So-called climate sceptics should set out the scientific evidence behind their views questioning man-made global warming, a leading scientist said today.
Prof. Alan Thorpe, head of the Natural Environment Research Council, said that in the wake of recent controversy over climate science, there was a need for researchers to engage more openly with the public and "sceptics".
But the former director of the met office Hadley Centre for climate change said discussion must be based on the scientific information on global warming, and said those who questioned the conclusions drawn by climate researchers had to "expose" their evidence, rather than just their beliefs.
A series of leaked e-mails, which sceptics claimed showed data being manipulated to support a theory of man-made global warming, and several errors unearthed in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's watershed 2007 report have provoked concerns over climate science and fuelled criticism of researchers.
Responding to the concerns raised by the incidents, Prof. Julia Slingo, chief scientist at the Met Office, acknowledged there were some uncertainties in the data, but said the case for man-made global warming was "very compelling".
She said carbon dioxide levels were rising, and the gas's impact on temperature had known about since the 19th century.
The link between higher levels of CO2 and temperature increases was "absolutely robust, very straightforward fundamental physics", she said, while other data - from sea level rises to retreating glaciers - also showed the climate was changing.
And new analysis indicated that previous studies of global warming based on a series of land surface temperature measurements around the world may have "underestimated" the extent of temperature rises - particularly in polar regions.
Prof. Slingo admitted there was a need for greater openness from scientists, such as the Met Office's recent efforts to publish data on temperature rises and the scientific method that had been used to turn the raw information into global average temperatures.
Prof. Brian Hoskins, of the Grantham Institute of Climate Change at Imperial College, London, and a member of the government's committee on climate Change, acknowledged there had been a few mistakes in the IPCC's 2007 report, but said it did not undermine the overall scientific case for global warming.
He said that even taking a conservative line on the evidence led to the conclusion that society needed to take account of global warming.
Climate change would alter society, policies and "the way things work", and older industries and those who wanted aviation to continue to expand would be among those who would want the problem to go away.
"There's an audience out there in the public that says 'I hope this isn't the case' and is eager to hear it's not."
But he insisted: "This isn't a question of belief, this is fact, this is evidence that points in that direction, and there's emerging evidence that it is increasing."