August 9, 2011 
To dispel climate skeptics’ theories of inaccuracy that led to “climategate” and remove a barrier of inaction by the public on climate, Climatic Research Unit (CRU) has released the raw data for temperature records going back 150 years around the world to the public. Research partners like NOAA warn that this release could harm future research projects, saying that organizations will hesitate to participate in future research out of concern the information will eventually be publicly released, but others argue that this action was necessary for dismissal of skeptics arguments against the report’s findings.
Posted on New Scientist
by Andy Coghlan
Anyone can now view for themselves the raw data that was at the centre of last year’s “climategate” scandal.
Temperature records going back 150 years from 5113 weather stations around the world were yesterday released to the public by the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia in Norwich, UK. The only records missing are from 19 stations in Poland, which refused to allow them to be made public.
“We released [the dataset] to dispel the myths that the data have been inappropriately manipulated, and that we are being secretive,” says Trevor Davies, the university’s pro-vice-chancellor for research. “Some sceptics argue we must have something to hide, and we’ve released the data to pull the rug out from those who say there isn’t evidence that the global temperature is increasing.”
Hand it over
The university were ordered to release data by the UK Information Commissioner’s Office, following a freedom-of-information request for the raw data from researchers Jonathan Jones of the University of Oxford and Don Keiller of Anglia Ruskin University in Cambridge, UK.
Davies says that the university initially refused on the grounds that the data is not owned by the CRU but by the national meteorological organisations that collect the data and share it with the CRU.
When the CRU’s refusal was overruled by the information commissioner, the UK Met Office was recruited to act as a go-between and obtain permission to release all the data.
Poland refused, and the information commissioner overruled Trinidad and Tobago’s wish for the data it supplied on latitudes between 30 degrees north and 40 degrees south to be withheld, as it had been specifically requested by Jones and Keiller in their FOI request and previously shared with other academics.
The price
The end result is that all the records are there, except for Poland’s. Davies’s only worry is that the decision to release the Trinidad and Tobago data against its wishes may discourage the open sharing of data in the future. Other research organisations may from now on be reluctant to pool data they wish to be kept private.
Thomas Peterson, chief scientist at the National Climatic Data Center of the US National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and president of the Commission for Climatology at the World Meteorological Organization, agrees there might be a cost to releasing the data.
“I have historic temperature data from automatic weather stations on the Greenland ice sheet that I was able to obtain from Denmark only because I agreed not to release them,” he says. “If countries come to expect that sharing of any data with anyone will eventually lead to strong pressure for them to fully release those data, will they be less willing to collaborate in the future?”
Davies is confident that genuine and proper analysis of the raw data will reproduce the same incontrovertible conclusion – that global temperatures are rising. “The conclusion is very robust,” he says, explaining that the CRU’s dataset of land temperatures tally with those from other independent research groups around the world, including those generated by the NOAA and NASA.
“Should people undertake analyses and come up with different conclusions, the way to present them is through publication in peer-reviewed journals, so we know it’s been through scientific quality control,” says Davies.
No convincing some people
Other mainstream researchers and defenders of the consensus are not so confident that the release will silence the sceptics. “One can hope this might put an end to the interminable discussion of the CRU temperatures, but the experience of GISTEMP – another database that’s been available for years – is that the criticisms will continue because there are some people who are never going to be satisfied,” says Gavin Schmidt of Columbia University in New York.
“Sadly, I think this will just lead to a new round of attacks on CRU and the Met Office,” says Bob Ward, communications director of the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment at the London School of Economics. “Sceptics will pore through the data looking for ways to criticise the processing methodology in an attempt to persuade the public that there’s doubt the world has warmed significantly.”
The CRU and its leading scientist, Phil Jones, were at the centre of the so-called “climategate” storm in 2009 when the unit was accused of withholding and manipulating data. It was later cleared of the charge.
This story is biased in favor of the climate deniers because it accepts their framing of events. Halfway to insanity is not “Objectivity”.
First of all, their is no such thing as a climate-skeptic. The climate exists and is well understood. The correct term for “climate skeptic” is “Greenhouse Pollution Denier”.
What we do have is a radical right cadre of anti-government activists fueled by libertarian diatribes against regulation. The very idea that we must share a planet with finite resources is in dispute. Economists’ beautiful math theories implicitly assume we will find another planet when this one is used up. If in your mind Regulation is Primary Evil, the One-Planet-Theory will have to be discarded. You will fantasize about God or biology making new oil faster than we can burn it, and somehow a couple centuries of data about the absorption spectrum of CO2 will be found wrong.
It is true that this data disclosure will help the deniers. They are paid to make the work of Science harder, so that the work of Big Old Carbon money is easier. The time that scientists spent arguing about this disclosure is time they will be paid for. If it makes gathering data harder in the future, that was the whole purpose of the activity.
Big Old Carbon needs governments help to avoid innovation so that coal stays cheap in relation to renewables– that won’t happen in a fair fight. Geothermal and Makani Power and innovative nuclear all have the potential to be available anywhere and much cheaper than coal.
The right way to deal with Greenhouse Pollution Deniers is to find out who pays them and expose that. Call them bad names. And don’t waste a minute tying to prove anything to them because they know who is paying them and it isn’t you.
Recently we have had productive work showing that the original “Doctors who smoke Camels” are in fact the same people running the Greenhouse Pollution Denial movement. In the mean time they did a lot of corrupt work on making sure Ronald Reagan’s Star Wars Science Fiction Missile Offence/Defense System got 100x more funding than anything to do with renewable energy. These guys have already spent more money lobbying on those earlier corrupt schemes than the whole science of climate has ever received from government. Don’t try to convince them. Expose them!
Good history on the Doctor’s Who Smoke Camels transition to Climate is in “Climate Cover-Up: The Crusade to Deny Global Warming (Greystone Books, $20).