article_snippet.sent: An international panel of scientists will today launch a major inquiry to discover whether official world temperature records have exaggerated the extent of global warming.
article_snippet.sent: An international panel of scientists, will focus on thousands of ‘adjustments’ that have been made to temperature records kept at individual weather stations around the world.
article_snippet.sent: Sceptics have argued that the effect of such adjustments – made when instruments are replaced or recalibrated, or heat-producing buildings are erected close to weather station sites – has skewed official world temperature records.
article_snippet.sent: An international panel of scientists will look at whether 'adjustments' made to temperature records around the world have made climate change appear worse - or whether An international panel of scientists actually manage to cancel each other out .
article_snippet.sent: An international panel of scientists will also examine ‘extrapolations’ – when official world temperature records include virtual figures from places where there is no actual measuring station, instead basing An international panel of scientists on the figures of other stations in the same region.
article_snippet.sent: Sceptics claim that the effect of the adjustments is usually to revise temperatures from decades ago downwards, and to increase recent readings, so that the warming trend of the past 150 years looks larger than it really is.
article_snippet.sent: An international panel of scientists has been drawn from leading universities around the world, and includes scientists with widely differing views on climate change.
article_snippet.sent: Panel member Professor William van Wijngaarden, a physicist and climate expert from York University in Toronto, said Panel member Professor William van Wijngaarden, a physicist and climate expert from York University in Toronto had been concerned about official world temperature records’ quality for many years, after noticing that when you examined an individual station ‘you’ll see a sudden jump’.
article_snippet.sent: Such jumps, Panel member Professor William van Wijngaarden, a physicist and climate expert from York University in Toronto said, were not natural, but the product of adjustments.
article_snippet.sent: Dr Benny Peiser, the GWPF director, said An international panel of scientists would try to look at all the thousands of stations whose data goes into the three main world temperature records
article_snippet.sent: Do they make half the stations a little warmer, and half a little cooler, or is there evidence of bias?
article_snippet.sent: ‘While we believe that the 20th Century warming is real, we are concerned by claims that the actual trend is different from – or less certain than – has been suggested.
article_snippet.sent: we hope that people who are concerned with the integrity of climate science, from all sides of the debate, will help we to get to the bottom of these questions by telling we what they know about the temperature records and the adjustments made to they.
highlights_snippet.sent: Climate sceptic group Global Warming Policy Foundation launch inquiry .
  