Climategate: Klimaatlobby sjoemelde met Russische data

[Dr. Marc-Alexander Fluks]

REPLY TO: D66 at nic.surfnet.nl

Bron:   Daily Mail
Datum:  17 december 2009
Auteur: Will Steward
URL:     
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1236513/Met-Office-manipulated-climate-change-figures-say-Russian-think-tank.html


Met Office 'manipulated climate change figures' says Russian think
tank linked to President Putin
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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. Most of Russia's income
is derived from oil and gas, which means its economy could be hit by
curbs on carbon emissions. '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.

(...)

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(c) 2009 Associated Newspapers Ltd

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