User:Tillman/CRU climate data problems

CRU climate data-discard controversy
According to The Times, the CRU has discarded much of the raw temperature data which it had  gathered from weather stations around the world, and then adjusted to take account of variables in the way they were collected. The original data, stored on paper and magnetic tape, were discarded "to save space" when the CRU moved to a new building in the 1980s. This means that "other academics are not able to check basic calculations said to show a long-term rise in temperature over the past 150 years," the Times reported. The CRU was forced to reveal the losses following requests for the data under the UK Freedom of Information Act (FOIA).

The CRU responded to the Times article with this statement:

"No data has been lost. The collection of land surface air temperature data by the Climatic Research Unit goes back to a time when there was insufficient computing data storage capacity to retain all versions of data records on computer - unlike today when all versions may be kept thanks to greater storage capacity. ... Much of the earlier data exists in World Weather Records volumes (published by the Smithsonian Library) and, of course, original data will still be available from the appropriate national meteorological services."

In an earlier statement, then-CRU director Phil Jones disputed charges of data deletion from others, stating that:

"The research unit has deleted less than 5 percent of its original station data from its database because the stations had several discontinuities or were affected by urbanization trends. When you're looking at climate data, you don't want stations that are showing urban warming trends, so we've taken them out. Most of the stations for which data was removed are located in areas where there were already dense monitoring networks. We rarely removed a station in a data-sparse region of the world."

Still earlier, in August 2009, the CRU posted the following notice on its website:, apparently in response to Roger Pielke Jr.'s FOIA request

"We are not in a position to supply data for a particular country not covered by the example agreements referred to earlier, as we have never had sufficient resources to keep track of the exact source of each individual monthly value. Since the 1980s, we have merged the data we have received into existing series or begun new ones, so it is impossible to say if all stations within a particular country or if all of an individual record should be freely available. Data storage availability in the 1980s meant that we were not able to keep the multiple sources for some sites, only the station series after adjustment for homogeneity issues. We, therefore, do not hold the original raw data but only the value-added (i.e. quality controlled and homogenized) data.""

Pielke Jr. responded to this statement, "“The CRU is basically saying, ‘Trust us’. So much for settling questions and resolving debates with science.”

John Nielsen-Gammon,  a climatology professor at Texas A&M, previously uninvolved with the CRU controversy, had this to ssay:

"There was nothing unethical about CRU throwing away the raw temperature data. This is because CRU IS NOT THE ARCHIVAL SITE FOR THE RAW TEMPERATURE DATA. The individual nations that collected the weather observations are responsible for their archival. If things proceeded as they normally do, CRU wrote to Burundi, say, and requested copies of their climate of their climate observations. Someone in Burundi made them a magnetic tape or Xerox copies of the data and sent it to CRU. CRU processed the data and got it in the form they wanted. Having no need for the copies of the original data anymore, they tossed them. ... In summary, there's no evidence that they destroyed data. They destroyed extra copies of data that they didn't need anymore. The originals, as far as we know, were and are in other hands.""

"Any regular reader of Climate Audit knows that McIntyre and his allies have struggled for years to pry information out of Phil Jones and his group, and that Jones has resisted at every turn." -- from an online column by John Nielsen-Gammon, a climatology professor at Texas A&M.

Pielke, Jr. describes what he calls the "bizarre contortions" CRU went through to avoid releasing its climate data to Steve McIntyre. CRU first told McIntyre that he couldn't have the data because he was not an academic. His colleague Ross McKitrick, an economist at the University of Guelph, then asked for the data. He was turned down, too.

Faced with a growing number of FOI requests, Jones refused them all, saying that there were confidentiality agreements regarding the data between CRU and the nations that supplied the data. McIntyre’s blog readers then requested those agreements, country by country, but only a handful turned out to exist, mainly from Third World countries and written in very vague language. Then Pielke Jr., who is also an academic, filed a request for the same data. CRU's response rejecting Pielke's (and similar) requests is quoted above, and was later reported by The Times, the first MSM account of the CRU climate data-discard controversy. ,