Climate sceptic wins landmark data victory ‘for price of a stamp’
Belfast ecologist forced to hand over tree-ring data describes order from information commission as a ‘staggering injustice’
by Fred Pearce The Guardian, Tuesday 20 April 2010
The Queen’s University of Belfast, Northern Ireland, must hand over 40 years’ worth of data on 7,000 years of Irish tree rings. Photograph: Ron Sachs / Rex Features/Rex Features
An arch-critic of climate scientists has won a major victory in his campaign to win access to British university data that could reveal details of Europe’s past climate.
In a landmark ruling, the UK Information Commissioner’s Office has ruled that Queen’s University Belfast must hand over data obtained during 40 years of research into 7,000 years of Irish tree rings to a City banker and part-time climate analyst, Doug Keenan.
This week, the Belfast ecologist who collected most of the data, Professor Mike Baillie, described the ruling as “a staggering injustice … We are the ones who trudged miles over bogs and fields carrying chain saws. We prepared the samples and – using quite a lot of expertise and judgment – we measured the ring patterns. Each ring pattern therefore has strong claims to be our copyright. Now, for the price of a stamp, Keenan feels he is entitled to be given all this data.”
Keenan revealed this week that he is launching a new assault. On Monday, he demanded the university also hand over emails that could reveal a three-year conspiracy to block his data request.
Keenan has become notorious for pursuing a series of vitriolic disputes with British academics over climate data. Two years ago, he accused Phil Jones of the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia of “fraud” over his analysis of data from weather stations in China. Jones recently conceded he may have to revise the paper concerned.
The latest ruling comes from Graham Smith, deputy information commissioner, who in January said information requests to CRU from climate sceptics were “not dealt with as they should have been under the legislation.” In the Belfast case, as well as insisting the university hand over the data, Smith has accused the university authorities of “a number of procedural breaches.”
The case goes back to April 2007, when Keenan asked Queen’s University for all data from tree-ring studies by Baillie and others. The data covers more than 7,000 years. They contain upwards of 1m measurements from 11,000 tree samples, mostly of oak. The university turned down Keenan’s request, citing a range of exemptions allowed under both the Freedom of Information Act and the European Union’s environmental information regulations. Keenan appealed to the information commissioner.
more at the Guardian
It will be interesting to see what independent analysis shows.
How can someone at such a high position at a university not even have a basic understanding of IP law?
” Professor Mike Baillie, described the ruling as “a staggering injustice … We are the ones who trudged miles over bogs and fields carrying chain saws. We prepared the samples and – using quite a lot of expertise and judgment – we measured the ring patterns. Each ring pattern therefore has strong claims to be our copyright. Now, for the price of a stamp, Keenan feels he is entitled to be given all this data.”
Prof. Baillie- the UK taxpayer paid you to do this work in the first place. ITS OUR DATA- NOT YOURS
And come to that, who do think paid for your university education, grants etc which got you to the position you now hold.
Yeah thats right. The UK taxpayer.
Who the hell do you boffins think you are? You work for us.
And dont you ever, ever forget it.
My taxes paid for this guy to trudge through the bogs – more likely it was his assistants – and as his benefactor I want all his data made public, so that it can be independently examined to see if any interpretations made using it are correct.
If Baillie has nothing to hide, why would he have gone through this charade? If he does, then………………….
I have a passionate hatred for snotty, arrogant bureaucrats and academics who believe the world should respect them, when they clearly have done little or nothing to earn that respect.
Keenan is just a name to us. If it were not Keenan then it would be someone else. What has he done improperly?
Instead, we can and should look at this matter w/o considering fairness or intellectual property, copyright, etc. Or whether Baillie trudged across bogs.
Look at it only as a legal ruling. The consequence of a law.
Baillie doesn’t like the consequences of a law. Has anyone else ever felt that way?
And he didn’t expect this outcome as he did his work and lived his life. Thus a law had unexpected consequences.
Have I ever heard that before? Some laws have unexpected consequences?
Baillie’s complaint is about a ruling. And if it has been applied in error then he and the university should seek remedy. And the university does seem to be appealing.
