CRUTEM3 data release (except Poland)
The entire CRUTEM3 database of station temperature measurements has just been released. This comes after a multi-year process to get permissions from individual National Weather Services to allow the passing on of data to third parties and from a ruling from the UK ICO. All the NWSs have now either agreed or not responded (except for Poland which specifically refused). Since the Polish data is a such a small fraction of the globe (and there are a few Polish stations in any case via RBSC or GCOS), this doesn’t make much difference to hemispheric means or regional climate. These permissions were obtained with help from the UK Met Office (who have also placed the station data on their website in a slightly different format) and whose FAQ is quite informative.
This dataset has occasionally come up in blogospheric discussions.
Tim Jones:
July 27th, 2011 at 1:46 PM
Wonderful! Always nice to have something to stand on when you do this sort of thing:
Justice denied
http://www.sltrib.com/sltrib/opinion/52265321-82/dechristopher-federal-prison-drilling.html.csp
Tim Jones
Austin, Texas
where we’re becoming more familiar with warmth than we care to. I like LIKE this format!
Ben Lawson:
July 27th, 2011 at 2:29 PM
Oh, those noisy bloggers will simply move the pea. It will be interesting to watch the flurry of “look here! Oh, never mind.” posts though.
David Miller:
July 27th, 2011 at 2:48 PM
So should we now expect a polite ‘thank you’ and independent verification of mainstream results from the ‘auditors’ ??
Funny how cynical people like me think no matter how much data and how much code is released it will never quiet the contrarians.
Still, I must give a hearty ‘attaboy to all involved; it couldn’t have been easy tracking down all the parties involved.
Gary Herstein:
July 27th, 2011 at 3:10 PM
“This dataset has occasionally come up in blogospheric discussions.”
Realclimate has just reset the bar for euphemism to somewhere on the far side of Jupiter …
J Bowers:
July 27th, 2011 at 3:12 PM
Oh good. I guess we can expect a zillion temp reconstructions from those so desparate to get their hands on it. Can’t we? I can just see the thousands of thanks sent to Phil Jones and CRU for all the hard work….
Neven:
July 27th, 2011 at 3:16 PM
Wolne danych!!!
Leo G:
July 27th, 2011 at 3:37 PM
Well done! I’m pretty sure that there will still be those that claim the data is fudged. But in reality, for the sceptic side, IMO, this fight was over a couple of years ago when some prominent sceptics actually did do their own analyses and came up with basically the same answers.
But still, this is a very big step in hopefully calming things down a bit, so that we the people can actually get going on making some decisions.
Thanx to all who were involved in this!
:)
Ernst K:
July 27th, 2011 at 5:07 PM
BBC article: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-14315747
From the article:
“And this process will carry on until the climate science community starts behaving like proper scientists”, Jonathan Jones (http://users.ox.ac.uk/~jajones/).
[edit - keep it substantive please]
J Bowers:
July 27th, 2011 at 6:19 PM
Ernst K, Phil Jones has been trying to get the data made available since before Climategate.
August 2009.
Robert Murphy:
July 27th, 2011 at 6:38 PM
This is obviously unpossible. It’s well known that Phil Jones personally destroyed all the raw temp data all over the world, via his data ray gun. I read it on a blog so it must be true.
Benjamin:
July 27th, 2011 at 7:24 PM
From what i understand, they didnt release it because they wanted to, but because it was imposed to them no June 23rd by the Information Commissioner after a FOI request.
“This comes after a multi-year process to get permissions from individual National Weather Services to allow the passing on of data to third parties and from a ruling from the UK ICO”
The ruling from UK ICO clearly states that permission by individual countries doesn’t matter, data must be made public.
And, on that ground, i don’t understand why Poland data wasn’t released… the ruling clearly states that the confidentiality agreements don’t hold.
“As has been noted in relation to the consideration of the other exceptions, there is very limited evidence available to the Commissioner from prior to, or subsequent to, the Met Office/UEA consultation exercise of the reasons why any of the NMSs might not consent to the disclosure of the information that they supplied to UEA. He is consequently not satisfied that it is more probable than not that disclosure would adversely affect the interests of the information providers and that regulation 12(5)(f) is engaged.”
