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© Holbert
Temperature records dating back more than 150 years are to be re-examined by the Met Office because public belief in global warming has plummeted.

The re-analysis, which was approved at a conference in Turkey this week, comes after the climate change email scandal which dealt a severe blow to the credibility of environmental science.

The Met Office says that the review is 'timely' and insists it does not expect to come to a different conclusion about the progress of climate change.

But the reassessment, which will take an international group of experts three years to complete, will be seen as a tacit admission that previous reports have been tainted by the association with the University of East Anglia's controversial Climatic Research Unit.

Since the leak of more than 1,000 emails and documents from the unit in November, belief in global warming has fallen from 41 per cent to 26 per cent.

The Met Office and the University of East Anglia work together to produce one of the three databases relied upon by the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change when assessing the danger posed by global warming.

A document proposing the review states that the reassessment of figures from 1850 will 'ensure that the datasets are completely robust and that all the methods are transparent'.

It also responds to calls for scientists to be more open about the uncertainty surrounding predictions, adding: 'Participants-will be required to create a full audit trail and publish their methodology in peer-reviewed literature.

'Strong preference will be given to systems...that reflect the uncertainties in the observations and methods.'

A Met Office spokesman denied the re-analysis had been triggered by doubts over the University of East Anglia's contribution.

He said: 'Scientists are always looking and trying to get the best results. Techniques change all the time and science is always evolving. We don't expect it to come up with any different results to what is already there.'

The IPCC has also come after under fire in recent weeks, after it was caught using a student's essay and an article from a climbing magazine to make claims about reductions in ice on mountains around the world.