User:Tillman/CRU climate data problems2

Title needs work!!

DRAFT Criticism of CRU climate data-release policies, and climate data treatment

 * Also see: Climatic Research Unit documents

[to be revised to include statements at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climatic_Research_Unit_email_controversy#Parliament]

Add info and cites to Climate data spat intensifies and McIntyre versus Jones: climate data row escalates, 2009 Nature articles by Olive Heffernan

"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," wrote John Nielsen-Gammon, a climatology professor] at Texas A&M.

Roger 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. McIntyre asked for reconsideraton. He was rejected again, this time by the UK Met Office, which said that "Some of the information was provided to Professor Jones on the strict understanding by the data providers that this station data must not be publicly released and it cannot be determined which countries or stations data were given in confidence as records were not kept." 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 FOIA 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 Roger Pielke Jr., who is also an academic, filed a request for the same data. He was rejected, too.

In August 2009, the CRU posted the following notice on its website:

"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.""

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

Peter Webster, a meteorologist at the Georgia Institute of Technology, is apparently the only outside scientist to date who has been given access to the CRU data sought by McIntyre, McKitrick, Pielke Jr., and others. Jones and his CRU colleagues used statistical methods to adjust the historic temperature record, using an approach called "homogenization." According to Der Spiegel, Phil Jones admitted "he had deleted his notes on how he performed the homogenization. This means that it is not possible to reconstruct how the raw data turned into his temperature curve."

For Peter Webster, this is "one of the biggest sins" a scientist can commit. "It's as if a chef was no longer able to cook his dishes because he lost the recipes," Webster told Der Spiegel. "To be honest, I'm shocked by the sloppy documentation."

Webster has spent several months examining the data he got from CRU. For example, it has been known for some time that there are noticeable jumps in ocean temperature readings. The reason is that, beginning in the 1940s, sea surface temperatures were no longer measured in buckets filled with seawater, but at the intake valves for the water used to cool ship engines.

When he analyzed Jones's data, Webster discovered similar jumps in temperature -- but on land. "Water buckets can't explain this," Webster said.

The Jones team attributes another sudden jump in temperature readings to the decline in air pollution since the 1970s as a result of stricter emission standards. Particulates suspended in the air block solar radiation, so that temperatures rise when the air gets cleaner. Air pollution in the South has always been much lower than in the North, because, as Webster explains, "there is less land and therefore less industry in the Southern Hemisphere." However, according to the CRU, the temperature increase in the South is just as strong as it is in the North.

Webster doesn't believe that inconsistencies like these will invalidate the Jones data altogether. "But we would like to know, of course, what's behind all of these phenomena." If natural causes account for some of the recent rise in temperatures, this would decrease the share of human-caused global warming.