PRESS RELEASE
Stockholm March 5, 2010
Climate scientist delivers false statement in parliament enquiry
It has come to our attention, that last Monday (March 1), Dr. Phil Jones, head of the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia (CRU), in a hearing with the House of Commons Science and Technology Committee made a statement in regards to the alleged non-availability for disclosure of Swedish climate data.
Dr. Jones asserted that the weather services of several countries, including Sweden, Canada and Poland, had refused to allow their data to be released, to explain his reluctance to comply with Freedom of Information requests.
This statement is false and misleading in regards to the Swedish data.
All Swedish climate data are available in the public domain. As is demonstrated in the attached correspondence between SMHI (Swedish Meteorological and Hydrological Institute), the UK Met Office and Dr. Jones (the last correspondence dated yesterday March 4), this has been clearly explained to Dr. Jones. What is also clear is that SMHI is reluctant to be connected to data that has undergone “processing” by the East Anglia research unit.
STOCKHOLM INITIATIVE
Göran Ahlgren, secretary general
Kungsgatan 82
12 27 Stockholm, Sweden
===================================
They included attached PDF files. which I have uploaded to WUWT below. Click for PDF files:
Request_from_Professor_Phil_Jones_regarding_the_release_of_data_from_the_HadCRUT_dataset__dnr_SMHI_
Data_from_the_HadCRUT_dataset_100304
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The summary is:
Jones asked the Swedes if CRU ‘homogenized’ data could be attributed to the Swedes.
The Swedes said no.
On the basis of this Jones and Acton conveyed the false impression to the parliamentary inquiry that the Swedes would not allow the release of their raw data.
This is clearly documented.
Resignations should follow.
Does there exist anywhere in the world, a data set that contains true raw data?
Is there a penalty for lies when giving “evidence” to a house committee?
Re Micajah (14:11:34) and mpaul (15:36:24) :
This is my understanding also as I read the attachments, and the cogent point that this letter from Mr Jones is sent long after FOI requests has been made was also made. Additionaly, to my understanding, Mr Jones has yet to release his version of the data refrenced, or his methods of altering it. Additionaly I have yet to see a copy of the original claimed, “non-disclosure agreements”. Please coreect me if I mistaken.
Liar, liar, pants on fire. And it has nothing to do with “global warming”.
Re: Leif Svalgaard (15:18:59)
I agree that I should have qualified the statement more carefully.
I encourage you to look at the material Corbyn has already provided. He talks fast in the presentations – and not all of the slides clearly convey what he says with words – but by rewinding the tapes and running calculations in parallel I’ve come to realize he actually has revealed a lot already. I understand his predicament. He does not have guaranteed secure, stable, generous, long-term income, as tenured professors do. It’s understandable that his priorities differ from what is normal in the mainstream science establishment.
Re RockyRoad (15:45:36) : Saying –
[Jones should divulge the homogenization algorithms and any other procedures he’s applied to the temperature datasets he publishes, all referenced against the raw data.]
This was last done in 1991 when the US Dept of Energy (DoE) reprinted the two documentation books TR022 (Nth Hem) and TR027 (Sth Hem) which should have been read along with the 1986 Jones et al papers published in Journal of Applied Meteorology.
This 1991 reprint has only been online since 20th Feb.
“USA Dept of Energy Jones et al 1986 350 pages station documentation now online in pdf”
http://www.warwickhughes.com/blog/?p=510
Appendix A sets out all the stations Jones et al considered and lists corrections, where comparisons were made etc.
Appendix B lists stations used.
No. The SMHI say their data is for non-commercial use. In many countries, “public domain” has a legal definition of usable for any purpose. Perhaps you meant to say “on the public record”. The leaked emails are on the public record, and are being used by many people, although various people hold the copyright to the messages.
What is also clear is that SMHI is reluctant to be connected to data that has undergone “processing” by the East Anglia research unit.
This gets my attention!
Phil Jones and global warming keep getting painted into an ever smaller corner. Less and less room to continue creating ‘global warming’. Soon all they may have left is implosion.
Scarlet Pumpernickel (17:07:18) :
Is there a penalty for lies when giving “evidence” to a house committee?
Of course. But unless Phil Jones cited specific examples with dates, etc., he will be able to claim that what he said about the Swedes was his impression of things. That would make it not a lie. Unless you can pin someone down with specifics (say, with a stained blue dress) perjury cannot stick.
I asked Acton’s office directly about Canada, and they changed their story. You can read about my inquiries in the “fast” comments section at Dr. Motl’s blog:
http://motls.blogspot.com/2010/03/royal-society-of-chemistry-defends.html
Quote:””Professor Jones: Yes. We have tried to go back to the countries and seven countries have said they would rather we did not release the copies of their data we have in our database.””
