IGNORE the unwarranted claims that hacked emails from the University of East Anglia (UEA) in the UK expose human-made climate change as a conspiracy. Away from those headlines, an equally intense battle is taking place over access to the data showing global warming is real.
It reached a peak earlier this year, when the UEA’s Climatic Research Unit (CRU) turned down freedom of information (FOI) requests for its temperature records. Last week, the UK’s Met Office attempted to quell the growing anger at its lack of openness by “releasing” data from 1700 weather stations around the world. The move was a token gesture. The Met Office has admitted to New Scientist that those figures were already publicly available through the World Meteorological Organization.
Much data remains under lock and key. It is tied up in confidentiality agreements with the governments that provided it. The Met Office and the UK government say they are now seeking permission to publish it. What they have not yet publicly revealed is that under a confidentiality agreement between the Met Office and the UK’s Natural Environment Research Council, a portion of the UK’s own temperature measurements is only made available to “bona fide academic researchers working on agreed NERC-endorsed scientific programmes”. Why? So that the data can be sold privately. “We have to offset our costs for the benefit of the taxpayer, so we balance that against freedom of access,” says David Britton, a spokesman for the Met Office.
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Government agencies are not alone in seeking to defend their hard-earned data against prying eyes. The hacked CRU emails reveal years of correspondence between a handful of climate scientists on how to respond to a growing number of FOI requests (see “Declare or defend?”). Many came from Canadian mathematician Steve McIntyre.
In 2003, after a career trading shares in mining companies, McIntyre started taking an interest in climate change. He began by asking climate historian Michael Mann, now at Penn State University in University Park, for the 1000 years’ worth of data behind his famous “hockey stick” graph, which shows that the warming in the 20th century is unprecedented. After eventually obtaining most of Mann’s data – much of which originally came from Keith Briffa at the CRU – McIntyre turned his attention to other CRU data sets, notably an archive of global temperatures assembled from 150 years of thermometer records by CRU director, Phil Jones.
Through 2008, as the FOI data demands escalated, so did frustration among the climate scientists. In one email, Ben Santer, a CRU alumnus now at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, wrote: “I believe that our community should no longer tolerate the behaviour of Mr McIntyre and his cronies.” Others disagreed, including former CRU director Tom Wigley, who urged Santer to be open with his data. “The benefits to the community would be truly immense,” he wrote in December 2008. Jones, however, clearly felt under attack. When New Scientist contacted him about the data wars in July this year, he said: “McIntyre has no interest in deriving his own global temperature series. He just wants to pick holes in those that do. I’m getting pretty fed up with this. It is just time-wasting.”
At stake here is the principle that scientific findings are only valid if they can be replicated – which in turn requires sharing data. And not just with friends. McIntyre told New Scientist: “There is an unseemliness about scientists willingly providing data to their friends and resisting the provision of data to people who are perceived as critics.”
Judith Curry, an atmospheric scientist at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta, agrees that ignoring sceptics is inappropriate. “Einstein didn’t start his career at Princeton, but at a post office,” she says. “Scientists claim they would never get any research done if they had to continuously respond to sceptics. The counter to that argument is to make all of your data, meta-data and code, openly available. Doing this would keep molehills from growing into mountains.”
“Make all of your data openly available, to keep molehills from growing into mountains”
Mann seems to have taken this advice of late. “He has made a concerted effort to place his materials online,” says McIntyre. Like other recent battles over official databases – from paedophile registers to school league tables – it seems those demanding the freedom of information are winning the war over climate data.
Read more: New Scientist’s full coverage on the latest Copenhagen and climate change news
Declare or defend?
A telling email episode in April 2007 shows how interactions between scientists and their critics spun out of control because the scientists mistook their critics for wreckers with no rights to data, while the critics took an aversion to scrutiny as a sign of fraud.
In the exchanges, Michael Mann of Penn State University in University Park, Phil Jones, the director of the UK’s Climatic Research Unit (CRU), and Kevin Trenberth of the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado, discuss freedom of information requests from Douglas Keenan, a financial statistician , for the location of Chinese temperature readings used in a paper co-authored by Jones 17 years before. Mann advised: “This crowd of charlatans… look for one little thing they can say is wrong, and thus generalize that the science is entirely compromised… Best thing is to ignore them completely.” Trenberth disagreed: “I don’t think you can ignore it. The response should try to somehow label these guys [as] lazy and incompetent.”
Keenan won his FOI request and said it showed the data was flawed, because some of the stations had been moved by the Chinese scientists who ran them. He said Jones’s reluctance to share the data was evidence of fraud. Tom Wigley, director of the CRU when the original paper was published, emailed Jones saying it would have been easier to admit the data’s shortcomings. “Why, why, why did you not simply say this right at the start?”