Dave Dardinger (10:56:16) :
Re Citation indices
Usually a high index indicates a good paper.
I have a feeling that a higher index could be achieved by writing the worst paper that one could get published.
Not only would that be cited by other researchers in the field, it would pick up a heap from others who didn’t need to cite it directly but did to show that they knew it was bad.
From the Guardian article:
Fairness, intellectual property, and copyright dont enter into it.
The law is quite clear.
Data held by publically funded bodies can be requested by anyone and cannot be refused simply because the data controller doesnt want to comply.
Fairness? intellectual property? copywrite ?
Dear God.
UK universitys are funded by the taxpayer. If the boss wants to see the books, you show them.
Dammit its just tree rings!
Just to clear up about the “miles of bog”; the trees would have been mechanically dredged up a part of the peat extraction process. The valuable peat either being used as a base for peat compost or fuel, the small amount of trees were usually left to the side in a pile. Sawing through “bog oak” is very very tough on a saw, and for this reason they were traditionally left alone.
What kind of scientist hides his data?
The Phil Jones-Mike Mann-Doug Keenan kind.
These guys deserve jail time.
Well-l-l… Somehow I conceive of Doug Keenan as more of a “one-off”.
Think the heretical, litigious Giles “More weight!” Corey in the Crucible.
This reminds me of a guy (I can think of other ways to describe him but [self-snip]) I knew – he was let go by his employer and decided he would take (steal) all the software he had written when he left. By doing so, he broke all sorts of things and wound up losing his severance package over it – he’s lucky that’s all that happened to him.
The moral of the story… when it’s on your employer’s time and dime, there is no such thing as copyright.
@Scientistfortruth
I went out to the Guardian website and read the first couple hundred comments. There are some snarky ones, but any that I would consider abusive have been removed. On the plus side the comments seem to be fairly evenly split between for the data release and against.
I think people are starting to realize the damage that has been done to so called climate science by climategate, they are realizing that the data needs to be open and available to prevent even the slightest taint.
I thought Baillie was one of the polite, well-mannered ones from the Queens-team. I sent to his colleague, David Brown, in 1975 for some tree ring data, thinking to spin a tale set in a Medieval city. My request was elaborately formal, explaining in considerable detail why I wanted authentic climate data. His response:
I managed, after several e-mail exchanges, to pry some information out of him about sub-fossil oaks, which was useful – but no graphs or real data, and his answers were always curt and dismissive. I got the same treatment from big shots at Lamont Observatory and the Laboratory of Tree Ring Research at University of Arizona, who seem to have a vested interest in protecting “their property”. Others, like Jeff Dean, a dendroarchaeologist there, were extraordinary.
I respect Doug Keenan, as well as Eschenbach, McIntyre and Watts – and anybody else who have persisted with their attempts, despite the brush-offs.
Parsons 15:43:09
I miss your point. What is a one-off?
Giles Corey was a suspicious man. But so what? When accused he defies the witchcraft tribunal and refuses to plead guilty or not guilty despite torture. How was that bad?
And again. What did Keenan do improperly? I intended to indicate that Keenan was not important in the matter. It could have been anyone who asked for the data.
To me the law and the acts of Baillie and the university are the only concern. And until they exhaust all appeals they should stick to their beliefs even if others think they are wrong.
Of course, as the Tree rings are Irish….they might be inside out!
Facts cannot be copyrighted, only creative works can.
Is Prof. Baillie claiming he made all this up?
just curious, is anyone here familiar with Mike Baillie’s publications ?
or with the oft-rumored quirky humor of the Irish ?
kiss the blarney, I’d be saying,
nothing draws a crowd like a good tussle
and the sh*te’s yet to hit the proverbial.
Thanks for posting Doug and if the Guardian “Dogs of War” are out in the commenting section, then it only goes to show how rattled they are! It seems a shame that Monbiot’s original disgust at the CRU, when the emails were first released, seems to have evaporated in the wind!
Congratulations on the result of your endeavours and I am sure we all look forward to reading your research into the ring data.