Which is true. They did not want CRU releasing the massaged, manipulated data that CRU had in their data base.
Remember, CRU destroyed their raw data.
Uncle Phil is just not telling the whole truth.
Quote: “”Professor Jones: Not in that way. We did, with the help of the Met Office, approach all the countries of the world and asked them whether we could release their data. We have had 59 replies of which 52 have been positive, so that has led to the release of 80% of the data, but we have had these seven negative responses which we talked about earlier, including Canada.””
Yes, he talked about it earlier. The seven countries did not want CRU releasing CRU’s manipulated data, from CRU’s data base.
Uncle Phil is lying by omission again.
Quote: “”Q148 Graham Stringer: I will repeat it one more time and then I will shut up, Chairman. That does exclude checking and it does rather put you as a scientist above interested scientists who want to check up. It is the United States Department of Energy that funds you, is it not?””
Quote: “”Professor Jones: Yes””
This was a shock and news to me! Where have I been?
I found only on major media report on why countries are refusing to release data through CRU. Bloomberg is one of the few news outlets based in America that is digging into and reporting Climategate.
Bloomberg recently bought Business Week and is integrating it in its news network.
Bloomberg has emerged as a major news network and has 2,200 news and multi-media professionals in 146 bureaus across 72 countries.
An article in Bloomberg has a very large reader base.
They are expanding while other news outlets shrink.
And yes, I gave the reporter Morales the info and links on Wattsup info for any future updates.
http://www.businessweek.com/news/2010-03-01/russia-canada-won-t-reveal-data-climategate-school-says.html
Russia, Canada Keep Data, ‘Climategate’ School Says (Update1)
By Alex Morales
March 01, 2010, 5:35 PM EST
Bloomberg/BUSINESSWEEK
“March 1 (Bloomberg) — Canada and Russia are among nations that won’t allow the U.K. university at the center of the “climategate” leaked-e-mail dispute to release their temperature data, researchers at the school said.
Seven of 59 nations asked to allow the University of East Anglia to release weather station data have declined, according to testimony given to a U.K. parliamentary committee today by Phil Jones, director of the school’s Climatic Research Unit, and UEA Vice Chancellor Edward Acton.” End quote
Full Story at
http://www.businessweek.com/news/2010-03-01/russia-canada-won-t-reveal-data-climategate-school-says.html
Bottom line, Jones can’t make the data available that is required to check his calculations without the Swedes approval, even if it is a “different” dataset than what the Swedes keep themself. The Swedes still have partial ownership rights in Jones massaged version. The FOIA were about the data that Jones uses for CRUTEM, and he can’t release it without the Swedes approval even if they are very concerned that whatever indignities have been inflicted on it since they handed it over be clearly identified as not their responsibility. Further, it is not enough to say “there is no evidence the Swedes put limits on it originally”. They wouldn’t need to. You don’t get to give other peoples stuff away to third parties just because they didn’t say you couldn’t –they have to affirmatively say you *can*. They don’t lose their rights because they didn’t make a point of asserting them at the time.
I’ve eventually found, after an intense search, where the Met Office has released it’s data. Somehow I get the feeling they didn’t really want anyone to find it.
http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/climatechange/science/monitoring/subsets.html
if you scroll down past the FAQs there is a zip file released in Jan 2010 available to download – 8meg.
Unzip it and you get 99 folders numbered 1 – 99.
Open each folder and you get a number of dat files which then open in wordpad as text data of different stations. There is no format or anything to figure which country is which as they are all over the place.
I figured Australia might be on the bottom at 99 – well there are a couple there like COOLGARDIE 1931 – 1939 but it s a dog’s breakfast.
I’d have to go through each of the 99 folders and each of the 10 – 15 files in each folder to find CRU’s data on Australia!
I found a great one for Elbing – Poland.
data set from 1829 – 2009
1843 – 1991 all temps are -99.0
Six data sets went quack quack quack
One data set never came back
And that’s about the maturity level of data handling.
re geo (18:46)
You said “Bottom line, Jones can’t make the data available that is required to check his calculations without the Swedes approval…” No, that is not the bottom line. What Jones said in this letter is that he does not have the original data. One cannot check Jones’ calculations with out the original data and with out the code that Jones used to process the data.
Bottom line is that Jones’ results cannot be reproduced.
CRU / Jones is basing their analysis off of just 8 meg. of data and having problems with keeping track of it?
