Excerpts from the Daily Mail article here:
Head of ‘Climategate’ research unit admits he hid data – because it was ‘standard practice’
The scientist at the heart of the ‘Climategate’ row over global warming hid data ‘because it was standard practice’, it emerged today.
Professor Phil Jones, director of the University of East Anglia’s prestigious climatic research unit, today admitted to MPs that the centre withheld raw station data about global temperatures from around the world.
The world-renowned research unit has been under fire since private emails, which sceptics claimed showed evidence of scientists manipulating climate data, were hacked from the university’s server and posted online.
Now, an independent probe is examining allegations stemming from the emails that scientists hid, manipulated or deleted data to exaggerate the case for man-made global warming.
Prof Jones today said it was not ‘standard practice’ in climate science to release data and methodology for scientific findings so that other scientists could check and challenge the research.
He also said the scientific journals which had published his papers had never asked to see it.
Appearing before the committee’s hearing into the disclosure of data from the CRU alongside Prof Jones, the university’s vice chancellor Prof Edward Acton said he had not seen any evidence of flaws in the overall science of climate change – but said he was planning this week to announce the chair of a second independent inquiry, which will look into the science produced at CRU.
h/t to WUWT reader Richard Lawson
UPDATE: Steven Mosher writes in comments about some relevant history that disproves Dr. Jones claim of “standard practice”:
==========================
OK. Everybody write the UEA committee.
Jones says its standard practice NOT to share data.
1. in 2002 PRIOR to the publication of MM2003 Jones shared
data with Mcintyre. Jones was aware of confidentiality agreements.
“Dear Steve,
Attached are the two similar files [normup6190, cruwld.dat] to those I sent before which should be for the 1994 version. This is still the current version until the paper appears for the new one. As before the stations with normal values do not get used.
I’ll bear your comments in mind when possibly releasing the station data for the new version (comments wrt annual temperatures as well as the monthly). One problem with this is then deciding how many months are needed to constitute an annual average. With monthly data I can use even one value for a station in a year (for the month concerned), but for annual data I would have to decide on something like 8-11 months being needed for an annual average. With fewer than 12 I then have to decide what to insert for missing data. Problem also applies to the grid box dataset but is slightly less of an issue.
I say possibly releasing above, as I don’t want to run into the issues that GHCN have come across with some European countries objecting to data being freely available. I would like to see more countries make their data freely available (and although these monthly averages should be according to GCOS rules for GAA-operational Met. Service.
Cheers
Phil Jones”
http://climateaudit.org/2009/08/06/a-2002-request-to-cru/
2. After the publication of MM03 he refused to share that data with Hughes in Feb 2005:a month after MM05 was published and a month after Wigly and he discussed ways to avoid FOIA. He refused
again with Mcintyre in 2007, citing confidentiality agreements.
3. Fully aware of the confidentiality agreements Jones shared the data
with Webster and with Rutherford.
His standard practice was this.
If Jones had no reason to suspect you as an individual he would violate confidentiality agreements and send you data. If jones didn’t like your results or your treatment of his co author Dr. Mann, then he would refuse you data.
There is nothing standard about this practice.
===================================
It appears once Dr. Jones learned that Steve McIntyre had skeptical views, his unwillingness to share data became “standard practice”. – Anthony
Don’t feel sorry for Phil. He’s going to negotiate a settlement package with a two way confidentiality agreement for an undisclosed sum of money. Then he’ll write a book or cooperate in the making of a movie as a consultant. He will make more money out of this disaster than he can spend in the rest of his life.
But back to the “confidential data”, Suppose you had surefire documented evidence that the world was going to end in ten days and it could be prevented. What would you do? Hands up, the number of people who would be calling every single person they know and going LOOK AT THIS! LOOK! even if it was something you stole and could go to jail for. Wow. Lotsa hands. OK, now how many people would run around screaming the world is going to end! Never mind how I know, I just know. Hmmm… no hands.
Fred Pierce at the Guardian reports of Jones here:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/cif-green/2010/mar/01/phil-jones-commons-emails-inquiry
“But for the first time he did concede publicly that when he tried to repeat the 1990 study in 2008, he came up with radically different findings. Or, as he put it, “a slightly different conclusion”. Fully 40% of warming there in the past 60 years was due to urban influences. “It’s something we need to consider,” he said.”
Well, well, well! I didn’t know that!
Super D (14:36:23) :
Sounds to me like the fix is in.
………………………………………………………………………………………………..
with no Steve M around I may have reason to agree with you.
You’ve got to laugh at the number of scientists popping up saying this is how science works. Well don’t think we didn’t notice that guys, and by the way, we also noticed there is a correspondingly huge amount of junk science going around, most of it based on spurious correlations. Happily the vast majority of it isn’t worth bothering about. Sometimes it is though and this is one of those times!
This has been going on for too long for them to not have released their data and codes.
If they had any faith in their “theory”, they would have been more than willing to prove it.
