Professor John Abraham's withering scrutiny reveals how the gurus of climate scepticism repeat a pattern of manipulation

• Monckton takes scientist to brink of madness at climate talk

Another one bites the dust. Every so often, someone with a strong stomach and time to spare volunteers to devote weeks or months of their life to a grisly task: investigating the claims of a person who dismisses the science or significance of man-made climate change. Dave Rado did it with Martin Durkin's film, the Great Global Warming Swindle. Howard Friel did it with Bjørn Lomborg. Ian Enting did it with Ian Plimer.

It involves slow, painstaking work, following the sources, checking the claims against the science. But the result in all cases has been the same: a devastating debunking of both the claims and the methods of the people investigated.

Now another fallen idol of climate change denial must be added to the list: Viscount Monckton's assertions have been comprehensively discredited by professor of mechanical engineering John Abraham, at the University of St Thomas in Minnesota.

Abraham, like the other brave souls who have taken on this thankless task, has plainly spent a very long time on it. He investigates a single lecture Monckton delivered in October last year. He was struck by the amazing claims that Monckton made: that climate science is catalogue of lies and conspiracies. If they were true, it would be a matter of the utmost seriousness: human-caused climate change would, as Monckton is fond of saying, be the greatest fraud in scientific history. If they were untrue, it was important to show why.

As Abraham explains at the beginning of his investigation, his scientific credentials didn't mean that he was automatically right, any more than Monckton's lack of scientific credentials meant that he was automatically wrong. Every claim Monckton made would be judged on its merits. Where Monckton gave references, Abraham would follow them up, seeking to discover whether he had accurately represented the papers he cited, or whether the authors of those papers agreed with his interpretation. Where he did not give references, Abraham would see whether Monckton's claims were consistent with published scientific data.

One of the difficulties with tasks like this is that it takes only a minute to make a claim, but can take hours, even days, to investigate it. So if people are making lots of claims, exposing them requires a great deal of work. Judging by the outcome of all the investigations I've mentioned, the gurus of climate change denial appear to expect that no one will have the time and energy to question them.

The results of Abraham's investigation are astonishing: not one of the claims he looks into withstands scrutiny. He exposes a repeated pattern of misinformation, distortion and manipulation, as he explains in the article he has written for the Guardian. Some of Monckton's assertions are breath-taking in their brazen disregard of facts. He has gravely misrepresented papers and authors he refers to, in some cases he appears to have created data, graphs and trends out of thin air: at least that was how it appeared to Abraham when Monckton gave no references and his graphs and figures starkly contradicted the published science.

The lecture, like all those Monckton gives, looked and sounded like science: lots of charts and graphs, plenty of numbers and citations, all delivered with an air of authority and finality. Abraham's hard grind demonstrates that it was a long concatenation of nonsense.

Monckton has already been exposed for falsely claiming that he is a member of the House of Lords (the UK's upper legislative body). Now that his claims about the science have been exposed to such withering scrutiny, it's hard to see how he can bounce back in the eyes of anyone other than his ardent disciples. But among them, I doubt that this exposure will make a jot of difference.

Such is the strength of their belief, that if Monckton were to claim that he is in fact the risen Christ, some of them would still go along with it. Given his past pronouncements, it's probably only a matter of time, so we should soon be able to test this proposition. Even if he somehow managed to alienate his followers, they would simply move on to the next charlatan, as climate change denial groupies have done many times already.

The problem is that people like Lord Monckton, Ian Plimer, Christopher Booker and James Delingpole act as an echo-chamber for each other's discredited beliefs. However nutty their views are, they will be affirmed by other members of the closed circle. Speaking and listening only to each other, as we saw at the Heartland Institute conference last month, their claims become ever weirder and more extreme as they isolate themselves from reality. In circumstances like this, it doesn't matter how comprehensively they are discredited, they will merely dig their holes even deeper.

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An angry professor who listened to Monckton's speech at a US university demolishes the wild claims made by the climate denier

• George Monbiot: Viscount Monckton, fallen idol of climate denial
• Read John Abraham's reply to Christopher Monckton in full

It takes a lot to make a scientist mad – even today, when it seems that science and scientists are under siege, particularly over the topic of climate change.

But everyone has a breaking point, one straw too many that inspires them to act.

For me, that time came last October when I learned about a British import we have had the displeasure of experiencing here in the United States.

That import, Christopher Monckton, Viscount Monckton of Brenchley, had given a rousing speech to a crowd at Bethel University in Minnesota, near where I live.

His speech was on global warming and his style was convincing and irreverent. Anyone listening to him was given the impression that global warming was not happening, or that if it did happen it wouldn't be so bad, and scientists who warned about it were part of a vast conspiracy.

I know a thing or two about global warming. I have worked in the field of heat transfer and fluid mechanics and I have published more than 80 papers on these topics.

I am a university professor and also an active consultant in the energy and environment industry. What I heard in his talk surprised me.

Monckton cited scientist after scientist whose work "disproved" global warming.

He contended that polar bears are not really at risk (in fact they do better as weather warms); projections of sea level rise are a mere 6cm; Arctic ice has not declined in a decade; Greenland is not melting; sea levels are not rising; ocean temperatures are not increasing; medieval times were warmer than today; ocean acidification is not occurring; and global temperatures are not increasing.

If true, these conclusions would be welcome. But there is a problem with this kind of truth – it is not made by wishing.

So I began a journey of investigation (the full results of which you can view here).

I actually tracked down the articles and authors that Monckton cited. What I discovered was incredible, even to a scientist who follows the politics of climate change. I found that he had misrepresented the science.

For instance, Monckton's claims that "Arctic sea ice is fine, steady for a decade" made reference to Alaskan research group (IARC).

I wrote to members of IARC and asked whether this was true. Both their chief scientist and director confirmed that Monckton was mistaken.

They also pointed me to the National Snow and Ice Data Centre (NSIDC) for a second opinion.

A scientist there confirmed Monckton's error, as did Dr Ola Johannessen, whose work has shown ice loss in Greenland (Monckton reported that Johannessen's work showed that Greenland "was just fine".)

Next, I investigated Monckton's claim that the medieval period was warmer than today. Monckton showed a slide featuring nine researchers' works which, he claimed, proved that today's warming is not unusual – it was hotter in the past.

I wrote to these authors and I read their papers. It turned out that none of the authors or papers made the claims that Monckton attributed to them. This pattern of misinterpretation was becoming chronic.

Next, I checked on Monckton's claim that the ocean has not been heating for 50 years. To quote him directly, there has been "no ocean heat buildup for 50 years".

On this slide, he referenced a well-known researcher named Dr Catia Domingues. It turns out Domingues said no such thing. What would she know? She only works for the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO) in Australia.

In one last, and particularly glaring example, Monckton referred to a 2004 statement by the International Astronomical Union (IAU) which stated that solar activity has caused today's warming and that global warming will end soon.

The president of the IAU division on the sun and heliosphere told me that there is no such position of the IAU and that I should pass this information on to whomever "might have used the IAU name to claim otherwise".

After learning all of this, and much more than can be written about in this limited space, I felt like Alice who fell down the rabbit hole and emerged in an alternate reality.

How can such misrepresentations be made without public recourse? I cannot answer that. I can say that scientists are listening and though our voices are small, we will use them to hold people like Monckton and others to account for their public claims.

The science community is slowly learning that if we don't perform this service, no one will.

Tough decisions are going to have to be made and the public deserves accurate information about the science so they can help make those decisions.

• John Abraham is associate professor in the School of Engineering at the University of St Thomas in Minnesota

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Figures from US scientists show Arctic sea ice is at a record low, while land temperatures are likely to hit new highs

• Nasa scientist James Hansen condemns 'politicised' media

New data from some of the world's leading climate researchers and institutions suggest that 2010 is shaping up to be one of the warmest years ever recorded.

Scientists at the US National Snow and Ice Centre Data Centre (NSIDC) report today that Arctic sea ice – frozen seawater that floats on the ocean surface – is now at its lowest physical extent ever recorded for the time of year, suggesting that it is on course to break the previous record low set in 2007.

Satellite monitoring by the NSIDC in Boulder, Colorado, shows that the melting of sea ice has been unusually fast this year, with as much as 40,000 sq km now disappearing daily.

The melt season started almost a month later than normal at the end of March and is not expected to end until September.

Meanwhile, research from the polar science centre at the University of Washington suggests that the volume of sea ice in March 2010 was 20,300 cubic km, 38% below the 1979 level when records began.

Global surface temperatures may also be at a record high, according to leading climate scientist James Hansen and colleagues at the National Aeronautic Space Administration (Nasa).

In a paper which is yet to be peer-reviewed but has been submitted to the journal Reviews of Geophysics, they suggest that the Earth has been 0.65C warmer over the past 12 months than during the 1951 to 1980 mean, and that the global temperature for 2010 will exceed the 2005 record.

Hansen, credited with being one of the first scientists to study climate change, dismisses sceptics' claims that global warming "stopped" in 1998.

"Record high global temperature during the period with instrumental data was reached in 2010," he writes.

"It is likely that the 2010 global surface temperature ... will be a record.

"Global warming on decadal timescales is continuing without let-up ... we conclude that there has been no reduction in the global warming trend of 0.15-0.2C/decade that began in the late 1970s."

The Nasa research backs up findings by the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association (NOAA), the US national climate monitoring service that measures global temperatures by satellite. This has recorded the hottest ever first four months of a year.

As a result of high sea surface temperatures, the Atlantic hurricane season – which officially started this week – is expected to be one of the most intense in years.

Last week NOAA predicted 14 to 23 named storms, including eight to 14 hurricanes – three to seven of which were likely to be "major", with winds of at least 111mph.

This is compared to an average six-month season of 11 named storms, six of which become hurricanes, two of them major.

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Climatologist also calls from more openness from researchers because data are 'too useful' to be kept 'under wraps'

• UK government chief scientist hits out at sceptics

The utterances of James Hansen, the Nasa climatologist who is widely credited with being the first scientist to successfully megaphone the risks of climate change to the wider world back in the 1980s, always attract attention.

