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Public opinion polls show a growing number of people question the science behind climate change. A recent stolen email scandal, a handful of errors in key UN reports and some uncharacteristically brutal winter weather in northern climes haven't exactly rea
Public opinion polls show a growing number of people question the science behind climate change. A recent stolen email scandal, a handful of errors in key UN reports and some uncharacteristically brutal winter weather in northern climes haven't exactly reassured sceptics that climate change is happening and happening now.
Changing that distrust - something crucial to creating the political will to curb climate change - will require, among other things, improving faith in the accuracy of the science.
The UK Met Office took an important first step in that direction this week, persuading the World Meteorological Association to begin collecting a new, beefed-up international temperature dataset.
Under the proposal by the Met Office, the United Kingdom's weather service, 183 countries around the world are expected to begin providing daily or weekly temperature readings to the World Meteorological Association. Formerly, only monthly averages were provided. Under the new system, the WMO also will publish not just global temperature averages but data broken down by region, said Helen Chivers, a spokeswoman for the Met Office.
"It's aimed at bringing the dataset into the 21st Century," Chivers said. "The technology has moved on."
The Met Office doesn't expect that the more frequent and precise temperature data will show anything different, she said.
"There are pretty known data sets out there already that all show the same thing, that temperatures are rising," she said.
But the new data will give much more detail, be open to public scrutiny and constitute a new internationally owned scientific resource. Similar datasets are already collected, but by national organizations, such as the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmosphere Administration (NOAA), NASA and the Met Office, Chivers said.
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