“The Commissioner requires the public authority to take the following steps to ensure compliance with the Act:
disclose all of the information contained in dataset A and dataset B to the complainant.”
If Poland data is included in dataset and/or dataset B, it must be made public, even if it has negligible influence on global temperature, it’s a matter of principle.
[Response: There are two separate issues here. The FOI request and ICO ruling was for a specific subset which was for near-tropical data. So that wouldn't involve Poland. The full data set linked to here is not in direct response to the FOI requests. Any subsequent FOI for the Polish data would have to be assessed again - and if the Polish NWS has made it clear that release would have direct consequences, the ICO might make a different conclusion (since his ruling was not against confidential data in principle, but on the lack of specified consequences). - gavin]
Gary Herstein:
July 27th, 2011 at 7:53 PM
I am not sure whether it qualifies as irony, but it is at least interesting to me that “Ernst K” would appeal to the BBC to support his thesis in #8 above, given how thoroughly excoriated the BBC has been for its alse balance in science and climate change reporting. See, for example, http://thinkprogress.org/romm/2011/07/22/275400/bbc-false-balance-climate-change/ for links and commentary.
[Response: Ernst K.'s comment (edited) was in the opposite sense of what you assume. - gavin]
Tony Lynch:
July 27th, 2011 at 8:43 PM
Would it be wildly off the mark to think the Polish refusal has anything to do with protecting the denialism of Vaclav Klaus, President of the Czech Republic and current President of the European Union?
Rattus Norvegicus:
July 27th, 2011 at 10:04 PM
Tony,
Yes.
dhogaza:
July 27th, 2011 at 11:34 PM
Benjamin:
Poland obviously doesn’t agree. Do you think that clap-trap from UK ICO is going to be binding on Poland???
Really?
Contracts are double-edged, the UK can’t unilaterally say “hey, Poland is wrong”.
Hopefully some notion of rule of law still applies, though you are strongly asserting that it doesn’t.
R. Gates:
July 27th, 2011 at 11:58 PM
To Leo G. #7:
Wish it were simply a matter of proof to change minds. It is a matter of true belief, and most will never change…sadly enough.
Edward Greisch:
July 28th, 2011 at 12:59 AM
Congratulations to CRU on the great effort to release the data. The CRUTEM3 data release should solve all of those problems with people complaining about that data being withheld. Just like all of the evidence should prove to everybody that RC is right. But I think that the other commenters are correct in saying that the same denialists will still be denialists.
In my efforts to find out why, I am reading “The Authoritarians” by Bob Altemeyer. The free book is at: http://home.cc.umanitoba.ca/~altemey/
Professor Altemeyer says that authoritarian followers have extremely compartmentalized minds. They never check for contradictions and they believe the latest thing their leader said. There is very little hope of changing them, although a university education helps a little.
Paul D:
July 28th, 2011 at 3:10 AM
Benjamin@11 stated:
“The ruling from UK ICO clearly states that permission by individual countries doesn’t matter, data must be made public.”
Would this happen in a world where all endeavours were commercially run and data had a price??
There seems to be a lot of politically confused people around these days, they can’t decide whether they are free marketeers or card carrying commies.
Benjamin@11 stated:
“If Poland data is included in dataset and/or dataset B, it must be made public, even if it has negligible influence on global temperature, it’s a matter of principle.”
So the whole business wasn’t about science, it was about being a pain in the back side. Which has long term consequences.
geolog:
July 28th, 2011 at 3:37 AM
Tony,
I’m from Poland. Polish decision has nothing to do with Klaus, or with stubborn denialism of both Polish major political parties which is a fact. The Polish national weather service IMGW has always seen all meteorological data as a business asset that should be tightly protected. Although IMGW is a state-owned institution receiving public funding, Polish public has no free access to current or archive station data. Actually, this is ridiculous because everyone can get the data from weather.com, GHCN or many other sites anyway thanks to WMO agreements. Even images from meteorological radars are published in Poland with 4-hour delay, unless official hydrological alerts are issued – a situation unseen in other countries in the region. But if Poland is presented in the media as the only opposing country – what should happen – I believe it would eventually let the data out.