He is nothing less than a Marmite figure within the climate debate; sceptics hate him for his sometimes emotive political advocacy, whereas advocates for action on climate change respect his scientific authority and the role he has played in spelling out to our political masters the potential dangers of climate change.

So a new draft paper (pdf), co-authored with colleagues at the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York, which has just been submitted to the journal Reviews of Geophysics, is sure to get noticed. Particularly so because it tackles head on the unique pressures facing climate science at the moment, namely, calls from a doubting public and media for climatologists to be more transparent about how they arrive at their conclusions.

For anyone interested in how climatologists collate and interpret the all-important average global temperature datasets the paper (which is yet to be peer reviewed) is an illuminating read, but perhaps the most interesting section for a wider audience – which Hansen admits "might not survive depending on the advice of the [journal's] editors" – is the final concluding section (pdf):

Human-made climate change has become an issue of surpassing importance to humanity, and global warming is the first order manifestation of increasing greenhouse gases that are predicted to drive climate change. Thus it is understandable that analyses of ongoing global temperature change are now subject to increasing scrutiny and criticisms that are different than would occur for a purely scientific problem.
Our comments here about communication of this climate change science to the public are our opinion. Other people may have quite different opinions. We offer our opinion because it seems inappropriate to ignore the vast range of claims appearing in the media and in hopes that open discussion of these matters may help people distinguish the reality of global change sooner than would otherwise be the case. However these comments, even though based on experience over a few decades, are only opinion. Our primary contribution is quantitative results discussed in the numbered paragraphs below. [Leo: certainly worth reading, but too long to include here on this blog.]
Communication of the status of global warming to the public has always been hampered by weather variability. Lay people's perception tends to be strongly influenced by the latest local fluctuation. This difficulty can be alleviated by stressing the need to focus on the frequency and magnitude of warm and cold anomalies, which change noticeably on decadal time scales as global warming increases.
A greater obstacle to public communication has arisen with the politicization of reporting of global warming, a perhaps inevitable consequence of the economic and social implications of efforts required to alter the course of human-made climate change. We have the impression that the effect of politicization on communication of the science is aggravated by the fact that much of the media is owned by or strongly influenced by special economic interests.
The task of alleviating the communication obstacle posed by politicization is formidable. The difficulty is compounded by continual attacks on the credibility of scientists. Polls indicate that the attacks have been effective in causing many members of the public to doubt the reality of global warming.
Given this situation, the best hope may be repeated clear description of the science and passage of sufficient time to confirm validity of the description. A problem with that prescription is the danger that the climate system could pass tipping points that cause major climate changes to proceed largely out of humanity's control [Hansen et al., 2008]. Yet continuation of this approach seems to be essential for the sake of minimizing the degree of inevitable climate change, even while other ways are sought to draw attention to the dangers of continued greenhouse gas increases.
One lesson we have learned is that making our global data analysis immediately available, with data use by ourselves and others helping to reveal flaws in the input data, has a practical disadvantage: it allows any data flaws to be interpreted and misrepresented as machinations. Yet the data are too useful for scientific studies to be kept under wraps, so we will continue to make the data available on a monthly basis. But we are making special efforts to make the process as transparent as possible, including availability of the computer program that does the analysis, the data that goes into the analysis (also available from original sources), and detailed definition of urban adjustment of meteorological station data.

There is, of course, plenty of urgent discussion going on at the moment about how to better communicate the climate change message following the events of recent months, such as the hacked/stolen/leaked/[for the purposes of avoiding a tedious debate, insert your own term] UEA emails, which have caused public confidence in climate science to nose dive. For example, Bob Ward was writing about just this issue in New Scientist last week.

But it is still interesting to hear the thoughts of one of climate science's leading voices, particularly one who has never shied away from implicitly politicising the communication of the science via his often strident advocacy of certain solutions.

Hansen lays out the efforts he has made to be transparent and open with his data. Advocating this approach despite the danger that flaws could be "interpreted and misrepresented as machinations" could be taken as an implicit criticism of the climate scientists at the University of East Anglia. They have come under attack for discussions in the stolen emails that were published in November which suggested they were withholding information from their critics.

Does this mean that Hansen will now temper his campaigning role and solely stick to "doing the science" though? After all, the paper also states that "our principal task remains the scientific one; trying to describe with increasing clarity and insight the global temperature change that is occurring".

One thing that Hansen and other climatologists will be desperately trying to communicate - as he does in this paper – is that 2010 is currently on course to challenge for the title of the hottest year on record, despite popular perception to the contrary following a cold winter in much of the northern hemisphere. As the paper states:

The 12-month running mean global temperature in the GISS analysis has reached a new record in 2010. The new record temperature in 2010 is particularly meaningful because it occurs when the recent minimum of solar irradiance is having its maximum cooling effect. At the time of this writing (May 2010) the tropical Pacific Ocean has changed from El Nino conditions to ENSO-neutral and is likely headed into the cool La Nina phase of the Southern Oscillation. The 12-month running mean global temperature may continue to rise for a few more months before the ENSO change causes the next decline. It is likely that global temperature for calendar year 2010 will exceed the 2005 record, but that is not certain if a deep La Nina develops quickly.

As Hansen acknowledges, the race is now on to present news such as this in a dispassionate, transparent, authoritative manner to a public that is also at the same time being aggressively courted by a noisy, anarchic blogosphere and a politicised media who are repeatedly urging them to shoot the messenger.

Yes, to a certain degree the messengers have conspired to shoot themselves in the foot of late, but what Hansen and his colleagues are now urgently trying to do is reboot the climate debate and start afresh. The message seems to be: if it means going back to basics and starting from the beginning all over again, then so be it.

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Meteorologists record a temperature of 53.7C (129F) in Mohenjo-daro as heatwave continues across Pakistan and India

Mohenjo-daro, a ruined city in what is now Pakistan that contains the last traces of a 4,000-year-old civilisation that flourished on the banks of the river Indus, today entered the modern history books after government meteorologists recorded a temperature of 53.7C (129F). Only Al 'Aziziyah, in Libya (57.8C in 1922), Death valley in California (56.7 in 1913) and Tirat Zvi in Israel (53.9 in 1942) are thought to have been hotter.

Temperatures in the nearest town, Larkana, have been only slightly lower in the last week, with 53C recorded last Wednesday. As the temperatures peaked, four people died, including a prisoner serving a life sentence for murder and an elderly woman. Dozens are said to have fainted.

The extreme heat was exacerbated by chronic power cuts which have prevented people from using air-conditioning. The electricity has cut out for eight hours each day as part of a severe load-shedding regime that has caused riots in other parts of Pakistan where cities are experiencing a severe heatwave with temperatures of between 43C and 47C.

"It's very tough," said M B Kalhoro, a local correspondent for Dawn.com, an online newspaper. "When the power is out, people just stay indoors all the time."

The blistering heat now engulfing Pakistan stretches to India where more than 1,000 people have reportedly died of heatstroke or heart attacks in the last two months. Although Europe and China have experienced cooler than average winters, record or well-above average temperatures have been recorded in Tibet and Burma this year.

Southern Europe was yesterday rapidly warming after a particularly cool winter. Thirteen provinces in southern Spain, including Andalucia, Murcia and the Canary islands, were put on "yellow alert" after meteorologists forecast temperatures rising to 38C (99F) in Cadiz, Córdoba, Jaén, Malaga and Seville.

According to the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association (NOAA), the national climate monitoring service that measures global temperatures by satellite, 2010 is shaping up to be one of the hottest years on record. The first four months were the hottest ever measured, with record spring temperatures in northern Africa, south Asia and Canada.

The global temperature for March was a record 13.5C (56.3F) and average ocean temperatures were also the hottest for any March since record-keeping began in 1880.

As a result of high sea surface temperatures, the Atlantic hurricane season, which officially started today is now expected to be one of the most intense in years. Last week NOAA predicted 14 to 23 named storms, including eight to 14 hurricanes, three to seven of which were likely to be "major" storms, with winds of at least 111mph. This is compared to an average six-month season of 11 named storms, six of which become hurricanes, two of them major.

On Sunday, scientists reported that Africa's Lake Tanganyika, the second deepest freshwater lake in the world, is now at its warmest in 1,500 years, threatening the fishing industry on which several million lives depend. The lake's surface waters, at 26C (78.8F), have reached temperatures that are "unprecedented since AD500," they reported in the journal Nature Geoscience.

Some scientists have suggested that the warming experienced around the world this year is strongly linked to warmer than usual currents in the Pacific Ocean, a regular phenomenon known as El Niño. Others say that it is consistent with long-term climate change.

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Global warming has always energised Hay audiences – but this year the mood is much more sober

For the past four or five years, one theme burned through discussions at Hay more than most: climate change, and the large and small things human beings might do to tackle it. Politicians – including, most famously, Al Gore – arrived here to talk up their ecological credentials, green authors warned the crowds of the doom that may await us, and everyone lapped it up.

Moreover, with the Copenhagen summit coming into view, last year's environmental sessions had an infectious mixture of trepidation and momentum, as they focused on The Big Question: whether the governments of the world would congregate and resolve to actually do something.

And then look what happened. Copenhagen turned out to be a grim, acrimonious affair, and the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change process now looks dangerously close to stalling. Just before the summit took place, the so-called "Climategate" affair (when emails at the University Of East Anglia's Climatic Research Unit were hacked, leading to a flurry of accusations about data manipulation) allowed the sceptics a field day. Immediately afterwards, a dispute about the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's work on melting Himalayan glaciers gave them even more encouragement. Recession and the crisis in public finances, too, seemed to hoof climate change well down the world's list of political priorities – while even this year's bitter winter gave the voices of climate-change denial yet another boost.

As a result, this year's green Hay sessions have an ever-so-slightly tortured kind of atmosphere, translatable as "What are we going to do now?", and are largely devoid of the spurts of tentative optimism that preceded Copenhagen.

