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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Willis –I’m confused. Are you saying Jones reports are reliable or not reliable? You seem to be arguing both. Do you believe in independent truth, regardless of Jones (or yours, or mine) representation of what it is? The moons of Jupiter didn’t start revolving around Jupiter only when Galileo trained his telescope on them, right? Whether Jones was willing to give it to you (or anyone else) some years ago, is entirely independent of his legal right to do so, yes? Up to a certain date his ability to get away with flying under the legal radar in servicing his favorites (and denying those not on the list) was probably a great deal more than it is today under the world-wide scrutiny he’s been receiving. . . do you agree with that proposition or not?
janama (19:24:14) : you say –
[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!]
Heavens above it is not quite that obscure. Australian data (and PNG) WMO numbers start 94 – so go to the UKMO folder 94.
To know the Australian WMO station numbers;
http://www.warwickhughes.com/agri/crudata.htm
scroll down to link; Jones/CRU/UKMO list 4138 stations 2009 pre ClimateGate
Might be available at the CRU site somewhere.
That txt file gives you all the WMO numbers for global stations incl Australia.
So you can go to the exact file you want in the UKMO heap of folders.
geo (22:13:05) : edit
The existence of agreements saying you can’t redistribute the data clearly means that without such an agreement you can redistribute the data …
I see Jones being demoted,not fired.I see another scientist taking up the reins using the data that is available to carry on the work.You will never know if the original data exists under the current government in the UK.
A new government may look at ways of getting the UK out from under the burden placed on the people by AGW proponents.
When do they release the emission stats for 2009-2010?
I am interested in seeing how much China’s emissions have gone up over the past year.
Canadian data is here:
http://climat.meteo.gc.ca/prods_servs/index_e.html
From Licence agreament:
“REDISTRIBUTION RESTRICTIONS – You are authorized to further distribute the data or software, including any portion of it, contained in this product under the following conditions only. No fee will be charged explicitly for this Environment Canada product to any party to whom it is distributed. (Charges for value-added services are permitted.). In consideration of the license you are herein granted, you have the obligation to acknowledge the source of the Environment Canada Data with the following layout or something similar: based on Environment Canada data. Redistribution must occur so that any other party must agree to the same redistribution restrictions before use of the redistributed product is allowed. “
@Willis Eschenbach (22:38:16)
That’s argument by assertion, Willis.
For instance, let’s look at copyright law in the US. You don’t have to mark a piece of writing as copyrighted at the time, nor register it with the copyright office at the time of origination, in order to claim your copyright rights on that document years down the road. You can do so at the the time of origination, of course, but it isn’t required.
By your theory, that some people choose to communicate their rights explicitly up front requires that anyone who doesn’t so choose has none. Simply not true.
“Heavens above it is not quite that obscure.”
Thank you Warwick – I’ve since sorted it out and realised you are correct. 🙂
here’s Brewarrina Hospital comparison between CRU and BoM.
http://users.tpg.com.au/johnsay1/Stuff/Brewarrina_CRU.jpg
geo (23:46:53) : edit
You are right that a copyright exists without marking it. However, no one (to my knowledge) has ever claimed that if someone gives me garden variety scientific data, that the data is covered under copyright and therefore I can’t distribute it. If that is so, you’d better tell all the scientists of the world, because they certainly don’t believe that.
Why don’t they believe it? Because in general, scientific data are not covered by copyright. I find:
In other words, just like the white pages in a phone book, a list of stations and temperatures is NOT COVERED BY COPYRIGHT.
Nice try, though. As I said, that’s why agreements not to re-distribute data exist … because without them, there is no such protection.
We don’t know what CRU is – max, min , mean?
Noelen:”I see Jones being demoted,not fired.I see another scientist taking up the reins using the data that is available to carry on the work.”
Without the raw data being available the Hadcrut data set is worthless because it can’t be verified. Think about that, 20 years of using unverifiable data. For sure the warmist camp have circled the wagons but apart from the ridiculous Professor Acton there must be many people extremely upset that Jones’ incompetence and mendacity has brought down the CRU. They will probably sideline him as you say but his career is finished, he’s a busted flush.