[Response: This sounds by far the most likely explanation. It was (and remains apparently) the commercialization of scientific information that is the barrier here. - gavin]
hat_eater:
July 28th, 2011 at 3:54 AM
It’s only a guess, but perhaps Polish NWO’a refusal to hand over the data might have something to do with this. It it is indeed so, that attitude is counterproductive, if you ask me (and I’m Polish). The emission reduction agreement has to consider the fact that Poland, having vast coal reserves, relies on coal for energy generation and really cannot afford to switch to other energy sources quickly, but the negotiations won’t be helped by a display of ill will.
Martin Vermeer:
July 28th, 2011 at 5:08 AM
dhogaza #15, it is the Information Commissioner of Airstrip One who has unilaterally revoked Trinidad and Tobago Met Office property rights. So it is not clear what rule of law you are referring to. Certainly not international IPR law. Here’s to hoping this has consequences, as any legalized theft should.
J Bowers:
July 28th, 2011 at 5:54 AM
Benjamin — “From what i understand, they didnt release it because they wanted to, but because it was imposed to them no June 23rd by the Information Commissioner after a FOI request.”
Phil Jones clearly states in the interview of August, 2009, that he was working on getting the data released, but in a systematic way. If you go to the webpage RC links to, you can see the data released in a systematic way. Where’s the inconsistency? What’s the issue? He followed through on what he said. But if I were you, I’d be organising a whipround to pay McIntyre to do that reconstruction and see if he follows through on his word.
Didactylos:
July 28th, 2011 at 6:28 AM
It must be soul-destroying dealing with all that bureaucracy and inconsistent nonsense. I really feel for Phil Jones, getting all the blame, all the work, and being the scapegoat for every bureaucrat covering their behind.
The ICO ruling is positively Byzantine. It actually bases its ruling on information that was not available at the time of the original decision! If this leads to NMSs withholding information in the future, then all the whole silly exercise will have achieved is the loss of valuable data.
The ICO should certainly have concluded that the original decision was correct, even if circumstances have changed now. But no, they had to be mean. How petty of them!
Didactylos:
July 28th, 2011 at 6:41 AM
I don’t think there will be fallout from Trinidad and Tobago. But what about all those other NMSs that simply didn’t respond?
The ICO may be technically right in that it is enough to gain the consent of a representative sample of NMSs, but in my opinion the ICO failed to properly account for the potential withholding of future data.
Martin Vermeer:
July 28th, 2011 at 7:05 AM
Didactylos, I can see in my mind’s eye your eyes rolling… yes this is Hitchhiker’s Guide bad. The real badness IMO is not the consequences for future data availability — that’s way too instrumentally thought. No, it’s what this does to respect for the law internationally, which is already at a low, and now, Britain failing to get its national practices compliant with the treaties they are a signatory to.
That country really needs a cleaning-up. Fingers crossed.
usermaatre:
July 28th, 2011 at 7:41 AM
I guess the skeptics will not be satisfied and will just move on to demanding the UAH raw data and source code..
Eli Rabett:
July 28th, 2011 at 11:54 AM
So now, if TT sues the ICO for conspiracy to steal internationally protected intellectual property everything will be wonderful. Know anyone in TT?
fm:
July 28th, 2011 at 1:31 PM
Totally irrelevant to the discussion, but did anyone else have a flashback to GWB saying “you forgot Poland!” from 2004?
Martin Vermeer:
July 28th, 2011 at 1:37 PM
Eli, just wait for someone to FOI them for the Polish data (hint, hint)…
julia:
July 28th, 2011 at 2:44 PM
New NASA Data Blow Gaping Hole In Global Warming Alarmism
http://news.yahoo.com/nasa-data-blow-gaping-hold-global-warming-alarmism-192334971.html
Anyone agree?
Gordon McGrew:
July 28th, 2011 at 3:04 PM
Oh sure, but it isn’t the long form data release.
Bibasir:
July 28th, 2011 at 4:00 PM
“McIntyre said that it’s not a priority for him, but added “if someone wanted to hire me, I’d do it”.
So the auditors don’t audit, they just make noise and try to stir the pot.
Hank Roberts:
July 28th, 2011 at 4:24 PM
> “if someone wanted to hire me …”
Hmmmm.
