Bishop Hill Who's withholding what from whom?
Mar 7, 2010 Climate: CRU FOI There have been some interesting developments on the subject of which countries are preventing the release of their raw temperature data. You may remember that the Select Committee inquiry into CRU were told that several countries, among them Sweden, Canada and Poland, were refusing to allow him to publish these figures.
Anthony Watts is now reporting a press release by a Swedish pressure group called the Stockholm Initiative, who have obtained the correspondence between Jones and the Swedish Met Office, SMHI. The suggestion is that SMHI weren't in fact preventing release at all, but there has been a very long thread at Climate Audit where several people have disputed this. This posting is my attempt to make sense of it all.
In the weeks after Climategate, Jones wrote a letter to SMHI asking them for permission to release some data:
Given the importance of the global surface temperature series, we would like to make the underpinning data more widely available. CRU therefore requests your permission to release the underlying monthly mean temperature station records we hold - which for some stations go back to the 19th century...
We stress that the data we hold has arisen from multiple sources, and has been recovered over the last 30 years. Subsequent quality control and homogenisation of these data have been carried out. It is therefore highly likely that the version we hold and are requesting permission to distribute will differ from your own current holdings.
What seems clear from this is that what Jones wanted to release
- had not all been derived from SMHI in the first place ("arisen from multiple sources")
- had been adjusted ("quality control and homogenisation").
This clearly concerned SMHI, who refused permission for CRU to publish this adjusted data on the grounds "that the version of the data from the SMHI stations that you hold are likely to differ from the data we hold".
This refusal was then reported to the parliamentary inquiry into CRU. The relevant quote is this one from UEA vice-chancellor Edward Acton:
Professor Acton: Unfortunately, several of these countries impose conditions and say you are not allowed to pass it on, so there has just been an attempt to get these answers. Seven countries have said "No, you cannot", half the countries have not yet answered, Canada and Poland are amongst those who have said, "No you cannot publish it" and also Sweden. Russia is very hesitant. We are under a commercial promise, as it were, not to; we are longing to publish it because what science needs is the most openness.
However, among the papers released by the Stockholm Institute is a more recent letter, [update: dating from after the hearings] in which SMHI object to this characterisation:
It has never been our intention to withhold any data but we feel that it is paramount that data that has undergone, for instance, homogenisation by anyone other than SMHI is not presented as SMHI data. We see no problem with publication of the data set together with a reference stating that the data included in the dataset is based on observations made by SMHI but it has undergone processing made by your research unit. We would also prefer a link to SMHI or to our web site where the original data can be obtained.
Questions are being raised over the probity of the behaviour of Jones and Acton as revealed by these letters and I will try to make sense of these here.
It seems clear to me that Jones does not actually require permission from SMHI to release the adjusted data. This, by his own admission, is different to what SMHI holds and there can therefore be no issues of intellectual property. In this light, the refusal by SMHI looks odd, because it was not their place to prevent release of Jones' adjusted data. The question then becomes whether the UEA statements to the Parliamentary inquiry were reasonable. They indeed had a refusal from the Swedes, but this didn't relate to the data that everyone wanted to see - the raw data as used. We might note that it is not clear from the transcript which data is being discussed by the committee, although the exchange is in the context of a discussion of replication of findings, when the only relevant data is the raw data as used. I would therefore suggest that it was misleading of UEA to present SMHI's refusal as a barrier to making the data public.
Of course, later on, we can see that SMHI's refusual was in fact no such thing anyway. Having being asked for permission to release, SMHI felt they were being asked to endorse Jones' adjusted figures. Quite properly, they refused. It is clear that they had no objection to Jones releasing his adjusted data provided he made it clear that it was just that: adjusted. But to reiterate, this is a red herring. What is required is the raw data as used.
This doesn't look good to me.
Reader Comments (59)
This is crazy - if we are given "fiddled with" data we produce fiddled results. That is duplication. What is required is raw data and a new fiddler to produce independent results to be used for comparison. Anything else is absurd.
If the raw data that the fiddled data sprang from are missing then the entire effort is garbage and it's time for a do-over.
I just telephoned Edward Acton's office at UEA. The most they would let me do was leave a message. My message explained that the Swedish Meteorological and Hydrological Institute was saying that Acton made untrue statements to the parliamentary Committee and that by doing so Acton was bringing the "climate research community" (to quote from the SMHI letters) into disrepute. It also explained that this was getting a great deal of attention on blogs over the weekend, and that some response was therefore sought.
(I telephoned Marcus Flarup at SMHI too. We talked only briefly, as he was about to go to a meeting.)
'Course, some people are just shit-stirrers. Do you know any, Douglas J bloody Keenan?
Seems like PJ's letter was built to provoke a "no you can't" response. The Swedes rightly don't want any of CRU's failure stink attached to them.
One issue facing any climate researcher is the sheer number of National Met Centers to deal with to obtain original, trusted, un-messed-with climate data. NCDC, GISS, and CRU have all taken themselves out of the running to collect, maintain, and provide it on a global basis. I hate to invoke the UN for this sort of thing, but do you suppose the WMO could be trusted to hold, update, and provide climate data?
Prof Jones's Mum—I am shocked and appalled at such language from a lady of your caliber!
My earlier comments suggested that this is all just due to miscommunication. I have now received the following e-mail, which confirms that.
I also received a telephone call from someone in UEA's Vice Chancellor's office, which said much the same thing.
Your Eminence—I have been having difficulty e-mailing you. Instead I get this message from the postmaster: "Delivery to the following recipients has been delayed". In one case, I got "Unable to deliver message to the following recipients, due to being unable to connect successfully to the destination mail server".
Doug
Thanks, I'm trying to fix it with my ISP.
Michael Cejnar "On a related note - has anyone noted Prof Acton's statement that CRU has only 3 F/T employees? What the ...."
Michael - I noticed this. I think Acton chose his words extremely carefully, so that they were "not incorrect" although they were rather far from painting a completely truthful picture. His actual words (according to the Select Committee transcript) were "May I point out, Chairman, that this is a very small unit. There are three fulltime members of academic staff within it (etc etc)".
As I posted elsewhere in His Grace's site:
According to the UAE CRU website, the CRU has:
* An acting director
[a professor - presumably also a fulltime member of academic staff]
* A deputy director
[a professor - presumably also a fulltime member of academic staff]
* A research manager and senior research associate (with a doctorate)
* Three "academic staff"
* Six research staff (four with doctorates)
* Eleven associate fellows (all with doctorates)
* Four support staff, one of them a "research administrator" holding a doctorate.
This is a much more substantial operation than the picture conjured up by Acton of just three harrassed academics inundated by a deluge of vexatious FOI requests.
Mark C,
No.
Re Staffing. There is also a poor b*****d called Mike Salmon who is the IT Manager. As one myself in a previous existence, he has my heartfelt sympathy. Either he got sold a pup when he took the job or he really really likes a good challenge. What we know of CRU's IT shop (eg from the Harry_Read_me files) is that it is pretty much chaotic...especially when it comes to that pesky stuff like data.
Re Funding: Does expenditure on research grants ever get accounted for and audited? PJ has been given 12 million smackers over the years. Is there any scrutiny to check what it was spent on....coz if there were only three of them, that's 4 Very Big Ones each.
Just wondered