Slashdot Mirror
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.
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.