for climate data in the world, the accuracy of the Met Office’s data is essential. The other two are maintained in the U.S. by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and NASA’s Goddard Institute of Space Studies (GISS). Problems with NASA’s climate records have been discovered in the past and much to their embarrassment they have been forced to restate records.

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The Met Office had initially been dismissive of the Climategate event. The agency’s statement four days after the release of the messages did not directly acknowledge the event and instead sought to reassure the public on the accuracy of the data saying, “we reinforce our commitment to ensuring that world leaders continue to have access to the best possible science.”

Despite the reassurances from the Met Office and other climate agencies, the uproar over the event however failed to subside and continues to grow, casting doubt on the very underpinnings of the manmade climate change theory. The released emails allude to manipulating, falsifying and deleting climate data in what some say were moves by the scientists to come up with a predetermined conclusion to support their hypothesis.

Much of the analysis of the Met Office’s data was performed by the Climate Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia. Its director, Phil Jones, is now at the center of the scandal and has temporarily stepped aside pending the results of an investigation into the center and many of the controversial emails he sent.

In the United States, Michael Mann of Penn State University is being investigated by his employer for the emails he sent. Mann was the author of the infamous ‘hockey stick’ graph that was used in reports released by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and in Al Gore’s book and movie “An Inconvenient Truth.” The graph has since been discredited.

The United Nations announced last week it would be conducting its own investigation as well. Dr. Rajendra Pachauri, chairman of the IPCC, said “We certainly are going to take a look at the whole lot of it and then are going to take a position on it. We certainly don’t want to brush anything under the carpet.”