To ask the Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change what the evidential basis is for the Facts About Climate Change section of his Department's website covering average global temperatures.

The evidential basis for the stated increases in global surface temperatures since around 1900 and the 1970s, respectively, come from the analyses of three independent data sets of surface temperature carried out by the Met Office Hadley Centre and Climatic Research Unit of the University of East Anglia and, in the United States, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's National Climatic Data Center and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration's Goddard Institute for Space Studies.

The stated range of possible rises in global temperatures by the end of this century, relative to 1990, are based on information from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's Fourth Assessment Report (2007), in relation to future scenarios for greenhouse gas emissions.