Met Office ‘manipulated climate change figures’ say Russian think tank
By Will Stewart
An explosive new claim that the Meteorological Office in Britain ‘manipulated’ climate change figures has come from a leading Russian think-tank founded by a former adviser to Vladimir Putin.
As the Copenhagen summit comes to a climax on Friday, it was alleged that Siberian weather statistics were selected in a way that masks evidence not showing global warming.
The think tank strongly disputes the use of data from the Met Office’s Hadley Centre for Climate Change which were released in a bid to diffuse the recent row over hacked emails from the Climate Research Unit in East Anglia.
The emails were seized upon by global warming sceptics as evidence that academics were massaging the figures.
The Moscow-based Institute of Economic Analysis (IEA) claimed the Hadley Centre used statistics from weather stations in Russian and Siberia that fitted its theory of global warming, while often ignoring those that did not.
The report was seized on by media with close ties to the Kremlin, which is opposed to rigid new curbs on carbon emissions demanded by many Western countries at the Danish summit. Russian meteorological station data did not substantiate the global-warming theory,’ stated semi-official RIA Novosti news agency.
It went further in saying the Hadley Centre ‘probably tampered with Russian-climate data’ by using statistics from only a quarter of available weather stations in its report.
‘Over 40 per cent of Russian territory was not included in global-temperature calculations for reasons other than the lack of meteorological stations and observations,’ claimed Kommersant newspaper, owned by pro-Kremlin oligarch Allisher Usmanov.
It was alleged the Hadley data known as HadCRUT used incomplete findings from Russian met stations ‘far more often than those providing complete observations’.
‘When choosing between stations with breaks in measurements and those with regular measurements in same region, HadCRUT would include the station with gaps in information but with a more obvious picture of warming,’ said Kommersant.
And data was also skewed to include stations in large populated areas more frequently than the correct data of remote stations, it was alleged.
One account of the 21 page report said: ‘The scale of global warming was exaggerated due to temperature distortions for Russia accounting for 12.5 per cent of the world’s land mass.’
The institute – founded by Andrey Illarionov, a former pro-Western economic aide to Putin who quit the Kremlin criticising his authoritarian policies – alleges that the Hadley report over estimated warming in Russia by up to 0.64C between the 1870s and 1990s, based on fuller statistics.
Illarionov, who edited the report and is also a senior fellow at the Cato Institute in Washington, has a track record of strong opposition to the climate change lobby.
The report’s language is less lurid than some accounts of it, but it stated: ‘It is not easy to find a rational explanation to such a selective approach. Although one can build up a theory.
‘Analysing the temperature trends received from met stations it is hard to get rid of the impression that they do not show any noticeable trend to warming in second half of the 20th and beginning of 21st centuries.’
It stressed: ‘It is easy to see that the met stations are situated not evenly, their concentration is substantially and predictably higher in western and southern regions of the country, and notably lower in northern and eastern.’
It raises the fear that similar methods may have been used in other countries.
In releasing its report last week, the Met Office said it used a network of individual stations designated by the World Meteorological Organisation.
‘The subset of stations is evenly distributed across the globe and provides a fair representation of changes in mean temperature on a global scale over land.’
The hacked emails from climate change experts at the University of East Anglia were released to the world via a Russian internet server.