His mum should have told him about playing with boys like Michael Mann.
there seems to be an awful lot of question marks about what is available as RAW DATA , is the output of the Swedish met office RAW DATA or has it been homoginised, adjusted for UHE etc. before being released. Is the country data available from the UEA in RAW FORM or only as homoinised by UAE or is it adjusted by the various Met Offices before being sent to UEA. I’m getting more confused every day. Basically I just want RAW DATA I’ll do my own adjustments thank you, then see if it matches.
SMHI response 21 Dec ’09:
“Given the information that the version of the data from the SMHI stations that you hold are likely to differ from the data we hold, SMHI do not want the data to be released on your web site.”
Isn’t there an ambiguity here? What is the data that the SMHI doesn’t want released on Jones’ Web site? One assumes it definitely includes SMHI’s own version, but couldn’t it also include Jones’ version?
Whatever, if I’d read that, I would have interpreted it as meaning at the very least that the SMHI didn’t want me to release their version of the data on my site. Fair enough. But they also say that they are developing a Web site that currently releases some of their own data and will in time release more.
Hence, by 1st March ’10, the date of the parliamentary hearing, it would not be possible to say with complete honesty that SMHI was refusing to release their data.
Complete and correct information would have been that the Swedes were quite happy to release their data (at least part of it immediately, and more in the future) for non-commercial use on their own Web site. However, they did not want it released on Jones’ Web site.
The information that Sweden was one of the countries refusing to release data was volunteered. Anyone listening to the enquiry would have assumed that Sweden had refused to make the data available, not that they had actually indicated they WOULD and to some extent ALREADY HAD made it available.
So just on the basis of the SMHI response of 21 Dec ‘09, disregarding anything else, the claim made by the Stockholm Initiative group that the statement at the enquiry was “misleading” does seem to be supported by the evidence.
As to whether it was also “false”, well, certainly the impression given at the hearing was false. I watched it, and I definitely took away the understanding that the Swedes were refusing to allow the data to be released, and by that I also understood, rightly or wrongly, that CRU held data which was the actual Swedish data, not a version of it that differed from the latter.
It’s now not clear whether the actual Swedish data is raw or manipulated on its own account, or, conceivably, whether both raw and manipulated data are available from the Swedes.
And this is the problem: little seems clear and transparent when it comes to climate surface temperature data. Why is there this consistent picture of confusion? We can lay aside all accusations of impropriety if we wish, but we are still left with deep uncertainties about data and code, etc.
Purely on those grounds, we cannot accept at face value anything that Jones and anyone else directly involved with analysis of the data have said in papers based on that. Nor, on papers by many other researchers that, quite probably completely innocently, rely on their results, because there appears to be no way at present to backtrack and replicate the work all the way from original raw data.
For all we know, there is a large number of papers that ought to be retracted in light of this. It’s absolutely astonishing that this is the situation given that there is so much at stake in the climate debate. How can anyone, for or against AGW, rest easy with the hypothesis? How can anyone not want to get at the truth purely for its own sake?
“Canada releases its temperature data to anyone who requests it,” Brigitte Lemay, a spokeswoman with Environment Canada, said in an e-mailed response. “We have in the past and we will continue to make our data public. All Environment Canada official climatic data is made available without restriction to the public through our web site.”
geo (20:36:06) :
@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
…………………………………
It is not just Sweden that might pass massaged data to CRU, while keeping their truly raw data at home.
Unfortunately, it is more complex by far. There are countries which are running quality improvement programs, creating un-numbered version after version of their country set, perhaps several times a year. The adjusters might have a record of what was in a version supplied by the collecting country some years ago, but I do not discern an attempt to keep the adjusters up to date with successive country versions. Some country data I have seen rejected by the host country has been continued in use by the adjusters, leading in part to a small estimate of the effect of man-made adjustment.
Some of the complexity of this was seen in the Darwin exercise. It would not surprise me to find at least a dozen data strings over the last century, all from Darwin, that are justifiable in some way by the adjusters, but far, far from matching each other today.
Now feed that problem into the thousands of stations that adjusters use and you might conclude that the problem has grown beyond management. I’m arriving at a conclusion that there has been trivial actual Global Warming in the last century.
Would someone like to show me I’m wrong?
Sort of changes the urgency for mitigation, uh?
janama (00:13:42) : You say;
[We don’t know what CRU is – max, min , mean?]
