ClimateGate: UK Weather Service to Re-examine 160 Years of Data

America's media might not think the growing ClimateGate scandal is important, but Britain's Met Office believes it's serious enough to re-examine 160 years of temperature data:

The new analysis of the data will take three years, meaning that the Met Office will not be able to state with absolute confidence the extent of the warming trend until the end of 2012. 

For those unfamiliar, the Met Office is England's national weather service.

Maybe this revelation will convince our global warming-obsessed press that information in the e-mail messages obtained from the University of East Anglia's Climatic Research Unit is actually newsworthy.

As reported by the London Times Saturday (h/t Ed Morrissey):

The Met Office plans to re-examine 160 years of temperature data after admitting that public confidence in the science on man-made global warming has been shattered by leaked e-mails. [...]

The Met Office database is one of three main sources of temperature data analysis on which the UN’s main climate change science body relies for its assessment that global warming is a serious danger to the world. This assessment is the basis for next week’s climate change talks in Copenhagen aimed at cutting CO2 emissions.

With the Copenhagen summit just days from now, this announcement out of England is HUGE news, especially given how connected this Office is to the university at the heart of the scandal:

The Met Office works closely with the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit (CRU), which is being investigated after e-mails written by its director, Phil Jones, appeared to show an attempt to manipulate temperature data and block alternative scientific views.

The Met Office’s published data showing a warming trend draws heavily on CRU analysis. CRU supplied all the land temperature data to the Met Office, which added this to its own analysis of sea temperature data.

Also of consequence is how this Office is trying to get temperature data from all over the world re-examined:

Since the stolen e-mails were published, the chief executive of the Met Office has written to national meteorological offices in 188 countries asking their permission to release the raw data that they collected from their weather stations. [...]

The UN’s Intergovernmental Panel of Climate Change admitted yesterday that it needed to consider the full implications of the e-mails and whether they cast doubt on any of the evidence for man-made global warming.

This led Ed Morrissey to opine Saturday:

The Met Office is taking the correct approach.  The data on which they largely relied has not only been shown to have been corrupted by bias and corruption, it’s also been destroyed.  Knowing the UEA-CRU’s credibility as a scientific effort has been compromised, real scientists would insist on recreating the data set in a thoroughly testable and transparent process before proceeding to use any of the conclusions reached from the previous work to form any more recommendations for action.

In fact, the UN, the UK, and the rest of the world should be insisting on the same approach — if they were interested in science in the first place.  The UK’s efforts to quash the Met Office’s review, which is what scientists would demand in any other context, shows that the politicians aren’t terribly interested in whether AGW is scientifically supportable, or even true at all.  They want the power that AGW hysteria gives them to seize control of private-industry production and the choices available to people now.

Indeed.