> julia … Gaping Hole …
That’s Spencer: http://scienceblogs.com/stoat/2011/07/spencer_and_the_mystery_journa.php
Jathanon:
July 28th, 2011 at 4:38 PM
julia says:
28 Jul 2011 at 2:44 PM
“New NASA Data Blow Gaping Hole In Global Warming Alarmism”
The language is laughable. I can’t get past the first few paragraphs with any thought of it being worthwhile.
dhogaza:
July 28th, 2011 at 5:23 PM
Forbes! And the author of the op-ed (not news report)?
“James M. Taylor is senior fellow for environment policy at The Heartland Institute and managing editor of Environment & Climate News.”
harvey:
July 28th, 2011 at 5:26 PM
So if McIntyre won’t do this audit unless paid, i can infer that he was “paid” in one way or another for his other “audits”
tsk tsk
J Bowers:
July 28th, 2011 at 5:43 PM
Gordon McGrew — “Oh sure, but it isn’t the long form data release.”
Can someone explain what difference that could make?
[Response: It's a joke. But if one needs to explain it.... - gavin]
NickV:
July 28th, 2011 at 6:02 PM
If anyone is interested Steve McIntyre is presently sounding off about the CRU on the Guardian website on the subject of Scientific fraud and regulation. See the comments
See: http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2011/jul/28/scientific-fraud-regulation
Russell:
July 28th, 2011 at 7:21 PM
Is this a coincidence?
http://news.yahoo.com/nasa-data-blow-gaping-hold-global-warming-alarmism-192334971.html
Someone wants peoples attention elsewhere.
Pete Dunkelberg:
July 28th, 2011 at 10:09 PM
“Is this a coincidence?”
Nah. Spencer has become a real crank, but it didn’t just happen today. Do read Stoat (above) and Skeptical Science. Spencer is on the Board of the Marshall Institute; the delightful Heartland bunch (cross bred with Forbes) produces his press release, and our complicit press plays it straight. If it were real science they would probably bring in a nutter for false balance, but since this item is nutty to start with they leave well enough alone. All in a days work for some.
wili:
July 28th, 2011 at 11:23 PM
Speaking of images from space, there seems to be an enormous iceberg out in the middle of the north atlantic–and pretty far south for one that big–45N. 50W
http://www.iup.uni-bremen.de:8084/amsr/arctic_AMSRE_visual.png
http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/cryosphere/NEWIMAGES/arctic.seaice.color.00...
Has anyone seen any news about this thing?
[Response: I assume you are referring to this image http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/cryosphere/NEWIMAGES/arctic.seaice.color.001.png? There is something about this here, though I'm not sure that's actually what you're referring to.--eric]
dhogaza:
July 28th, 2011 at 11:50 PM
Yahoo news is just a bit of software that sweeps up content from a wide variety of news sources. I don’t think of software being “complicit” in the sense you mean, the algorithm’s blind to questions like “is this media source a lying sack of shit or not?”.
That’s just not the kind of stuff that even advanced AI software can do.
Not surprising, nor can most human wetware, after all…
One Anonymous Bloke:
July 29th, 2011 at 3:11 AM
It’s times like this I wish RC had a “like” button
andrew adans:
July 29th, 2011 at 4:17 AM
Didactylos,
The ICO should certainly have concluded that the original decision was correct, even if circumstances have changed now. But no, they had to be mean. How petty of them!
I don’t think they are being mean and petty. Since the FoI Act was introduced in the UK the ICO has taken a pretty robust stance against bodies which refuse FoI requests without having extremely strong grounds for refusal and it has certainly upset the government on a few occasions. Speaking as someone who has very hawkish views on FoI I think it has done an excellent job, especially given that the Act was worded less strongly than I would have liked with too many exemptions and the deeply ingrained culture of secrecy in many public bodies and government departments.
Maybe in this specific case they made the wrong decision – we will have to see how it pans out and if NMSs do actually withold data in future as a result of this ruling, but looking at it from a wider perspective I would much rather have an ICO which errs on the side of those requesting information than on the side of those who hold it.
El Cid:
July 29th, 2011 at 7:29 AM
On the new NASA data blowing a “gaping hole” in “alarmist” global warming predictions…
…I didn’t think that the major measure of how increasing CO2 concentrations in the upper atmosphere might slow heat energy release to space depended on how CO2 would increase atmospheric humidity and clouds.
