Watts Up With That?

For all of our UK readers, now is the time for all good citizens to come to the aid of their country (and science). The Met Office refuses to release data and methodology for their HadCRUT global temperature dataset after being asked repeatedly. Without the data and  procedures there is no possibility of replication, and without replication the Hadley climate data is not scientifically valid. This isn’t just a skeptic issue, mind you, others have just a keen an interest in proving the data.

What is so bizarre is this. The FOI request by Steve McIntyre to the Met Office was for a copy of the data sent to Peter Webster. If the restrictions on the data hold for Steve McIntyre, why did they not prevent release of the data to Webster?

When asked by Warwick Hughes for this data, Dr. Jones famously replied:

Even if WMO agrees, I will still not pass on the data. We have 25 or so years invested in the work. Why should I make the data available to you, when your aim is to try and find something wrong with it.

This is just wrong on so many levels. This isn’t state secrets, it is temperature data gathered from weather stations worldwide and the methodology of collating and processing it.  Much of the weather station data is available online and live via hundreds of Internet sites, so the argument that “strict understanding by the data providers that this station data must not be publicly released” is in my opinion, bogus. You can get a list of CRU stations. Go to: http://www.cru.uea.ac.uk/cru/data/landstations/ and download the file: crustnsused.txt

And then look up any number of these stations on the Internet and get the data.

The fact that Hadley/Met Office repeatedly refuses to disclose the data and methodology only deepens the likelihood that there is something amiss and Hadley does not want to be caught out on it.

Dr. Jones is looking more and more like a “very bad Wizard” with each denied FOI request.

Science and scientists should demand open access to this data. If GISS can do it, why not Hadley? They share much of the same data.

Steve McIntyre tells the complete story below. My advice to UK readers, start sending an FOI request every week and complain loudly to your UK representatives and write letters to the editor.  Details are in the body of the post below. – Anthony

UK Met Office Refuses to Disclose Station Data Once Again

It must be humiliating for the UK Met Office to have to protect Phil Jones and CRU. Even a seasoned bureaucrat must have winced in order to write the following:

Some of the information was provided to Professor Jones on the strict understanding by the data providers that this station data must not be publicly released and it cannot be determined which countries or stations data were given in confidence as records were not kept.

Here is the complete text of the UK Met Office’s most recent refusal of their station data. Read the rest of this entry »