Tuesday, February 16th, 2010
A science blogger has uncovered a catalogue of errors in Met Office records that form a central part of the scientific evidence for global warming.
The mistakes, which led to the data from a large number of weather stations being discarded or misused, had been overlooked by professional scientists and were only discovered when the Met Office’s Hadley Centre made data publicly available in December after the “climategate” e-mail row.
Although the errors do not alter the bigger picture on climate change, they have been seized upon as a further sign that scientific institutions have not been sufficiently transparent. “It makes you wonder how many other problems there are in the data,” said John Graham-Cumming, the programmer who spotted the mistakes. “The whole idea of doing science without releasing your data is quite worrying.”
Since being alerted of the problems last month the Met Office has issued a corrected version of its land-based temperature record on its website.
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This article was posted: Tuesday, February 16, 2010 at 5:12 am