Fine. Let it be their damn copyright.
But, of course that means that no review is possible and therefore absolutely NO public policy can in any way be based on studies that use this data.
I was astounded at the number of folks in the Guardian comments section who brought up the straw man argument regarding going into a university and taking a desk – because they, the tax payers, own it. It is obvious that these commentators are stating this is wrong, so Keenan cannot have the raw data anymore than he can have a desk. But in so making this argument, they prove Keenan right. No one person or group of persons, can “own” a publicly funded thing to the exclusion of others. No one person can claim the public desk, it belongs to all of us. We have a right to its dimensions, a picture of it, a diagram, and maybe even a list of its contents. But no one can own the desk all by themselves and walk out with it. A taxpayer cannot claim to own the desk anymore than they can claim to own raw data if they got it through public funds and published on the public’s dime. The researchers at the university cannot claim to own the desk anymore than they can claim to own raw data if they got it through public funds. Therefore the main argument being used in the comments section is seriously flawed and even proves the other side.
Unless we chop up the desk and give each citizen of the UK a itsy-witsy-bit of it can’t be shared… and it wouldn’t be a desk anymore… so the desk will have to remain shared property held in trust by the university… although they could sell it and give the citizens a tax refund… nah they’d never consider that.
Data on the other hand is DIGITAL or is on paper and as such IT CAN EASILY BE COPIED. Haven’t they heard of file copying or a photo-copier? I guess not.
The public paid the professor for the work to collect and analyze the data. Cough up the data forthwith. At worst they’d be a marginal fee for photo-copying or a digital media DVD with the data on it.
The power of stamping your foot down and demanding your rights!
Excellent work Doug Keenan!
Now when can we get a copy from yours?
KTWO (16:50:39) :
If I knew what you were talking about I could answer you better. Keenan has done nothing “wrong”. You might debate whether he has a right to the data which apparently is being released to him.
(At least some of) the ring data that Baillie has collected while working on the public dime (using grants, graduate student labor, or even his own on university time) is public property. All of the physical samples – the cores and cross-sections – are like forensic evidence collected in a trial. They don’t belong to the detective who collected them. That doesn’t mean that the public has a right to go into the warehouse, load up the boxes of cross-sections, grab handfulls of cores, etc, and take them home. But (if I see the situation clearly) a private citizen like Keenan does have a right to request the lab analysis of those cores – and probably Baillie’s (or the lab tech’s) graphs of those results.
As badly as Michael Baillie feels about this, these items are a matter of public record, and he has an obligation to hand them over.
A couple of his works from the 1980’s:
http://www.treeringsociety.org/TRBTRR/TRBTRR.htm
Do a word search for “Baillie”.
One final comment on the Keenan case. Taking cores for tree ring analysis can require government permission. I’m guessing that most of the ancient subfossil stuff that Baillie and Co. have harvested comes from parks and preserves, not private land, and that requires a permit.
Here in Colorado, I had a written request turned down to take a few Bristlecone Pine cores because of potential ecological damage that it might do. The State Parks official “dissuaded” me, claiming that I’d need an “EPA damage assessment” that would run into the tens of thousands – and even then he wouldn’t let me do it. University-related researchers harvested there routinely.
If Michaele Baillie carried a chainsaw as he says, it was in order to take cross-sections. In other words he was carting off sizeable chunks of the Emerald Isle subfossil history for study at the University of Belfast. Irreplaceable history. Lost to the public.
I thought the ranger’s case prohibiting me was silly. But by the same Medieval logic… Baillie’s pollardings and gleanings are, in fact, property of the Republic. And if that hadn’t been interpreted as the people of Ireland, maybe they should be queuing up with pitchforks and torches.
“kadaka (10:05:29) :
…over 40 years’ worth of data on 7,000 years of Irish tree rings…
Where did they find trees in Ireland that were 7000 years old? Did they dredge them out of bogs?”
Peat bogs, which Ireland is pretty well famous for, is a great natural preservative.
There are similar instances of trees, Kauri trees, found in swamps in New Zealand that are some 4.5 million years old apparently.