IPCC AGW as defined for over 20yrs by Jones et al/CRU/UKMO is mean monthly T.
Re: Leif Svalgaard (21:49:11)
Even with a major contribution, harsh criticism would be focused on whatever remains unexplained (and there are loose ends). A glass-half-full reception in the near-term would have been more likely without the wrapping of successful long-range forecasts in an anti-CO2 flag. Science vs. politics or science and politics? I would bet on the latter in this case.
Has anyone considered that the current position of the Swedes is not necessarily the same as at the time of the FOI requests? Seeing as how they are only now putting their data in the public domain, I think that these letters serve to show that they didn’t want their data made available at the time of those requests.
Re: B. Kindseth (Mar 5 13:00),
The SMHI website has an English language version here
If that is not suitable then try placing the link for the main SMHI Swedish langauage website http://www.smhi.se inside Google Translate
(Ignore the “Your Opinion Counts” user survey in Swedish that pops-up from Webstatus).
@geo (15:11:49) :
“The thing I actually get mad at Jones the most about, is he is the only one who truly understood over the last 20 years what a hash up this was. . . .and he did nothing about it.”
I think that saying Jones was “the only one” totally overlooks another major actor in this saga: namely Trevor Davies (director 93-98). Davies (currently Pro-Vice Chancellor for Research and Knowledge Transfer) was present at the Science and Technology Sun-Committee seated directly behind Jones and Acton and passing notes mainly to Acton.
“Sometime in the mid-to-late ’90s when it was becoming apparent how important this stuff is, he should have started rectifying these issues on his own and maybe by 2007 he would have had a product he wasn’t ashamed for the world to see the innards of. Whatever excuses he might make to himself about “1980s standards”, the reality he is he had a long time *after that* to get his house in order, and did nothing.”
You are quite correct, however, in saying that Jones had ample opportunity to act during his co-directorship (98-04) and directorship (04-) and appears to have done nothing.
Thats assuming that the adjustments were not of not overwhelming!
The Stockholm Initiative are being completely unfair to Dr. Jones.
SMHI said “no” in December 2009, Dr. Jones reported that they had said “no” on March 1, 2010.
The Stockholm Initiative accuses him of giving a false and misleading statement based on a letter explaining that the “no” should be interpreted as “yes, but with clarifications” on March 4!
Why attack Dr. Jones when he IS trying to share the data?
Paul Vaughan (02:41:13) :
Even with a major contribution, harsh criticism would be focused on whatever remains unexplained
One cannot criticize what has not been explained. One cannot accept it either.
“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.”
And, as cited by my Overlord, Willis Eschenbach at (01:21:42), is also false in regards to the Canadian data.
In Doc Jones’ testimony, he mentioned “Sweden, Canada and Russia” — and Russia’s data is open-source.
So, if the statements he made in regards to obtaining data are false, by what metric are we to accept the truth of any of his other statements?
geo (20:36:06) :
geo wrote “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”
Which part of my post where you referring to with “That remains to be seen.”? Jones doesn’t have the original data?, or that his work cannot be reproduced?
In fact it may be even worse because he may not even know how he processed the original data, because if he had control of the processing he had done, he could reverse engineer to get the original data. I think he hinted at that in one of the leaked e-mails. Perhaps Harry (from the leaked files) is right and the processing code is such a mis-mash that no one knows how or why the data was processed by Jones.
Therefore, it is also possible that even Jones could not reproduce his own results if the original data was found.
From SMHI homepage (Google tranlation)
3.2 The Licensee owns no right to use the data or products provided under this agreement for commercial purposes and not for development or production of meteorological, hydrological and oceanographic value added-value services. The licensee does not own nor authorized to redistribute, sell, assign or otherwise transfer data products or documentation without further processing to third parties unless the parties have received written permission from SMHI.
4th Privacy
4.1 The licensee is not entitled to publish, communicate, link to or otherwise disseminate the contents of the data and / or products obtained in accordance with this Agreement to any third party.
5.1 SMHI guarantee, if not otherwise specified, the data and / or products
delivered under this Agreement has been the usual quality control. SMHI
does not guarantee the accuracy of the information provided, the data represent or
they can be used for that purpose the user intends.