On Saturday afternoon, the former Energy and Climate Change Secretary – and much-tipped Labour leadership contender – Ed Miliband delivers one of this year's big eco-hits: a video-link conversation with the president of the Maldives, the cluster of islands in the Pacific Ocean that's already dealing with the grim effects of an overheating planet. Mohamed Nasheed, 43, came to office after long years of torture and imprisonment; now he's keen to talk about rising sea and freshly-evacuated islands, and tell people in the Northern Hemisphere what's required of them. "What we need is large-scale, 60s-style direct action: dynamic street activity," he says. "We need to act very quickly." The words rouse the crowd, but there's an uneasiness in the air: right now, are large amounts of "dynamic street activity" a realistic possibility?

An hour after the event, I meet Miliband. "When I was here last year," he says, "I did an event with Franny Armstrong [director of the climate change film The Age Of Stupid]. There was high expectation then. Now, there's a sense of" – he slows down, so as to pick his words carefully – "sober reality. But I don't think there's a despair. People don't think it's all hopeless. Copenhagen was the crest of a wave, and you inevitably have a bit of a sense of disappointment, and people wanting to gear themselves up again. I think they realise you've got to dig in for a long struggle. That's what it felt like today: people were talking about education, and how we get lots of different people involved – they were taking a long view."

One all-important question, though: how will people like him once again put jump-leads on the public mood?

"It's a struggle," Miliband admits. "Look: President Nasheed didn't despair. From 1991 to 2008, he was jailed on 13 separate occasions. And as he told us today, he didn't say, 'Oh, I'm giving up now.' You've got to always realise that there is a sense of possibility, and that you do have setbacks on the road. But just because it isn't easy, doesn't mean you give up."

The day's next green talkfest is a conversation between Rosie Boycott and Nicholas Stern, the economist and life peer who authored 2006's Stern Review, which made the case for cutting our emissions on the basis of hard-headed logic: to do so now would take a tiny fraction of the world's cash and resources, whereas sitting back and then trying to cope with a boiling planet would almost literally cost the Earth. His specialism is a forensic, inevitably rather wonk-ish take on what to do next – underpinned by an optimism that defines just about all his answers.

When I suggest that the recession seems to have turned people – and, more importantly, countries – inwards, and squashed the kind of collective thinking we're surely going to need if our emissions levels are even to start coming down, he claims that an economic downturn is the ideal time to push economies in a greener direction.

"This is a special opportunity," Stern says. "If you've got idle resources, the right thing to do is to invest in the growth story of the future – not just reflate the economy in a business-as-usual way. The Koreans' reflation package was about 70% into green activities. With China, it was 25 or 30%. This was an argument that went round the world, and in a few cases, people acted on it."

So why has climate change apparently disappeared from the political agenda? Again, more glass-half-full stuff: "It wasn't ever prominent in the election campaign. But one of the reasons for that was that the parties are actually in quite close agreement. It was all there in their manifestos. When David Cameron was putting the coalition together, he said, 'Let's start with what we agree on.' And this was point number two."

Stern is surely sounding too optimistic for his own good, not least when he chews over Copenhagen's deadening aftermath. "Life is full of ups and downs. People didn't see, because it was so chaotic and acrimonious, that the Copenhagen accord turned out to be a strong platform for going forward. It was much less fragile than many of us feared. The submissions to Copenhagen now cover 120 countries, and 80% of emissions. If everybody delivers, it will give you emissions levels in 2020 that are the same as we have now. And we'll have peaked. That's really worth having."

By way of an antidote, I pitch up at an admirably eco-minded hotel in nearby Kington, to meet 91-year-old Professor James Lovelock, on his third trip to the festival. He cuts a fascinating figure here: thanks to the brilliant Gaia Hypothesis (whereby the Earth is seen as a self-regulating system, akin to a living organism), he was one of the first intellectuals to embrace what we now know as green thinking, yet he calmly makes the kind of arguments that send many environmentalists over the edge. At his afternoon event, all is ambivalence: he's received as a hero, but then spends a good deal of his allotted hour taking questions – and mini-speeches – from irate members of the audience.

To boil down any of Lovelock's thoughts to a few sentences is to do him a serious disservice, but here goes. As he sees it, climate change is now all but out of control. We should certainly cut our greenhouse-gas emissions, but focus most of our efforts on adapting to a world that, sooner or later, will turn troublesome beyond words. As part of that, he has long claimed the only sustainable method of generating the electricity Britain needs is nuclear power – and that in large swathes of the world, solar and wind power are already proving to be a dangerous distraction. From time to time, he dispenses optimism, of a sort: he's not having the standard-issue predictions of steadily-rising global temperatures, and thinks that though the Earth could suddenly heat up in a way that few models have so far predicted, we might also have longer to prepare than some people think.

"Who knows? Everybody might be wrong," he says. "I may be wrong. Climate change may not happen as fast as we thought, and we may have 1,000 years to sort it out."

If that sounds comforting, bear in mind that the subtitle of his latest book, The Vanishing Face of Gaia, is "the final warning" – and when it comes to the kind of climate change-related schemes that dominate the headlines, he tends to sound withering, to say the least. Copenhagen, he tells me, was not just "futile" but "a monumental extravagance – I'm never convinced that big people-gatherings like that can solve the truly important issues." His most dismissive words, however, are reserved for the Stern Review: "If you mix up some science that's incomplete with some economics which is almost as bad, you're going to get an absolutely dreadful progeny."

In the context of Hay, Lovelock's most sobering point takes on a grim hilarity. The argument is simple enough: even if the public were to get newly excited, and politicians were united by fresh resolve, the human race might face an insurmountable problem – that even the kind of great minds who come to Hay might not have the IQ required for such a massive challenge.

"The main problem is that we're not really clever enough as a species," he says, with a wry look. "We haven't developed far enough. The Earth's evolving, and we're evolving with it – but it's a damn slow process. It's taken us a million years to change from being semi-intelligent animals to what we are now: still animals, and still semi-intelligent. I don't think we can handle big problems like the Earth."

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Just as leading US experts give their clearest warning about emissions, 43 UK scientists prompt Royal Society to rethink

• Government's chief scientific adviser hits out at climate sceptics

Two weeks ago, the United States National Academy of Sciences published its clearest ever report on the science of climate change. It concluded: "Climate change is occurring, is caused largely by human activities, and poses significant risks for a broad range of human and natural systems."

Over recent years, particularly during the George W Bush administration, the academy has faced great challenges in presenting the science of climate change to domestic policymakers, many of whom have been in denial about the consequences of greenhouse gas emissions.

But with Barack Obama in the White House, the academy has been more able to offer scientific advice that some politicians may find inconvenient.

So it is ironic that just as the leading scientists in the US give their clearest warning about climate change, we now see suggestions that some fellows of UK's national academy of science, the Royal Society, might be disputing the evidence.

Last December, ahead of the United Nations conference in Copenhagen, the society published a statement entitled Preventing dangerous climate change, which was unequivocal.

It said: "It is certain that GHG [greenhouse gas] emissions from the burning of fossil fuels and from land use change lead to a warming of climate, and it is very likely that these GHGs are the dominant cause of the global warming that has been taking place over the last 50 years."

But now, 43 of the society's 1,489 fellows have written to complain about some of its statements about climate change published over the last few years. It is not clear exactly what the 43 have concerns about.

And because their identities have not been made public, we do not know whether any of them are climate researchers.

There are certainly some fellows working outside climate science who dispute the findings of mainstream researchers.

One such is Anthony Kelly, a member of the academic advisory council of the Global Warming Policy Foundation, a lobby group set up by Nigel Lawson last year to promote scepticism about climate change.

Professor Kelly is an 81-year-old distinguished research fellow in materials science and metallurgy at Cambridge University.

The other members of the GWPF's academic advisory council include Ian Plimer, the Australian geologist who has wrongly claimed that volcanoes produce more carbon dioxide than human activities.

The news that 43 fellows apparently disagree with the society is likely to generate even further public confusion about the causes and consequences of climate change.

A YouGov poll published earlier this week found that 40% of the public either do not believe climate change is happening, or think scientists are divided about its occurrence, compared with 32% last year.

The Royal Society is carrying out a review of its statements on climate change in response to the fellows' letter. It will no doubt prefer to remain silent until the review is completed.

But given the impact of the controversies over the University of East Anglia's Climatic Research Unit and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, it would be better if the 43 fellows made their concerns public, and the society clarified where it stands on the scientific evidence about climate change.

• Bob Ward is policy and communications director at the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment at the London School of Economics and Political Science, and was head of media relations at the Royal Society until September 2006.

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• Copenhagen climate change conference 2009
• Climate change
• Barack Obama
• George Bush
• US politics
• United Nations
• University of Cambridge
• University of East Anglia
• London School of Economics and Political Science

Professor John Beddington dismisses 'unreasonable' comments from groups including Nigel Lawson's thinktank, as Royal Society responds to critics with new climate science guide

• UK Royal Society revives confusion as US concludes climate change certainty

The government's chief scientific adviser has hit out at climate sceptics who attack global warming science on spurious grounds.

The statements from Professor John Beddington appeared to be a veiled attack on the former Tory chancellor and arch climate sceptic Nigel Lawson.

Beddington said that he had met Lord Lawson to brief him about the science of global warming.

His comments came as the Royal Society announced that it would publish a new guide to climate science for the public following criticism of existing statements on the topic, reportedly from 43 of the society's 1,489 fellows.

"It has been suggested that the society holds the view that anyone challenging the consensus on climate change is malicious – this is ridiculous," said Professor Martin Rees, the society's president.

"Science is organised scepticism and the consensus must shift in light of the evidence.

"In the current environment we believe this new guide will be very timely. Lots of people are asking questions, indeed even within the fellowship of the society there are differing views."

In his first interview since the election, Beddington agreed that true scientific scepticism was healthy and must be encouraged but he criticised individuals and organisations that cherrypicked data for political ends.

"There is no doubt that there are organisations and individuals who will choose to characterise the science as being nonsensical on the basis of what are not reasonable criticisms," he said.

He highlighted the spurious argument that because the UK winter had been so cold, climate change science must be wrong.

Beddington said there was a difference between weather and climate. "The fact that we have had a very cold winter in Britain does not mean that the climate is not getting warmer," he said, adding that rejecting global warming on those grounds was wrong. "This is just not science. This is commentary," he said.

Lawson's thinktank, the Global Warming Policy Foundation, has deployed similar arguments to downplay the significance of climate change.