Here is the abstract from the Forbes-linked article:
On the Misdiagnosis of Surface Temperature Feedbacks from Variations in Earth’s Radiant Energy Balance
Roy W. Spencer and William D. Braswell
“Abstract: The sensitivity of the climate system to an imposed radiative imbalance remains the largest source of uncertainty in projections of future anthropogenic climate change. Here we present further evidence that this uncertainty from an observational perspective is largely due to the masking of the radiative feedback signal by internal radiative forcing, probably due to natural cloud variations. That these internal radiative forcings exist and likely corrupt feedback diagnosis is demonstrated with lag regression analysis of satellite and coupled climate model data, interpreted with a simple forcing-feedback model. While the satellite-based metrics for the period 2000–2010 depart substantially in the direction of lower climate sensitivity from those similarly computed from coupled climate models, we find that, with traditional methods, it is not possible to accurately quantify this discrepancy in terms of the feedbacks which determine climate sensitivity. It is concluded that atmospheric feedback diagnosis of the climate system remains an unsolved problem, due primarily to the inability to distinguish between radiative forcing and radiative feedback in satellite radiative budget observations.”
[Response: The full paper is here - but there are multiple issues here. First off the Forbes article does not represent the paper well at all - S&B only conclude that short term variations are not useful for constraining sensitivity, not that the models have the wrong sensitivity (though this is was Spencer wants to think). But the analysis in S&B is very poor - there are no error bars shown, they appear to be calculating regressions on smoothed data (without taking into account the decrease in degrees of freedom), they use 100 years of data for the models, while using only 10 years of data for observations (with big differences in the noise level), and the 'simple model' used is the same as the one excoriated by Barry Bickmore in a serious of posts. I predict that any re-do of this calculation will not support S&B's conclusions. - gavin]
J Bowers:
July 29th, 2011 at 7:41 AM
Ahhh. Thanks Gavin…. I think.
jgarland:
July 29th, 2011 at 8:31 AM
@41…Re. Petermann Ice Island. I live in Newfoundland. The island is not floating in the “middle” of the North Atlantic, it is floating down the Labrador Current. So far it is staying east of the Northern Peninsula/Straits of Belle Isle and therefore is probably unlikely to ground there. If it should go through the oilfield areas in anything remotely like its present form, the Hibernia gravity-based structure is likely toast. The FPSO’s in the other fields could likely disengage and move off.
A mitigating factor is that it is melting quite rapidly–there are waterfalls coming down the sides that are pretty spectacular. T’will be an interesting September or so.
chek:
July 29th, 2011 at 9:46 AM
@ J Bowers – longform, think birthers/Oily Toads (or whatever her name was).
p.s. well done on landing two good solid ones on McTyres in that Guardian thread. Proabably scuttled away to blog something venomous with added bile about the team now.
anthropoggedon:
July 29th, 2011 at 11:46 AM
After reading the paper I have some misgivings on some of the conclusions Spencer reached
http://thumbsnap.com/i/5S5vCMlG.png
As you can see his period is the yearly cycle as opposed to the feedback period that according to him is probably 600 days,but he says specifically:
“Yet, as seen in Figure 2, we are still faced with a rather large discrepancy in the time-lagged
regression coefficients between the radiative signatures displayed by the real climate system in satellite
data versus the climate models. While this discrepancy is nominally in the direction of lower climate
sensitivity of the real climate system, there are a variety of parameters other than feedback affecting
the lag regression statistics which make accurate feedback diagnosis difficult.”
So I have a hunch that he completely ignores the part of the cycle when the oceans are absorbing more than what they are irradiating. Since the irradiation frequency is smaller than the summer winter cycle then any period that is not -λT will ALWAYS create lower climate sensitivity. If he is only using the the summer winter cycle he is basically resetting the feedback in his model every Jan 1.
Basically what he is arguing is that the ocean is emitting more energy than what they are absorbing, (if you ignore radioactive decay) then this is a clear violation of the laws of conservation of energy.
