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Temperature Data Wants To Be Free
An anonymous reader writes "The UK's Met Office Hadley Centre and University of East Anglia have been refusing access to the data used for their global climate averages and scientific studies. A copy of the data has leaked, and attempts continue to accomplish the release of the data by whoever maintains it. Excuses have included confidentiality agreements which cannot be verified because no records were kept, mention of the source has been removed from the Met Office web site, and IPCC records were destroyed."
Data from a particular NERC (UK Research Council) project I'm involved with are allowed to be kept by the researchers for a certain amount of time (18 months, maybe?) but then have to be released to the BADC: http://badc.nerc.ac.uk/home/index.html - this gives the researchers time to do some analysis and get some papers out on all the hard work they've done, but obliges them to release the data to the community.
Some of the BADC data sets are restricted to non-commercial use only, so you need to flash your 'Academic Investigator' magic card at them to get it. These guys keep good metadata and license agreements and all that stuff. There's even some datasets from CRU, unrestricted (registration required).
The troll from ClimateAudit not being able to get free access to the source data isn't the same as there not being data. No one will give him data unless they have to because he dishonestly misrepresents it. And why the hell the UK government should spend ANY UK taxpayers money to even consider his request is beyond me. He's not British.
I would also note that the owner of one of the two sites mentioned in your story (Anthony Watts) has just employed the DMCA to have a video criticizing his Surface Stations project pulled from Youtube.
What's missing here are some additional context facts; recognizing that the data are not UK data per se. Data from many countries has been collected and collated at the CRU (Univ. of East Anglia) and which feeds into some of the UK Met Office work. Some of this data were collected under the arrangement that the source data were not to be made public because of commercial or other interests. Outside of the USA this is quite common -- that national meteorological services (tasked with maintaining a national observing system and archive) treat their data as a commercial product -- and so they will not release it to just anyone. The fact that I and others think this is wrong and inhibits science is not the issue, the reality is that many countries are not willing to freely release their data. So the CRU and Met Office are between the rock and a hard place; publicize the data and risk ruining their relationships with the data sources, or hold onto the data so that they can keep the data stream flowing and be able to produce the valuable derivative products.
We're currently in a very CO2-starved climate, if we go through the geological record. Plant life seems optimised (evolution does that) for much higher CO2-levels, and we've had more than a magnitude higher levels without the earth having gone into any self-feedback loops before.
Peer-reviewed source for the above, see fig 8: http://www.geocraft.com/WVFossils/Reference_Docs/Geocarb_III-Berner.pdf
it's in my head
You're completely wrong. We have excellent data on global climate back about 850ky, good data back to 60mya, and some data back as far as bya. There is something unusual about the climate today.
The idea that there is a stable weather utopia circa 1988 is CRAZY, and you're the one bringing it up as a straw man. Current models account for solar cycles (Milankovitch and others)--- currently, the sun is currently as a period of low output, actually, based on sunspot activity. These are well understood cycles. In spite of that, we have an overall trend of global warming. When you try to account for that data, the best fit to that data is easily the increased CO2 in the atmosphere.
Why did you people moderate this as insightful? Steve McIntyre has shown in the past how various erroneous statistical analysis of climate related data has been dishonestly misrepresented by those in the "warmist" camp themselves. I'm thinking of the infamous Mann hockey stick, as well as various offerings from James Hansen and recently Steig et al. Unlike a lot of Climate Scientists (and the met office itself), McIntyre publishes in full his code, data and methods. I hardly think he can be reasonably described as a troll, unlike the poster above.
You really don't get it.
What effect does diffusion in ice cores cause? It flattens the data-- it causes it to move to average. This means that the real signal would be stronger then that recorded if this is a problem. Which actually just makes the ice core conclusions stronger. Another check on this is using other methods and seeing if the agree; and these other methods, such as isotope ones, support the ice core evidence.
On ocean cycles: You realize that global temperature controls ocean cycles, right? So you're agreeing with me?
It's clear you don't really understand the science; both of your citations can't even be used as evidence to support your claim that there isn't data. It's also clear that assumptions are being tested and as such the conclusions that can be reached are stronger. Which is exactly what you'd expect if it's a real trend.
The problem appears to be that the data itself was collected and supplied by various combinations of public and private entities throughout the world, and collectively released under a non-free license under which researchers aren't able to publically redistribute the data set. The British government also must respect the contract under which it obtained the data set. Now, you can argue that the data should be free in the first place, or that there should be no copyright law for data, or that there is a public interest in violating copyright law and the contractual obligations if you believe that this is a national security issue, etc.
Unfortunately the conspiracy theorists see this lack of public data as further evidence of the big conspiracy. Yes, it would be better if the complete data set were public domain. No, the data set being distributed under a less permissive license does not mean that global warming is not happening.
It should be noted that this is not a unique case - there are many instances where researchers at universities are given access to commercial or otherwise non-public-domain data sets which they use in their research and are unable to legally reproduce. Does this mean their research isn't following the scientific method? Not really - as long as other researchers are able to access the data set and reproduce the research, then it is science. The scientific method doesn't require that everyone in the world is able to reproduce your experiments, although it certainly does help.
There are the type of people you describe on both sides of the climate debate.
From his blog: "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 isnâ(TM)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."
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