Benny Peiser, a social anthropologist at Liverpool John Moores University who is the foundation's director, said in December last year: "We look out of the window and it's very cold, it doesn't seem to be warming."

Lawson has said that "global warming ... is not at the present time happening". Peiser has previously said the GWPF does not challenge climate science but concentrates on examining policy implications.

Beddington, who gave a public lecture on climate change at the University of York yesterday, was also highly critical of the mistakes made by the UN's climate science body, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which he called "fundamentally stupid statements".

Referring to the incorrect claim that Himalayan glaciers would melt by 2035, he said: "Nobody in their right mind would see that as even a scientific statement. There's no uncertainty, there's no caveats." But he added that overall the IPCC report had a "remarkably small number of problems".

Beddington said that he had yet to have a formal meeting with David Cameron or Nick Clegg, but he said the coalition government faced a slew of scientific and engineering issues.

"Just about anywhere I look around the portfolio of government problems in any department, there are big issues of science and engineering including social science," he said.

He highlighted climate change, obesity, the volcanic ash cloud and vigilance to pandemic influenza as pressing problems for government to address.

He said he would advise Cameron to shield funding for scientific research from future spending cuts as far as possible.

"If you then think about how the UK as an economy is going to compete in the future, the underpinning of science and engineering having the best quality students, the best quality scientists and engineers is absolutely imperative."

When asked about the BP oil spill off the coast of Louisiana, Beddington said there would be lessons for the UK.

"I think we need to understand it," he said. "I think deep offshore [drilling] presents formidable engineering problems as you can see from the attempt to actually deal with it.

"I think that one will have to be asking questions about the appropriate levels of regulation that are operating in licensing deep offshore drilling in the North Sea."

• Climate change
• Climate change scepticism
• Deepwater Horizon oil spill
• Oil spills
• Glaciers
• Climate change
• Martin Rees
• Liberal-Conservative coalition
• David Cameron
• Nick Clegg

The Science Museum's new gallery aims to deepen the understanding of those who accept man-made global warming and inform those who are unsure

If there were ever a subject that required calm and considered discussion, it is climate change. The stakes are so high. Is it happening? Is it really being driven by humans? Is it serious? If the threat is mild, we could needlessly waste huge effort and resources. If it is not, we could put at risk our food and water supplies, and world stability, as well as bequeathing our grandchildren a legacy of rising sea levels, shifted climatic zones and an impoverished biosphere. Respond correctly, and we could ensure a future in which both people and the planet can flourish.

Yet public comment is increasingly polarised and shrill. A tyranny is afoot, in which participating risks personal attack, whatever your viewpoint. The situation has become so bad in the United States, that 255 members of the US National Academy of Sciences recently published a letter in which they expressed deep concern about a growing wave of political assaults on scientists in general – and climate scientists in particular.

Why should this subject generate so much emotion? Given this and the inevitable uncertainties, how can we find a sensible way forward?

Like the US scientists, I am convinced that recent climate warming is real and that human activities are the most likely dominant cause. How can I be sure? The Earth is very complex, and science, after all, can only prove what is not, not what is. In fact I would be pleased to be wrong, since we could all then continue to enjoy the benefits of "business as usual". But the scientific evidence indicates otherwise. As a trained physicist, I can evaluate some of the results directly myself. After a career in the subject, I have faith in the overall integrity and competence of the research community. More fundamentally, I have confidence in the self-correcting nature of the scientific process. The organised scepticism of science, through peer review and the adversarial nature of scientific challenge, can be relied upon over time to expose imperfect execution, flaws and errors. This is despite the study of Earth's climate covering so many areas of expertise that no single individual can judge every piece of the evidence.

What about non-scientists? How can they judge what to believe and who to trust? There is evidence that reactions to climate change are often strongly influenced by people's beliefs and values. Healthy scepticism, in which claims are examined with an open mind and facts followed to their conclusion, is often replaced by a closed-minded pursuit of a prejudged position, of acceptance or denial. The situation is not helped by the discussion being framed as a debate, in which it is assumed that one "side" has the right answer, and that the purpose of the exercise is to seek out flaws and defend assumptions in order to win the argument. In a situation in which the evidence is often highly technical, and people's knowledge is very patchy, arriving at agreement can be understandably elusive.

This is where the Science Museum can play a helpful role. Our purpose is to make sense of the science that shapes our lives. Our gallery – "atmosphere: exploring climate science" – which will open in November, will provide a dedicated, immersive space for visitors to deepen their understanding of climate science in an enjoyable, engaging and memorable way. It will include purpose-built interactive exhibits and a variety of objects to explain how the climate system works, to show how scientists study the system, and to summarise the current state of knowledge. The content aims to engage and interest those who accept that man-made climate change is real, as well as those who are unsure and those who do not.

But a gallery alone has limitations. After years of experience with our Dana Centre, we know that facilitated dialogue amongst specialist and non-specialists can provide a basis for real evolution of thinking, and the ability to resolve confusion and change minds. This is why the gallery will be complemented by a three-year programme of events throughout the museum.

These will assume that we all have pieces of the answer, and will provide a means to collaborate on finding common ground, to explore and understand assumptions, and to discover new possibilities. Given the consequences to humanity of responding wrongly, the need to provide a forum for reason and wisdom could not be greater.

• Professor Chris Rapley CBE is the director of the Science Museum and University College London professor of climate science.

• Climate change
• Climate change scepticism
• Climate change
• Museums
• Museums

Will the new prime minister, David Cameron, open the floor to new proposals – such as mandatory carbon sequestration?

One of the first issues David Cameron highlighted on which he agreed with Nick Clegg was climate change. Was this because they could both say "I agree with Ed"? I hope not. Not that I have anything against Ed Miliband, one of the brightest stars of the outgoing cabinet, but he inherited a climate policy dating all the way back to John Prescott that amounted to "Copenhagen or bust". The result, as you will recall from last December, was bust.

The overarching goal of the outgoing government's climate change policy was to secure a global deal to reduce the rate of greenhouse gas emissions. As Copenhagen approached, the policy became ever more focused: support the EU on legally binding emission targets for 2020. With UK emissions comprising around 2% of the total, everyone knows that domestic climate policy is just about showing leadership: the UK Climate Change Act won't, in itself, stop climate change.

So what's wrong with that, you may ask? Don't we need a global deal? Eventually, yes – but what kind of deal, and by what route? In the run-up to Copenhagen, I argued that the best possible outcome would be for governments to agree to limit warming to, at most, two degrees; to accept that measures currently on the table won't work; and to launch a genuine debate on how it is to be done. So I can hardly complain about the outcome – except that the debate hasn't really got going. Serious questions were asked immediately after Copenhagen about whether any conceivable deal on negotiated national emission quotas could actually achieve the goal of avoiding dangerous climate change. Sadly, as other matters intervened, these questions seem to have dropped off the agenda.

I was asked to go along to a session of our university's debating society last week, on the question of whether we should put economic growth before combating climate change. The result was predictably infantile, with Nigel Lawson, Christopher Monckton and friends arguing that any meaningful mitigation effort would condemn billions to permanent poverty and all of us to global government by the unelected United Nations. They failed to mention, of course, that uncontrolled climate change followed by draconian emission cuts or geo-engineering imposed in a few decades' time when things start to get serious looks like one of the surest routes to a rather nasty and impoverishing form of global government. But their opponents were all too willing to counter with the argument that "economic growth isn't all it's cracked up to be", to which I imagine most of the citizens of China and India would respond that they would quite like to try it out for themselves to make up their own minds, thank you.

Both sides have been actively suppressing debate on how to address the problem of climate change for years. Lawson and friends enjoy pointing out the many problems in a global emission cap based on national quotas along the lines of Kyoto/Copenhagen, and argue we should therefore, in effect, do nothing. The environmental establishment – most government environment ministries, the European Commission, and major green NGOs – counters that Kyoto/Copenhagen is "the only game in town", so you are either for it, or you are in climate change denial. The reaction is entirely predictable: those (probably including many incoming Tory MPs) who cannot stomach the state expansion that effective emission rationing would entail have no option but denial. The echoes of George Bush are uncanny.

One might have hoped that the failure of Copenhagen to agree on actual targets, and the collapse of plans for a nationwide cap-and-trade system in the US, would open up the debate to effective alternatives. There are plenty of ideas out there. One option we have proposed is mandatory sequestration: obliging fossil fuel suppliers to bury (as carbon dioxide) a steadily increasing fraction of the carbon they extract from the ground, with the fraction tied to global emissions such that it rises to 100% before the total amount of carbon released is enough to cause dangerous climate change.

Mandatory sequestration requires no restrictions on national or individual consumption: those rich enough to afford it can just carry on consuming. So, unlike a cap-and-trade regime, it does not provide a mechanism for encouraging virtuous behaviour or for wealth redistribution. Some might reject it on these grounds: for them, there are much more redistributive alternatives, such as the cap-and-dividend idea. Others, possibly including Cameron, might quite like a climate policy that does not substantially increase the power of the European commission.

But instead of opening up the debate, the failure of Copenhagen seems to have had the opposite effect: a kind of siege mentality to "get something through" in the run-up to Cancun. And politicians who object to the whole technocratic thrust of the Copenhagen process have been either, like Nigel Lawson, too busy belittling the problem, or too afraid of being associated with Lawson to speak out.

So we have a real opportunity here. Will Cameron and Chris Huhne just keep on pushing for "meaningful and binding commitments" in Cancun? Or will they use those friendly invitations from Barack Obama, Angela Merkel and Hu Jintao to say: "That didn't work, did it? Here's a better idea…"

• Myles Allen is the head of the climate dynamics group at University of Oxford's atmospheric, oceanic and planetary physics department

• Climate change
• Carbon capture and storage (CCS)
• Fossil fuels
• Copenhagen climate change conference 2009
• Carbon offsetting
• Carbon emissions
• Liberal-Conservative coalition
• David Cameron
• European commission
• Climate change

Only 62% of Britons interested in subject, down from 80% in 2006, according to YouGov survey

Popular concern about climate change has declined significantly, following this year's harsh winter and rows over statistics on global warming, a survey has found.