I have been pushing around 19.9 gig of raw data, on my home pc with out a problem, after processing into daily maps for five parameters, and archiving the CSV files and grid files, it only runs 223.8 gigs total before up loading to server, where it takes up 187 gig of HD space.
My total budget expense, compared to his, is smaller than the percent of CO2, by two orders of magnitude, what is wrong with this picture??
So that much for Sweden.
Is this “National Climate Data and Information Archive” here: http://www.climate.weatheroffice.gc.ca, or here: http://climat.meteo.gc.ca/prods_servs/index_e.html
– exonerating Canada?
Anybody have any details about data from Poland?
@Robert Burns (19:55:41) :
That remains to be seen. So far as I can tell, there are two data manipulation points (or possibly three).
1). Turning “Swede I” into “Swede II” (and all the others of course)
2). Manipulating all the “II” versions into CRUTEM
Getting Swede II (and all the other II versions, of course) into public answers half the need, if the software code that does it is also included –and Hadley’s version that produces the same results is already publicly available, is my understanding.
If you look upstream, you’ll find my concerns about replicating step 1). . . you may be right. But we haven’t had that hurdle in front of us to clear yet. I can foresee the likliehood of bruised shins, but I prefer to wait for the actual event.
http://climate.weatheroffice.gc.ca/prods_servs/index_e.html#cdcd
The Canadian station data is in the link above. Won’t unzip on windows7, not sure why.
The larger issue to me is not the whole trail about who asked for what when. The issue is that raw data was used to create “value added” data and nothing seems available as to what mathematical operations were performed to arrive at the value added data. This means that should an error have been made in methodology in the first place, the error would propogate through to each new version of the data. With no record of the original data, it cannot be compared to Sweden’s record to determine if there are differences between their current records and the ones Jones started with, and if there were errors in the very first mathematical operations, there is no way to even identify them, let alone back them out of any later versions.
This isn’t data anymore. This is just a series of numbers that can at best be called an approximation.
“What is also clear is that SMHI is reluctant to be connected to data that has undergone “processing” by the East Anglia research unit.”
Here we have the money quote ladies and gentlemen.
Paul Vaughan (17:22:24) :
It’s understandable that his priorities differ from what is normal in the mainstream science establishment.
If he can demonstrate that his claims are true, they are worth not the trifle he gets from his business, but billions [and he would get his share for sure and be set for life], so I don’t understand his predicament, unless he knows that he can’t demonstrate anything, in which case I do understand his predicament.
geo (18:46:15)
Well, since I made the first FOI for this data, I can assure you that you are wrong. Jones refused to release the data to me because he said that some of it (2% by his figures) was covered by confidentiality agreements. (Of course in the fullness of time we found out that he couldn’t release it because he had lost it … but I digress). He didn’t say at the time “I lost it”, he said “confidentiality”.
So I said fine, then release all but the 2% … but he said he couldn’t do that because of
sunspots, no, becauseI might try to find fault with it,no … hang on, I’ll look at my correspondence … oh, yeah, because it was available on the web … somewhere. When I asked where, they wouldn’t answer. Useless.Nonsense. Jones made a clear distinction to me between the 98% of the data that theoretically could be released because it was not covered by a confidentiality agreement, and the 2% that could not be released because it was covered. Your claim is simply not true.
So then I and others filed an FOI asking for the confidentiality agreements. They pulled up three or four pieces of paper, only one of which restricted redistribution. Ooops … sorry, they said, but they had lost the rest of the confidentiality agreements. None of these was from Sweden. So all of their excuses turned out to be totally bogus.
Finally they ‘fessed up that they can’t locate the raw data that their whole edifice is based on. The dog ate their homework. So they were lying from day one, just shucking and jiving to avoid telling the truth — they lost the data.
Now, they’ve written to Sweden to ask if they can release the massaged Swedish data. The Swedes, reasonably, said no way. You can’t release the munged data and call it the Swedish raw data.
So in fact, Jones et al.’s whole CRUTEM and HadCRUT “adjusted” datasets are merely apocryphal. The raw data is lost, gone. They released what they claimed at the time was the raw data, but it’s not. It is merely the CRUcified data, so it is useless.
So there is nothing scientific about the CRUTEM and HadCRUT adjusted datasets, because they cannot be replicated. And replication, as we know, is the core of science.
As a result, the UK Met Office (the “Had” part of the HadCRUT “adjusted” data) has decided to start over, and reassemble the raw data from scratch. They know, even if you haven’t noticed, that everything that the CRU now has has is useless unverifiable junk. Despite your claim, they know that there is no way to “check [Jones’s] calculations”. The game is over.
End of story.