Much anguish and fury I wonder what it signifies ? I see big Al in the news today trying to calm the waters in the hopes that change will occur in the Senate with some new bill being sponsered for all of our own good. Follow the money.
@Nick, ‘Not many scientists here, are there?
Standard practice is to outline the initial hypothesis, assumptions, and data, provide a guide of methodology, and conclusions. It is not to provide all of the interim and explicit calculations and values. You don’t release tables of processed data and explicit code.’
If I claim the sun is about to fry your ass dead before your natural lifetime is up, how much information would you require before you even started to consider to believe that was true?
Steve Goddard (15:06:31) :
They should offer him immunity to spill the beans.
………………………………………………………………………………………………
I don’t know if they are really after the beans.
>>Wren (15:26:49) :
>>I think it would be highly relevant if my purpose was to find small flaws that I and/or others could blow out of proportion to discredit the “value added.”
I see. So basically you are against the scientific process and don’t really care if what Jones and Co. are saying is true or not despite the implications this has for the world. Ok.
>>It also would be relevant if I were curious about exactly how the value was added, but I doubt I would be unless the added value seemed strange.
And they do. Sort of the entire point.
How conclusions may be verified without actual data, including metadata and methodology, is beyond me.
I do know that in every undergrad science course I took, I’d have failed miserably had I simply presented my conclusions with nothing else. Are you saying that somehow climate science is above the requirements for physics, biology, etc.?
DirkH (12:18:23) :
Isn’t there a journal for unreproducible results?
Called The Guardian isn’t it…?
“Wren (14:54:16) :
The [snip] gross exaggeration of the small error McIntyre discovered in GISS temp records(i.e.,the correction for1934 and1998) confirms Jones was right to be wary of how data could end up being misused.”
That’s a misuse for you? Of course it was a “small” error, the entire climate science talks about fractions of degrees all the time and spends all their time trying to find an anthropogenic signal in the noise of natural variation. If you ask me, that’s like looking into an old CRT TV with no signal and trying to recognize the face of a deceased one in the noise. Before the correction, 1998 was the teensiest bit warmer than 1934 and the worldwide media machine went into overdrive about it, catastrophe was just around the corner! That’s “small” for you. McIntyre’s discovery BTW was NEVER reported by the MSM. That’s “exaggeration” for you.
====
And after the correction, 1934 was the “teeniest bit” warmer than 1998, a difference too small to be seen in the global warming trend. No wonder it wasn’t reported in the MSM. How would you headline the story?
Those confidentiality agreements sound fishy. Have those confidentiality agreements been shown as proof that confidentiality agreements exist?
Or are the terms of the confidentiality agreements themselves subject to confidentiality?
If so, is this additional confidentiality expressed in the confidentiality agreements themselves, or is it expressed in a higher level, separate confidentiality agreement? If the latter is the case, can the higher level confidentiality agreement be shown? Are we dealing with chinese boxes, russian dolls, or plain old child phantoms?
I wonder, does it make any sense that the CRU temperature reconstruction results — involving lots of money and processing — are publicly available for free — yet the crude raw data on which they are based is claimed to be confidential? If so, what does this suggest as to the respective value of the raw vs refined material.
Why would a given amount of a crude raw material be implicitly considered more valuable, and hence more worthy of protection, than the laboriously refined product obtained from it? Why would a basket of grapes be more demanding of protective confidentiality than the supposedly fine wine obtained from them? Are the grapes sour? Are they dangerous? Has the wine been adulterated? There is an Italian movie, can’t remember its name now, where near the end, an old successful winemaker imparts a fundamental secret to his son. He says “You know, son, wine can *also* be made from grapes.”
“Not many scientists here, are there?”
My Masters degree was in Computational Fluid Dynamics. In my thesis there is every step in the derivation of the PDE’s used, a complete detailed description of the flux-split, predictor-corrector, time stepping integrator (including stability analysis), a comparison to the results to a known, closed-form problem, and every single line of glorious FORTRAN77 used to implement it *including* the plotting library I wrote to graph it.
During the review process, somebody asked to see every single bit of it and *that* was just for a Master’s degree.
If someone wants reinvent the global economy, I’d think the standard should be at least the same, or (just maybe) a wee bit higher.
If the CRU has only 3 members of staff, where did all the funding go? I suspect most of it was used to prop up the UEA’s finances. The Vice-Chancellor is clearly in damage limitation mode.
As for Professor Jones, he has ridden the gravy train and also ridden rough-shod over any dissenter. I am sure that at the time it all seemed good fun and just between friends, however it is now coming back to haunt him, and I think he has only just realised the enormity of his situation. That is life, – we make a mistake, or get carried away with our own importance, and we have to live with the consequences. Tough.
The UEA will fight tooth and nail to preserve its reputation, and hence its funding. Whether they will sacrifice Jones is a moot point. On the one hand they must be seen to support him as they have employed and funded him for many years. On the other hand they may let him go in order to show that they now have a clean slate. The problem with the latter is it will be seen as an admission that the CRU was severely compromised.