The numbers of those interested in where Britain's electricity comes from have also slipped back, according to a survey commissioned by the energy company EDF, demonstrating what appears to be growing consumer complacency in an era of electric-powered gadgetry.

At the same time resistance to building new nuclear power stations appears to be slackening. The results of the YouGov poll, based on a sample of 4,300 adults questioned during the week after the general election, show that interest in climate change fell from 80% of respondents in 2006, to 71% last year and now stands at only 62%. Only 80% say they are interested in where electrical power is made, down from 82% the previous year.

Other recent polls have recorded a similar drop in public alarm about the imminence of climate-triggered disaster. The number of climate change agnostics – those unsure whether human activity is warming the planet – has risen from 25% in 2007 to 33% now.

There may be many reasons for the change. Failure to reach agreement on fresh emissions targets at the Copenhagen climate summit, the furore over the leaking of global warming data from the University of East Anglia and the recent cold weather may all have contributed to confusion around the issue.

The French-owned firm EDF, which commissioned the latest poll, owns British Energy, which runs eight nuclear power stations in the UK. EDF plans to build a new generation of nuclear plants, with the first in operation by 2017.

The survey says the "favourability rating" of nuclear power stations rose from +4 to + 16 between 2007 and this year.

Among Lib Dems – the coalition party explicitly opposed to new nuclear building – as many as 58% of supporters believe "nuclear energy has disadvantages, but the country needs it to be part of the energy balance", according to the survey. Slightly fewer, 47%, are in favour of the construction of new nuclear power stations; 32% are opposed.

Vincent de Rivaz, chief executive of EDF Energy, said the poll "recognises the scale of the energy challenges facing the UK and the need for a low-carbon, eco-friendly economy as outlined by the coalition government.

"We are pleased to see strong public support across voters from all three major political parties in favour of new nuclear build. We also note that opposition to new nuclear build has continued to fall. This strong public support is further reflected by the clear backing for planning reform to facilitate investment in low carbon technologies, including nuclear.

"We need urgent action if we are to meet the UK's carbon emissions targets and address the looming energy gap. We believe nuclear power is the lowest cost low-carbon solution and can be built in the UK without subsidy. Therefore, it must be part of an affordable, clean and secure generation mix."

EDF, he said, "remains resolute in its commitment to a truly sustainable economy".

• Climate change
• Climate change
• Energy
• Energy industry
• EDF Energy
• Nuclear power

Head of Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change admits error but defends use of 'grey literature'

Rajendra Pachauri, the head of the international body which produces key reports to advise governments on climate change, today defended the use of "grey literature" which is not published in scientific journals.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has come under fire after a high-profile mistake was exposed in its most recent assessment of the scale and impacts of global warming — a claim the Himalayan glaciers would melt by 2035.

The claim came from a report by charity WWF and was based on remarks made by an Indian scientist which were never published in a scientific, peer-reviewed journal.

The IPCC has said it regretted the mistake, revealed at the height of the row over climate science which blew up amid efforts to secure a new global agreement to tackle rising greenhouse gas emissions.

In a hearing today of the InterAcademy Council, an organisation of the world's science academies which is conducting an independent review of the processes and procedures of the IPCC, Pachauri described the inclusion of the glacier claim as "human failure" which should not have happened.

But the IPCC's chairman said there was a need to use information which was not from peer-reviewed scientific journals, because in some places that was the only research that had been done.

He said the media and other sections of society had misunderstood the role of such information, labelling it grey literature, "as if it was some form of grey muddied water flowing down the drains".

Dr Pachauri said academic work being done by bodies including the International Energy Agency, the World Bank, national governments and charities "cannot be ignored", but had to be closely examined to make sure it was robust.

He said the mistake about the glaciers should have been picked up by the authors of the section of the Fourth Assessment report in which it was included, or by its reviewers.

He said there had been comments from contributors before publication but "they were not very specific in this regard".

He told the hearing in Amsterdam: "Somehow it just missed everybody's attention.

"It is in my view a human failure which happened a few times, we just have to make sure something like this doesn't happen once again."

Dr Pachauri said the mistake was buried in the 1,000 page report and did not get used in the much-shorter summary which is written for use by policy-makers.

And he said: "We have been less than adequate in informing the public that, yes, there was an error but that does not take away anything from the fact the glaciers are melting at a very rapid rate.

"This is where our communication skills need to be enhanced."

Even if the Himalayan glaciers did not melt by 2035, glaciers around the world were in decline, with water supplies predicted to fall and the melting ice contributing to sea level rises, he said.

"Although there was this error, there's a whole lot of valid information and assessment on glaciers which we can only ignore at our own peril and the peril of generations yet to come," he said.

• Rajendra Pachauri
• Climate change
• Climate change
• Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)
• Glaciers

Reptiles that 'tolerate heat and should be well buffered against warming are the victims' as world enters 'era of climate change extinctions'

One–fifth of lizard species globally will become extinct by 2080 due to global warming, according to a study using data from more than 1,200 populations worldwide.

The research found that more than a 10th of Mexico's Sceloporus lizard populations have been driven to extinction in the last 35 years, with the figure projected to increase to almost 40% by 2080. The scientists projected their findings globally using data from other lizard populations around the world.

The findings come in the wake of immense criticism over the failure of world leaders to live up to a commitment to reduce biodiversity loss by 2010. Professor Barry Sinervo at the University of California, Santa Cruz, who led the study, said he believes "we have now entered the era of climate change extinctions".

Although we may not be accustomed to considering lizards as important players within our ecosystems in the UK, he warns that the reptiles occupy diverse ecological roles in ecosystems across the globe and their reduced numbers will have important implications for ecosystems and maintaining species diversity. "Their loss could cause a collapse at higher levels of the food webs," he said.

"Many people appreciate that climate warming may lead to extinction in the future," said Prof Raymond Huey an evolutionary physiologist at the University of Washington, who was not directly involved in the study. "But this paper shows that climate-induced extinction has already arrived and that more is coming. What is especially concerning is that lizards – a group of animals that tolerate heat and should be well buffered against warming – are the victims."

Scientists made the initial discovery by distributing an electronic device across 200 sites in Mexico where the lizards were both thriving and had already gone extinct. They found that rapid warming was causing the animals to spend more time in cooler retreats, preventing them from finding food and reproducing at a level able to maintain a stable population size. The reptiles do no produce their own heat internally and so are dependent on the sun.

When the researchers plotted the thermal biological data from the Sceloporus lizards, and more than 1,200 other populations found worldwide, against projected temperature rises they discovered that global warming will drive 39% of all global lizard populations and one fifth of all lizard species to extinction by 2080.

A drastic cut in CO2 production which limited temperature rise might enable losses to be limited to 6% of species, the study predicts. However, given the time lag required for current levels of CO2 to decline in the atmosphere and the projected rise in temperatures that we have already observed, Sinervo believes it is unlikely that more extinctions could be avoided.

Huey said the paper was a call to arms for scientists and policymakers. "This is a mission critical paper that sends urgent messages to two groups. First, it should prompt government officials to draft regulatory changes that may slow the growth of greenhouse gasses. Second, it sends a strong message to biologists - we need to get busy and start studying extinctions [their extent and causes] rather than just predicting future extinctions."

• Climate change
• Climate change
• Wildlife
• Biodiversity
• Conservation

Explorers with the Catlin Arctic survey battled strong headwinds, freezing waters and dangerously thin ice on their expedition to measure sea ice at the north pole

Catlin Arctic survey drills 'hole in the pole' to collect water samples that will be used to measure ocean acidification

• Ocean acidification 'poses disaster' for marine life
• Interactive: The effects of ocean acidification around the world

Arctic explorers have taken the first-ever samples of ocean water at the north pole after a gruelling two-and–a-half month expedition across the polar ice.

Headed by former bank manager Ann Daniels, the Catlin Arctic survey team achieved what last year's expedition - led by polar explorer Pen Hadow - failed to do: reach the north pole and take water samples to measure the impact of a changing climate.

Pen Hadow, the survey's director and last year's expedition leader, said: "It's not possible to imagine what this team has had to do to pull off this extreme survey. I consider them to be the world's toughest to have done this."

The survey hopes to measure how fast the Arctic Ocean is acidifying due to rising CO2 levels and what effect it has on the region's animals and plants. Setting out in early March, the three-strong explorer team trekked over 483 miles across sea ice off the coast of Greenland to the geographic north pole.

Daniels said: "It has been an unbelievably hard journey. Conditions have been unusually tough and at times very frustrating with a frequent southerly drift pushing us backwards every time we camped for the night. On top of that we've had to battle into headwinds and swim across large areas of dangerously thin ice and open water."

The team also struggled with ice cracks forming under their tent and thin ice and fierce north winds.

Last year's Catlin Arctic survey, which found evidence that Arctic ice was thinner than expected, was beset by technical difficulties, and the team had to be airlifted off the ice before reaching the pole.

On their journey to the north pole, the Catlin team drilled, collected samples from water as deep as 5,000m, and measured ice thickness.

As the adventurers forged north, a separate team of scientists undertook measurements and samples at an ice base north of Canada in -45C temperatures. Between the two groups, the survey has collected over 2,200 pieces of data from plankton collections, ice core samples and around 350 water samples. The samples will now be sent to British Columbia in Canada for analysis.

Globally, oceans have seen a 30% increase in acidity on pre-industrial levels, the fastest rate of change in 55m years. Scientists say that carbon emissions from human activity is to blame. The Arctic Ocean appears to be acidifying faster than warmer regions because cold water absorbs more CO2.

"As it's been collected for the first time, this data will be viewed as baseline information for further studies, providing insight into the impact of carbon dioxide absorption [in the Arctic]," said Dr Tim Cullingford, science manager for the Catlin Arctic survey.

The survey hopes to present the findings of the expedition before the end of this year.

• Catlin Arctic survey
• Polar regions
• Climate change
• Oceans
• Arctic
• Climate change

Ancient woodland would not have the same response to climate factors, such as temperature or rainfall, as oak trees today

• Climate sceptic wins landmark data victory 'for price of a stamp'

In April, the UK Information Commissioner's Office ruled that Queen's University Belfast must hand over data obtained during 40 years of research into 7,000 years of Irish tree rings to a City banker and part-time climate analyst, Doug Keenan. Professor Mike Baillie, the man who collected most of that data, called the ruling a "staggering injustice". He explains his opinion below.

