UK meteorological agency accused of tampering climate data

The Meteorological Office is facing accusations that it had tampered climate data in a bid to raise evidence of global warming.

Russian critics on Wednesday charged UK climatologists of using altered climate records in producing a report that was provided to world leaders attending this week’s Copenhagen conference. The organization’s research, which states that the first decade of the 21st century has been the warmest in 160 years, is being used by policymakers to declare claims that the humankind is causing global warming.

Experts at the Institute of Economic Analysis (IEA) in Moscow however said that the UK report only used figures from weather stations that support its global warming theory, while disregarding those that do not. They accused Met Office’s Hadley Centre of solely depending on just 25 per cent of the weather stations in Russia and over-rating temperature levels in the country by over half a degree Celsius. Fred Singer, a global warming sceptic from the Science and Environmental Policy Project, has long suspected that the global warming issue is just an illusion.

Between 1975 and 2000, the number of Russian weather stations had decreased from 7,000 to 3,000. Patrick Michaels, an environmentalist and professor of Cato Institute in Washington, said that there was insufficient climate data coming from Russia in the last 15 years that can scientifically support global warming. He earlier questioned Hadley’s report, but the organization was not willing to show the raw data.

The IEA counter report claims that Hadley only used the partial findings from Russian meteorological stations. It further said that Hadley had puffed up warming records in Russia by up to 0.64C between 1870 and the 1990s.