The other problem is that the politicians have signed up to AGW lock stock and barrel, and it is going to be difficult for a committee of MPs to find that the CRU has been fundamentally flawed (Never mind the science and data). Unless the politicians want to find a way out of the AGW barrel and the associated costs, I regard it as highly unlikely that the Inquiry will lead to much more than a mild slap on the wrist for dubious practises.
Politicians like taxes, they can then spend them. Green taxes are great, as the public tends to swallow them with less noise than with other taxes. Once you have the money, you can spend it where you like. Given the dire state of the UK economy, the AGW cash cow will take a long time to die.
Hence the soft questioning. If they push too hard they will open a can of worms that can’t be closed, so better to put the can-opener away.
Sorry to be so sceptical, but that’s a lifetime of observing politicians and people.
INTERLUDE:
Anthony, the MMs, the CRUtape evangelist, and many others deserve our thanks a thousand-fold.
Thank you for saving us (so far) from Climapocalypse!
For those here who are complaining about Post Normal Science (PNS)…
Aren’t you at least glad it wasn’t called Post Modern Science?
Come on people, you all know full well that withholding climatic scientific data has been standard practice all year:-)
The beeb’s report:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/8543289.stm
Unless I missed it, not a sign of the “standard practice” phrase. My guess is they realise just how much of an embarrassment it is.
I predict most alarmists will either try to defend it somehow, or divert attention away from it; probably mostly the latter as the former will put them in the same hole as Jones.
How conclusions may be verified without actual data, including metadata and methodology, is beyond me.
I do know that in every undergrad science course I took, I’d have failed miserably had I simply presented my conclusions with nothing else.
Yes, that’s exactly what we’re talking about here, conclusions and nothing else. In fact, there’s not even that, just “Phil sez we haz teh globle warminz!!1!” on a blank sheet of paper.
I always enjoy when commenters not only haven’t read the science or the news article linked to the post… but obviously haven’t even read the original post.
Yes, you people are going to save science from itself.
REPLY: Supporting data is extremely important. For example, missing metadata is central to the Keenan complaint on the Chinese weather stations, without it the claims of urban/rural siting and Jones UHI claim in his 1990 paper cannot be verified.
Climate claims without supporting data are likely to no longer be accepted after today, the Royal Statistical Society just weighed in. They call for making models and data “public domain”. This is a very important concept, and despite your snark, one that is now gaining traction. -A
Standard practice my “eye’. What a blatant lie.
Welcome to the hell of denial, Dr. Jones. May your stay be long and painful.
Putting aside the issue of whether, under an FOI request, CRU is obliged to release data even if bound by a non-disclosure agreement or similar, I think it inappropriate to use public funds to acquire data from overseas meteorological organisations; to use that data and those funds in support of research; to conduct public policy advocacy on the back of ‘findings’ from that research; to claim that the research is science; and to hide behind the non-disclousre agreements when those findings become the subject of scientific debate.
For me, the issue is simple: without disclosure (or at least the possibility of disclosure) of the data sets, that data should not have been used in support of publicly funded ‘research’ – especially in view of the high profile nature of that research and the impact that it would likely have on the design of public policy.
The choice is simple: use confidential data by all means, but call any analytical undertaking based thereon ‘advocacy’; or avoid using confidential data in research and enjoy the privilege of having your work enter into meaningful scientific debate.
As the inimitable Jones is now discovering, confusing advocacy with science provides uncomfortable ground upon which to rest.
I guess maybe I don’t understand it all…but this seems remarkable simple to me.
Me: Hey…I’ve found a way to create Gold out of pine needles.
Other scientist: Great…give me your data and your formulas, and I’ll see if I can do it too.
Me: Yeah…that’s just not going to happen. But I did it. Really. I did. I can’t show you how, because you may be trying to poke holes in what I’ve done, but really. This gold here?…I made that gold. Out of pine needles.
Media: He did! Really!…He did! And stop saying you doubt it!…you’re just a denier!…
That about cover it?
JimB (Antarctica) 🙂
I guess the data, programs and processes are all transparent,
when you can’t see them. Makes sense!
They call for making models and data “public domain”. This is a very important concept, and despite your snark, one that is now gaining traction.
You may be surprised – as well you should, since you didn’t ask – that I think making data and metadata and calculations public domain is a fantastic idea. Open it all up, for every researcher and in every field, rather than dogpiling on one scientist who does what many do because of the often cutthroat nature of research. Put it on arXiv or something without a strict word count so explanations and methodology can be detailed and complete. I hope the idea gains wider acceptance.
My “snark” should neither help nor hinder that noble effort, and was only directed at the idea that Jones’s research consists of “conclusions and nothing else.” If you read even one paper, you know that’s not the case. Reading the post is helpful too.