I regard myself as a chronologist and a dendro-catastrophist; in particular I wish to link the tree-ring and ice core chronologies so that we can view some historical events, such as those around AD540 or 44BC, in human records, in tree-ring records and in ice core records of atmospheric chemistry. My early work was as part of a team involved in constructing a 7,000-year oak chronology at Belfast to allow calibration of the radiocarbon timescale. Since then I have built further chronologies and have studied some extreme events initially indicated by the Irish trees.

To put the record straight, I am neither a climatologist nor a dendro-climatologist. I have no academic stance on human-caused global warming except that, as a scientist reviewing the issue from an evolutionary perspective, if humans are even partly the cause of the warming since 1990 then we are already doomed as a species. I agree with Doug Keenan (the man who placed FOI requests at Queen's University Belfast asking for my data) that the issue of the Medieval Warm Period (MWP) is of critical importance at the present time. In a nutshell, either the MWP was warmer than now and we are in with a chance of surviving long enough to do something about climate change, or the MWP was cooler than now and we are probably due for rapid extinction.

In the 1980s we supplied our modern oak data (available at www.noaa.gov) to the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia. Work by the dendro-climatologists there gave rise to two papers Dr Keith Briffa and colleagues that convinced us that British/Irish oak was not a good subject for the reconstruction of instrumental-style temperature and rainfall records. Thereafter, at Belfast, we gave up any hope of contributing to the issue of climate change using tree rings. Recently a paper by Dr Garcia-Suarez (I am a co-author) on Irish trees and climate records shows results compatible with that research. It confirms that it is very unlikely that past temperatures can be reconstructed from Irish oaks. I recently stated that our Irish oak data has never been used in climatic reconstructions. It turns out I was wrong on this point. I did not know that the US climate scientist Professor Michael Mann had used a few of our oak records in a 2008 publication. I was not aware of his paper, nor of the use of the data. While this seems to be regarded by some members of the public as criminal (not to have read every paper on climate reconstruction), my reply is, why should I have known about it? I am not a climatologist. I have little research interest in present climate, only in trying to understand aspects of the past (as my publication list for the last several decades shows).

I consider that our raw tree-ring measurements should not have been released following an FOI request. I know the Irish data better than anyone else; particularly the highly disparate nature of the samples before the year AD1700 (variously from historic buildings, archaeological sites, lake margins and peat bogs). It is unlikely that these ancient woodland, forest or bog trees would have the same response to climate factors (such as temperature or rainfall) as current living oak trees. Worse still, living parkland oaks in Ireland are much wider ringed than any of the ancient oak populations. This is almost certainly because modern oaks on walled estates are probably imported stock, brought in from the 17th century onwards by landowners who wished to beautify their estates with large oaks. Even worse than that, although ancient bog oaks occur across Northern Europe, there are no good examples of oaks currently growing on raised lowland bogs anywhere. So it is essentially impossible to find out exactly what such oaks were responding to.

These latter observations mean that even if a climate-calibration exercise had been successful (comparing oak growth with modern instrumental records), it is unlikely that any attempt at interpreting the climate response of the more ancient Irish oaks would be meaningful. That is my considered view, though doubtless few will accept it.

Finally, regarding intellectual property and the release of data under FOI, when a dendrochronologist measures the widths of the growth rings in a sample, he or she has to make multiple decisions with respect to the starts and ends of the rings, problem rings, and so on. Repeated measurement of the same sample, will not give exactly the same measurements. The number of rings must be the same, but the actual measured widths will not be. This means that the ring pattern of a tree-ring sample carries the "intellectual fingerprint" of the dendrochronologist who measured it, every bit as much as this text carries my intellectual fingerprint. In my opinion, tree-ring patterns are therefore intellectual property and should not be handed out as if they are instrumental climate data.

• Prof Michael Baillie retired as a paid academic in 2005 before the current FOI issue began. He now holds an Emeritus position at Queen's University Belfast where he pursues research on chronology and mythology with a particular interest in sorting out the likely effects of volcanoes from those of comets or other extraterrestrial vectors.

* Individual tree ring-width data is available from 12 modern oak sites in Ireland, namely Ardara, Baron's Court, Breen Wood, Caledon, Cappoquin, Enniscorthy, Garryland Wood, Glen of the Downs, Killarney, Loch Doon, Rostrevor and Shane's Castle. Individual tree data is also available for seven English and Scottish sites.

• Climate change
• Climate change
• Climate change scepticism
• Queen's University Belfast

Open letter defends the integrity of climate science and hits out at recent attacks driven by 'special interests or dogma'

• Read the full text of the open letter

A group of 255 of the world's top scientists today wrote an open letter aimed at restoring public faith in the integrity of climate science.

In a strongly worded condemnation of the recent escalation of political assaults on climatologists, the letter, published in the US Journal Science and signed by 11 Nobel laureates, attacks critics driven by "special interests or dogma" and "McCarthy-like" threats against researchers. It also attempts to set the record straight on the process of rigorous scientific research.

The letter is a response to negative publicity following the release of thousands of hacked emails from climate scientists at the University of East Anglia (UEA) and two mistakes makes by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the UN climate body.

The letter sets out some basic features of the scientific method. "Like all human beings, scientists make mistakes, but the scientific process is designed to find and correct them. But when some conclusions have been thoroughly and deeply tested, questioned, and examined, they gain the status of 'well-established theories' and are often spoken of as 'facts'," it says.

The document, citing theories including the age and origin of the Earth, the Big Bang and Darwin's evolution by natural selection, says that anthropogenic climate change is now so well-supported by evidence that it has achieved the same status. It adds that owing to science's adversarial nature, "fame" awaits any scientists who can prove the theory wrong.

"There is nothing remotely identified in the recent events that changes the fundamental conclusions about climate change," the letter says.

The authors – who are all members of the US National Academy of Sciences (NAS), the country's premier scientific institution – include some of the academic community's most distinguished climate researchers. But the list also includes top anthropologists, biochemists and physicists who have felt the need to defend climate science in the wake of what they regard as politically motivated attacks. Three senior scientists from the Universities of Cambridge, Oxford and Manchester have also added their endorsement. All of the scientists signed up in a personal capacity, not on behalf of the National Academy or on behalf of their institution.

"Many recent assaults on climate science and, more disturbingly, on climate scientists by climate change deniers, are typically driven by special interests or dogma, not by an honest effort to provide an alternative theory that credibly satisfies the evidence," the letter says.

Its call for an end to "McCarthy-like threats of criminal prosecution against our colleagues based on innuendo and guilt by association" appears to be jibe at Republican senator, James Inhofe, who has called for a criminal investigation into US and British climatologists whose email exchanges were stolen from UEA. The letter also condemns the "harassment of scientists by politicians seeking distractions to avoid taking action, and the outright lies being spread about them."

The letter's co-ordinator, Peter Gleick, of the Pacific Institute for Studies in Development, Environment and Security in Oakland, California, said: "[It] originated with a number of NAS members who were frustrated at the misinformation being spread by climate deniers and the assaults on scientists by some policy-makers who hope to delay or avoid making policy decisions and are hiding behind the recent controversy around emails and minor errors in the IPCC."

According to one of the signees, Professor Anthony Bebbington at the Institute for Development Policy and Management at Manchester University, the individual signatories have come together to collectively endorse the quality of work being conducted within the scientific community, particularly on climate science.

Despite two highly-publicised errors found within the scientific assessment of climate change produced by the IPCC over the timing of glacier melt in the Himalayas and sea level in the Netherlands, Professor Beddington warned against 'throwing the baby out with the bathwater'.

• Climate change
• Climate change scepticism
• Climate change

Full text of an open letter from 255 members of the US National Academy of Sciences in defence of climate research

• Have your say on the letter

We are deeply disturbed by the recent escalation of political assaults on scientists in general and on climate scientists in particular. All citizens should understand some basic scientific facts. There is always some uncertainty associated with scientific conclusions; science never absolutely proves anything. When someone says that society should wait until scientists are absolutely certain before taking any action, it is the same as saying society should never take action. For a problem as potentially catastrophic as climate change, taking no action poses a dangerous risk for our planet.

Scientific conclusions derive from an understanding of basic laws supported by laboratory experiments, observations of nature, and mathematical and computer modelling. Like all human beings, scientists make mistakes, but the scientific process is designed to find and correct them. This process is inherently adversarial— scientists build reputations and gain recognition not only for supporting conventional wisdom, but even more so for demonstrating that the scientific consensus is wrong and that there is a better explanation. That's what Galileo, Pasteur, Darwin, and Einstein did. But when some conclusions have been thoroughly and deeply tested, questioned, and examined, they gain the status of "well-established theories" and are often spoken of as "facts."

For instance, there is compelling scientific evidence that our planet is about 4.5bn years old (the theory of the origin of Earth), that our universe was born from a single event about 14bn years ago (the Big Bang theory), and that today's organisms evolved from ones living in the past (the theory of evolution). Even as these are overwhelmingly accepted by the scientific community, fame still awaits anyone who could show these theories to be wrong. Climate change now falls into this category: there is compelling, comprehensive, and consistent objective evidence that humans are changing the climate in ways that threaten our societies and the ecosystems on which we depend.

Many recent assaults on climate science and, more disturbingly, on climate scientists by climate change deniers, are typically driven by special interests or dogma, not by an honest effort to provide an alternative theory that credibly satisfies the evidence. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and other scientific assessments of climate change, which involve thousands of scientists producing massive and comprehensive reports, have, quite expectedly and normally, made some mistakes. When errors are pointed out, they are corrected.

But there is nothing remotely identified in the recent events that changes the fundamental conclusions about climate change:

(i) The planet is warming due to increased concentrations of heat-trapping gases in our atmosphere. A snowy winter in Washington does not alter this fact.

(ii) Most of the increase in the concentration of these gases over the last century is due to human activities, especially the burning of fossil fuels and deforestation.

(iii) Natural causes always play a role in changing Earth's climate, but are now being overwhelmed by human-induced changes.

