The Sunday Times Jonathan Leake, Science and Environment Editor The chairman of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), has used bogus claims that Himalayan glaciers were melting to win grants worth hundreds of thousands of pounds.

Rajendra Pachauri’s Energy and Resources Institute (TERI), based in New Delhi, was awarded up to £310,000 by the Carnegie Corporation of New York and the lion’s share of a £2.5m EU grant funded by European taxpayers.

It means that EU taxpayers are funding research into a scientific claim about glaciers that any ice researcher should immediately recognise as bogus. The revelation comes just a week after The Sunday Times highlighted serious scientific flaws in the IPCC’s 2007 benchmark report on the likely impacts of global warming.

Q1: What raw data are available for global temperature monitoring?

A1: The number of land surface weather stations in the Global Historical Climatology Network (GHCN) drops off in recent years. This fact is an indication of our success in adding historical data. Every month data from over 1,200 stations from around the world are added to GHCN as a result of monthly reports transmitted over the Global Telecommunication System. This number is up from what it was a decade ago due to systematic efforts by the Global Climate Observing System (GCOS) and others to encourage countries to send in CLIMAT reports. If NCDC relied solely on such data that would be the maximum number of stations available. But we have systematically sought to increase the data holdings in the past through international projects such as the once a decade creation of World Weather Records as well as NCDC's own digitization of select Colonial Era archive data. The creation of the GCOS Surface Network is one example of a specific attempt to both enhance data exchange around the world and to identify and select the 'best' stations for long-term climate change purposes. The weighting scheme used to rate stations for the initial selection in the GSN clearly indicates the biases climatologists have in favor of stations that have been in operation for a long time, that are rural, are agricultural research sites, and are distributed throughout the world with increasing density the farther they are away from the tropics. The result of all these efforts is that GHCN has data for many thousands of stations in the period from the 1950s to the 1990s that cannot be routinely updated, thus the number of stations drops considerably in recent years.

Because 71 percent of the world is covered by oceans, NCDC also has a strong focus on collection of observations over the world's oceans. The global ocean temperature analysis is primarily based on buoy and ship observations from the International Comprehensive Ocean Atmosphere Dataset (ICOADS), while monthly data updates come from the Global Telecommunications System (GTS). NCDC is active in a continuing multi-decadal effort to digitize historical ocean observations that contribute to ICOADS. The number of sea surface temperature observations in ICOADS has increased due to recent digitization by NCDC. Other parts of NOAA are involved in ocean buoy deployments that also contribute to ICOADS and the GTS data streams. NOAA continues to seek to increase the amount of data available for global analyses.

Q2: What data are used for U.S. land surface temperature monitoring?

A2: NOAA maintains a network of thousands of stations, many of which have volunteer observers. A subset of 1,219 of these stations in the contiguous 48 states make up the U.S. Historical Climatology Network (USHCN). This dataset has undergone extensive quality control and corrections to remove biases. One of the differences between USHCN and GHCN is that for U.S. data, we have access to detailed station history information which is used to guide part of the bias removal process. Additionally, the new, high quality U.S. Climate Reference Network data are used to verify recent years of the USHCN analysis.