Yesterday, the Moscow-based Institute of Economic Analysis (IEA), of which I am President, issued a study (in Russian), “How Warming Is Being Made: The Case of Russia.” The report, prepared by IEA director Natalya Pivovarova, suggests that the Hadley Center for Climate Change based at the headquarters of the British Meteorological Office in Exeter (Devon, England) and the Climate Research Unit of the University of East Anglia (CRU) in Norwich (England) apparently cherry-picked Russian climate data.

The IEA report shows that Russian meteorological-station data in the last 130 years did not substantiate the rate of warming on Russian territory suggested by the Hadley Climate Research Unit Temperature (HadCRUT) database, which has now been partially released.

IEA analysts point out that Russian meteorological stations cover most of the country’s territory, while the HadCRUT used data from only 25% of such stations in their calculations. Over 40% of Russian territory was not included in their global temperature calculations even though there was no lack of meteorological stations and observations. The data of stations located in areas not listed in the HadCRUT survey often shows slight cooling or no substantial warming in the second part of the 20th century and the early 21st century.

The HadCRUT database includes specific stations providing shorter observations and incomplete data highlighting the warming process, rather than stations providing longer and uninterrupted observations not demonstrating significant warming. On the whole, HadCRUT specialists use the incomplete findings of meteorological stations far more often than those providing complete observations. IEA analysts found that the climatologists used the data of stations located in large populated centers that are influenced by the “urban heat effect” more frequently than the unbiased data from the stations located in less populated places.

The IEA authors calculated that the scale of actual warming for the Russian territory in 1877–1998 was probably exaggerated by 0.64°C. Since Russia accounts for 12.5% of the world’s land mass, such an exaggeration for Russia alone should have an impact on the IPCC claim that the global temperature in the last century has risen by 0.76°C.

If similar procedures have been used for processing climate data from other national data sources, the impact on the rate of change in global temperature would be considerable.

The IEA report concludes that it is necessary to recalculate all global temperature data in order to assess the real rate of temperature change during the last century. Global temperature data will have to be modified because the calculations used by Copenhagen Conference on Climate Change analysts are based on HadCRUT research.