(iv) Warming the planet will cause many other climatic patterns to change at speeds unprecedented in modern times, including increasing rates of sea-level rise and alterations in the hydrologic cycle. Rising concentrations of carbon dioxide are making the oceans more acidic.

(v) The combination of these complex climate changes threatens coastal communities and cities, our food and water supplies, marine and freshwater ecosystems, forests, high mountain environments, and far more.

Much more can be, and has been, said by the world's scientific societies, national academies, and individuals, but these conclusions should be enough to indicate why scientists are concerned about what future generations will face from business- as-usual practices. We urge our policymakers and the public to move forward immediately to address the causes of climate change, including the unrestrained burning of fossil fuels.

We also call for an end to McCarthy- like threats of criminal prosecution against our colleagues based on innuendo and guilt by association, the harassment of scientists by politicians seeking distractions to avoid taking action, and the outright lies being spread about them. Society has two choices: we can ignore the science and hide our heads in the sand and hope we are lucky, or we can act in the public interest to reduce the threat of global climate change quickly and substantively. The good news is that smart and effective actions are possible. But delay must not be an option.

• The signatories are all members of the US National Academy of Sciences but are not speaking on its behalf or on behalf of their institutions.

Adams, Robert McCormick, University of California, San Diego

Amasino, Richard M, University of Wisconsin

Anders, Edward, University of Chicago

Anderson, David J, California Institute of Technology

Anderson, Wyatt W, University of Georgia

Anselin, Luc E, Arizona State University

Arroyo, Mary Kalin, University of Chile

Asfaw, Berhane, Rift Valley Research Service

Ayala, Francisco J, University of California, Irvine

Bax, Adriaan, National Institutes of Health

Bebbington, Anthony J, University of Manchester

Bell, Gordon, Microsoft Research

Bennett, Michael V L, Albert Einstein College of Medicine

Bennetzen, Jeffrey L, University of Georgia

Berenbaum, May R, University of Illinois

Berlin, Overton Brent, University of Georgia

Bjorkman, Pamela J, California Institute of Technology

Blackburn, Elizabeth, University of California, San Francisco

Blamont, Jacques E, Centre National d' Etudes Spatiales

Botchan, Michael R, University of California, Berkeley

Boyer, John S, University of Delaware

Boyle, Ed A, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Branton, Daniel, Harvard University

Briggs, Steven P, University of California, San Diego

Briggs, Winslow R, Carnegie Institution of Washington

Brill, Winston J, Winston J. Brill and Associates

Britten, Roy J, California Institute of Technology

Broecker, Wallace S, Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory and Columbia University

Brown, James H, University of New Mexico

Brown, Patrick O, Stanford University School of Medicine

Brunger, Axel T, Stanford University

Cairns, Jr John, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University

Canfield, Donald E, University of Southern Denmark

Carpenter, Stephen R, University of Wisconsin

Carrington, James C, Oregon State University

Cashmore, Anthony R, University of Pennsylvania

Castilla, Juan Carlos, Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile

Cazenave, Anny, Centre National d' Etudes Spatiales

Chapin, III F, Stuart, University of Alaska

Ciechanover, Aaron J, Technion-Israel Institute of Technology

Clapham, David E, Harvard Medical School

Clark, William C, Harvard University

Clayton, Robert N, University of Chicago

Coe, Michael D, Yale University

Conwell, Esther M, University of Rochester

Cowling, Ellis B, North Carolina State University

Cowling, Richard M, Nelson Mandela Metropolitan University

Cox, Charles S, University of California, San Diego

Croteau, Rodney B, Washington State University

Crothers, Donald M, Yale University

Crutzen, Paul J, Max Planck Institute for Chemistry

Daily, Gretchen C, Stanford University

Dalrymple, Brent G, Oregon State University

Dangl, Jeffrey L, University of North Carolina

Darst, Seth A, Rockefeller University

Davies, David R, National Institutes of Health

Davis, Margaret B, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis

De Camilli, Pietro V, Yale University School of Medicine

Dean, Caroline, John Innes Centre

DeFries, Ruth S, Columbia University

Deisenhofer, Johann, University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center at Dallas

Delmer, Deborah P, University of California, Davis

DeLong, Edward F, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

DeRosier, David J, Brandeis University

Diener, Theodor O, University of Maryland

Dirzo, Rodolfo, Stanford University

Dixon, Jack E, Howard Hughes Medical Center

Donoghue, Michael J, Yale University

Doolittle, Russell F, University of California, San Diego

Dunne, Thomas, University of California, Santa Barbara

Ehrlich, Paul R, Stanford University

Eisenstadt, Shmuel N, Hebrew University of Jerusalem

Eisner, Thomas, Cornell University

Emanuel, Kerry A, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Englander, Walter S, University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine

Ernst, W, G, Stanford University

Falkowski, Paul G, Rutgers, State University of New Jersey

Feher, George, University of California, San Diego

Ferejohn, John A, Stanford University

Fersht, Sir Alan, University of Cambridge

Fischer, Edmond H, University of Washington

Fischer, Robert, University of California, Berkeley

Flannery, Kent V, University of Michigan

Frank, Joachim, Columbia University

Frey, Perry A, University of Wisconsin

Fridovich, Irwin, Duke University Medical Center

Frieden, Carl, Washington University School of Medicine

Futuyma, Douglas J, Stony Brook University

Gardner, Wilford R, University of California, Berkeley

Garrett, Christopher J R, University of Victoria

Gilbert, Walter, Harvard University

Gleick, Peter H, Pacific Institute, Oakland

Goldberg, Robert B, University of California, Los Angeles

Goodenough, Ward H, University of Pennsylvania

Goodman, Corey S, venBio, LLC

Goodman, Morris, Wayne State University School of Medicine

Greengard, Paul, Rockefeller University

Hake, Sarah, Agricultural Research Service

Hammel, Gene, University of California, Berkeley

Hanson, Susan, Clark University

Harrison, Stephen C, Harvard Medical School

Hart, Stanley R, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution

Hartl, Daniel L, Harvard University

Haselkorn, Robert, University of Chicago

Hawkes, Kristen, University of Utah

Hayes, John M, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution

Hille, Bertil, University of Washington

Hökfelt, Tomas, Karolinska Institutet

House, James S, University of Michigan

Hout, Michael, University of California, Berkeley

Hunten, Donald M, University of Arizona

Izquierdo, Ivan A, Pontifical Catholic University of Rio Grande do Sul

Jagendorf, André T, Cornell University

Janzen, Daniel H, University of Pennsylvania

Jeanloz, Raymond, University of California, Berkeley

Jencks, Christopher S, Harvard University

Jury, William A, University of California, Riverside

Kaback, H Ronald, University of California, Los Angeles

Kailath, Thomas, Stanford University

Kay, Paul, International Computer Science Institute

Kay, Steve A, University of California, San Diego

Kennedy, Donald, Stanford University

Kerr, Allen, University of Adelaide

Kessler, Ronald C, Harvard Medical School

Khush, Gurdev S, University of California, Davis

Kieffer, Susan W, University of Illinois

Kirch, Patrick V, University of California, Berkeley

Kirk, Kent C, University of Wisconsin

Kivelson, Margaret G, University of California, Los Angeles

Klinman, Judith P, University of California, Berkeley

Klug, Sir Aaron, Medical Research Council

Knopoff, Leon, University of California, Los Angeles

Kornberg, Sir Hans, Boston University

Kutzbach, John E, University of Wisconsin

Lagarias, J Clark, University of California, Davis

Lambeck, Kurt, Australian National University

Landy, Arthur, Brown University

Langmuir, Charles H, Harvard University

Larkins, Brian A, University of Arizona

Le Pichon, Xavier T, College de France

Lenski, Richard E, Michigan State University

Leopold, Estella B, University of Washington

Levin, Simon A, Princeton University

Levitt, Michael, Stanford University School of Medicine

Likens, Gene E, Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies

Lippincott-Schwartz, Jennifer, National Institutes of Health

Lorand, Laszlo, Northwestern University

Lovejoy, Owen C, Kent State University

Lynch, Michael, Indiana University

Mabogunje, Akin L, Foundation for Development and Environmental Initiatives

Malone, Thomas F, North Carolina State University

Manabe, Syukuro, Princeton University

Marcus, Joyce, University of Michigan

Massey, Douglas S, Princeton University

McWilliams, Jim C, University of California, Los Angeles

Medina, Ernesto, Venezuelan Institute for Scientific Research

Melosh, Jay H, Purdue University

Meltzer, David J, Southern Methodist University

Michener, Charles D, University of Kansas

Miles, Edward L, University of Washington

Mooney, Harold A, Stanford University

Moore, Peter B, Yale University

Morel, Francois M M, Princeton University

Mosley-Thompson, Ellen, Ohio State University

Moss, Bernard, National Institutes of Health

Munk, Walter H, University of California, San Diego

Myers, Norman, University of Oxford

Nair, Balakrish G, National Institute of Cholera and Enteric Diseases

Nathans, Jeremy, Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine

Nester, Eugene W, University of Washington

Nicoll, Roger A, University of California, San Francisco

Novick, Richard P, New York University School of Medicine

O'Connell, James F, University of Utah

Olsen, Paul E, Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory of Columbia University

Opdyke, Neil D, University of Florida

Oster, George F, University of California, Berkeley

Ostrom, Elinor, Indiana University

Pace, Norman R, University of Colorado

Paine, Robert T, University of Washington

Palmiter, Richard D, University of Washington School of Medicine

Pedlosky, Joseph, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution

Petsko, Gregory A, Brandeis University

Pettengill, Gordon H, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Philander, George S, Princeton University

Piperno, Dolores R, Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute

Pollard, Thomas D, Yale University

Price Jr. Buford P, University of California, Berkeley

Reichard, Peter A, Karolinska Institutet

Reskin, Barbara F, University of Washington

Ricklefs, Robert E, University of Missouri

Rivest, Ronald L, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Roberts, John D, California Institute of Technology

Romney, Kimball A, University of California, Irvine

Rossmann, Michael G, Purdue University

Russell, David W, University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center of Dallas

