Data Activism And The Met Office Climate Change Data

After all the pre-Copenhagen nonsense surrounding the leaked e-mails and allegations of manipulated evidence supporting manmade global warming, the Met Office decided to publish some of the data it uses to analyse climate change. I hadn't seen it so I went looking for it and here it is.

The data spans 200 years and contains over 1.6 million temperature readings from more than 1,700 stations around the globe. Says the release:

"Average global temperatures are now some 0.75 °C warmer than they were 100 years ago and since the mid-1970s average global temperatures have increased at a rate of more than 0.15 °C per decade. Yet over the last 10 years temperatures have risen more slowly, causing some to claim that global warming has stopped. Here we explain why this is not the case and explain that observed changes are entirely consistent with our understanding of natural fluctuations of the climate within a trend of continuing long-term warming. The evidence is very clear that global temperatures are rising and that humans are largely responsible."

Interestingly, some of the data visualisation community (including Jer Thorp) have begun to rally to the cause and use their skills to generate some interesting visualisations out of the data including this one, from Flink Labs:

http://vimeo.com/moogaloop.swf?clip_id=8113546&server=vimeo.com&show_title=1&show_byline=1&show_portrait=0&color=&fullscreen=1

Global Climate Change Visualisation from Flink Labs on Vimeo.