Rutter, William J, Synergenics, LLC

Sabloff, Jeremy A, University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archeology and Anthropology

Sagdeev, Roald Z, University of Maryland

Sahlins, Marshall D, University of Chicago

Salmond, Anne, University of Auckland

Sanes, Joshua R, Harvard University

Schekman, Randy, University of California, Berkeley

Schellnhuber, John, Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research

Schindler, David W, University of Alberta

Schmitt, Johanna, Brown University

Schneider, Stephen H, Woods Institute for the Environment

Schramm, Vern L, Albert Einstein College of Medicine

Sederoff Ronald R, North Carolina State University

Shatz, Carla J, Stanford University

Sherman, Fred, University of Rochester Medical Center

Sidman, Richard L, Harvard Medical School

Sieh, Kerry, Nanyang Technological University

Simons, Elwyn L, Duke University Lemur Center

Singer, Burton H, Princeton University

Singer, Maxine F, Carnegie Institution of Washington

Skyrms, Brian, University of California, Irvine

Sleep, Norman H, Stanford University

Smith, Bruce D, Smithsonian Institution

Snyder, Solomon H, Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine

Sokal, Robert R, Stony Brook University

Spencer, Charles S, American Museum of Natural History

Steitz, Thomas A, Yale University

Strier, Karen B, University of Wisconsin

Südhof, Thomas C, Stanford University School of Medicine

Taylor, Susan S, University of California, San Diego

Terborgh, John, Duke University

Thomas, David Hurst, American Museum of Natural History

Thompson, Lonnie G, Ohio State University

Tjian, Robert T, Howard Hughes Medical Institute

Turner, Monica G, University of Wisconsin

Uyeda, Seiya, Tokai University

Valentine, James W, University of California, Berkeley

Valentine, Joan Selverstone, University of California, Los Angeles

Van Etten, James L, University of Nebraska

Van Holde, Kensal E, Oregon State University

Vaughan, Martha, National Institutes of Health

Verba Sidney, Harvard University

Von Hippel, Peter H, University of Oregon

Wake, David B, University of California, Berkeley

Walker, Alan, Pennsylvania State University

Walker John E, Medical Research Council

Watson, Bruce E, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute

Watson, Patty Jo, Washington University, St. Louis

Weigel, Detlef, Max Planck Institute for Developmental Biology

Wessler, Susan R, University of Georgia

West-Eberhard, Mary Jane, Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute

White, Tim D, University of California, Berkeley

Wilson, William Julius, Harvard University

Wolfenden, Richard V, University of North Carolina

Wood, John A, Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics

Woodwell, George M, Woods Hole Research Center

Wright, Jr Herbert E, University of Minnesota

Wu, Carl, National Institutes of Health

Wunsch, Carl, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Zoback, Mary Lou, Risk Management Solutions, Inc

• Climate change
• Climate change
• Climate change scepticism
• Carbon emissions

Scientists say onset of British summer has become increasingly early in the last 50 years, consistent with global warming

Britain is broke and the bank holiday weekend was a washout, but scientists at Sheffield University have some rare good news in these uncertain times: summer is coming earlier each year.

According to a new study, the English summer arrives some 18 days sooner than during the late 1950s, when Harold Macmillan succeeded Anthony Eden in No 10 and announced: "We have a difficult task before us in this country, all of us."

Grant Bigg and Amy Kirbyshire of the department of geography at Sheffield University examined temperature records of central England over recent decades, together with observations of 140 types of summer flowering plant, such as geraniums and roses, and when they came into bloom.

To determine the onset of summer, they looked for the third day of each year when average temperatures reached 14C. That may sound distinctly chilly for summer, but comfortably allows for daytime temperatures above 20C.

"We wondered if we could set a defining moment of when summer begins," Bigg said.

According to the analysis, summer should, on average, arrive in Britain tomorrow.

Records show that in the period 1954-1963, the average date for the third such day was 25 May. By the 1990s, it had shifted forwards to 14 May. By 1998-2007, on average, summer arrived on 7 May. The shift is consistent with global warming, Bigg said. "It's always very difficult to make direct attributions but scientists say global warming is very likely driven by human activity and I think we can say the same thing." The researchers saw a similar, though smaller, pattern with summer plant flowering. On average, the first flowering date for 1954-1963 was 29 May. By 1991-2000 it was 26 May.

Announcing their results in the journal Climatic Change, the duo say they "present a convincing argument that the onset of the British summer season has become increasingly early in the last 50 years". The finding is consistent with similar studies that have used the timing of natural events to investigate the onset of spring and autumn.

Earlier summers may have encouraged drought or heatwave conditions by prolonging the period of warm temperatures, the scientists suggest. The earliest recorded summer onset day was 18 April in 2003, which was followed by a record breaking heat wave.

An early start does not always herald a good summer. The second-earliest onset day was in 2007, which preceded the wettest summer in England and Wales since records began in 1766. "An early summer onset is clearly no guarantee of a barbecue summer," the scientists say.

This year is not following the early summer pattern however, as there has not yet been a day with an average temperature of 14C.

• Climate change
• Weather
• Meteorology
• Climate change

After two weeks spent reading manifestos and reviewing the parties' responses to our questions about science policy, Martin Robbins has reached his verdict

It's easy to get cynical about elections. We used to vote for the people we disliked the least. Then along came the Liberal Democrats and we realised it might be possible to make everybody lose. Added to that, any rational discussion of policy is pushed aside by a media machine more interested in what shoes the leaders' wives are wearing than in serious analysis of the parties' plans.

Science policy has hardly been mentioned in the news. So it's probably just as well that since the start of last week the Guardian has been looking in detail at the science policies of the main parties. What have we learned?

Our survey reveals the root cause of the media's lack of interest in science at this election. One striking feature of the parties' answers to our questions was the extent to which they all agree. A broad consensus exists on climate change, the need to develop renewable sources of energy, support for GM and stem cell research, animal testing, dealing with pandemics, libel reform and science funding.

Equally, all the parties seem to view science as inextricably linked with business, something that many scientists will be – and should be – wary of.

These aren't party political issues, so it's not really surprising that they don't feature much in an election campaign.

Whether this consensus is a good thing or not varies from issue to issue. In the case of libel, the consensus is a demonstration of the astonishing success of the Libel Reform campaign in recent months. On climate change, it indicates that a vigorous attempt by internet cranks to subvert science has met something of a brick wall, unless the next government turns out to be a coalition of Ukip and the BNP.

On the other hand it's hard to be optimistic when it comes to science funding – none of the parties seems particularly committed to it, and if the science budget isn't cut I'll happily dance around Guardian HQ naked. The only question is how much it will be cut by – the suspicion from Adam Afriyie's recent comments is that the Tories might wield the larger axe, but it's just a guess.

When it comes to the differences between the parties, all of them are committed to some extent to basing policy on evidence. The sticking point is where this clashes with moral ideology. Nowhere is this clash of political cultures starker than in the debate over drug policy, with both Labour and the Conservative party happy to abandon the pretence of a rational, evidence-based debate in favour of reactionary policies that pander to public opinion.

This wouldn't be a problem if we were able to have a proper public debate on drugs, but the right-wing press has made any sensible discussion of drug policy impossible. Not only do we have to endure hysterical shrieking over every drug scare that comes along, but academics have been subjected to what amount to vicious campaigns of intimidation. Witness the newspaper attacks last year that were directed not just at Professor David Nutt himself, but also at his family.

It's harder to understand the reasoning behind the Liberal Democrats' opposition to nuclear power, which seems to be based on more than simply the economic costs, or why the Labour party is so in thrall to the alternative medicine community.

And what of the respective potential science ministers? Dr Evan Harris commands the respect of the scientific community for the knowledge and passion he brings to the job. Similarly Lord Drayson managed to retain the respect of scientists even as they became increasingly disgruntled with his party. Like Harris he is heavily engaged with scientists and could regularly be found at meetings and events around London, or responding to Tweets on Twitter. His curious disappearance during this campaign has prompted some speculation about what his future might hold.

The Conservative shadow science minister, Adam Afriyie, on the other hand, is an unknown and rarely seen figure who has yet to demonstrate any real passion for scientific issues – which inevitably harms his party's credibility on science.

So if science could cast a vote, where would it put its cross?

I've concentrated here on the three main parties because as well as having no chance of forming a government, the smaller parties generally lack credibility on science. Plaid Cymru and the SNP are well-meaning, but don't cover the full spectrum of science policy. Ukip's policymakers are disastrously ignorant, while the Greens are gradually maturing but are still in thrall to irrational fears. Both might benefit from wider engagement with real scientists, whereas the BNP and Christian Party are too far gone to be saved.

That leaves the Conservatives, Labour and the Liberal Democrats.

Labour's record on science policy is unfortunate, with the debacle over funding for the UK Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC) and the sacking of David Nutt being particular lows. On the other hand, the party performs well in areas such as climate and energy.

The Conservatives look better than Labour on paper, but here we come up against the limits of an exercise like this. Can their answers really be trusted given, for example, the apparently lukewarm support within the party for action on climate change? At any rate, should the Tories win the election, the majority of their MPs are likely to be new faces, which makes any predictions uncertain.

Do you choose the devil you know, or take a gamble on the devil you don't? Except that this time there's a third way – the Liberal Democrats. Their science spokesman is an activist in his own right, while Nick Clegg comes across well on science. There are unanswered questions and potential flaws in their energy policy, but overall they provided a much more solid response to our questions than any of the other parties.

Which leads me to emerge from two weeks buried in paperwork and political promises to find myself at this conclusion. If I were to cast my vote based purely on science, it would be for the Liberal Democrats, for Nick Clegg and for Evan Harris.

How much science matters when you cast your vote is up to you, but I'll leave you with one final thought. Science itself may not be the biggest issue at this election, but a commitment to science-based policy is a commitment to evidence. Who would you trust more on the economy: a party prepared to listen to expert evidence and properly test and review its ideas, or a party that abandoned evidence as soon as it clashed with ideology? Tomorrow it's up to you.

• Science policy
• Labour
• Liberal Democrats
• Conservatives
• Climate change
• Climate change
• Nuclear power
• David Nutt
• General election 2010