Didactylos:
July 29th, 2011 at 12:23 PM
andrew adans: That was my response to this specific incident, but in the wider picture, my opinion is that NMSs should make their data public, and that busy-bodies trying to cause trouble should go and bother those individual services, instead of forcing the CRU and Met Office to waste vast amounts of time and effort in response to a vicious and ideologically driven campaign of harassment through vexatious and pointless FoI requests.
And yes, I stick by my comments about the ICO. They got a fair amount of blame themselves (justified or not) in the various Climategate reports, and my opinion is that it rankled.
As to your own wider view – consider, if you will, someone requesting information about specific people, perhaps even yourself. How would you feel if the ICO managed to twist the regulations to be more “open”, then decided to release your personal information without your consent, because the data holder wasn’t able to show that there were any guaranteed adverse effects heading your way? I don’t believe there really is a slippery slope argument here, but I’m unhappy about the precedent.
Please also bear in mind that without the specifically higher standard applied to environmental data, the original decision would have been upheld without question.
Didactylos:
July 29th, 2011 at 12:36 PM
dhogaza: an awful lot of news outlets just take a press release and change a few words before publishing it. Some don’t even bother with changing a few words….
Others will paraphrase the release, but only the better journalists bother with research and getting actual quotes instead of the predigested press release quotes.
Of course, this sort of laziness pales in comparison to the in~cestuous “reporting” going on in certain parts of the right-wing press.
And that feeble excuse for a spam-filter is still being useless.
caerbannog:
July 29th, 2011 at 5:26 PM
OK, so I downloaded the CRUTEM3 data, modified my “really dumb temperature anomaly gridding/averaging program” and ran the CRUTEM3 data through it.
Here is a quick-n-dirty plot of my results: http://img35.imageshack.us/img35/2210/mycrumyghcnnasaghcn.jpg
The plot shows my own GHCN (raw data) and CRUTEM3 results plotted against the official NASA “Meteorological Stations” results.
In case you can’t read the legend on your iWhatever, my own GHCN and CRUTEM3 results are plotted in dark blue and red, respectively. The NASA “Meteorological Stations” results (copied/pasted directly from NASA/GISS) are plotted in yellow.
Now I’m *all* confused — I thought that the temperature data that CRU had been hiding from us all this time was going to show massive *cooling*. ;)
Anyway, the results here are the output of a very straightforward temperature anomaly gridding/averaging procedure that a student intern could code up.
So what’s with the deniers out there? Certainly a few of them have the college-freshman programming skills needed to tackle a project like this.
So, when is one of them going to “step up to the plate”, generate his/her own global-temperature results from the CRUTEM data, and then apologize to Phil Jones?
steven mosher:
July 30th, 2011 at 1:18 PM
RE: #9.
On Jones efforts to get the data released before climategate. Some more facts: In the july 2009 time frame when we raised the issue of the confidentiality agreements and CRU responded positively to our 50+ FOIAs by posting the agreements, Jones indicated that he was going to work to get the data released.
On nov 12th 2009, the draft letter to all the countries was exchanged (as an attachment) between thorne and Jones in the very last mail of the climategate stack.
My subsequent FOIA request for all CRU documents between July 2009 and Nov 2009 related to Jones efforts to get the data released, yielded No documents, except for the attachment to the Nov 12th email. The task of getting the countries to comply was apparently turned over to MET. That decision was documented as well in the ICOs recent investigation. Just to be clear on the facts. Jones, I think, did the right thing by turning the matter over to MET. So, to be exactly accurate I think we need to point out that Jones actually didn’t work to get the the data released, at least CRU could produce no documents from the time period July 2009 to Nov 2009, showing any effort. He apparently turned the matter over to MET who got the job done. That’s not a criticism. That just appears to be the way things were handled.
As for SteveMc, re doing the temperature series. That’s never been his interest in the data. That’s been my interest. As, I’ve said since 2007 when we started asking for the data, I do not expect to find anything ‘wrong’ with the data. But, I will interested to see how perfectly I can match their results. I’m very close just using standard GHCN data, but I want to see those last few wiggles disappear:
http://stevemosher.files.wordpress.com/2011/07/verification.png
For some of us this hasnt been about “wrong” data. It’s just been about access TO data. Had folks looked at actual requests, rather than the the blogs we choose to read, they might have found that some of us share a great many of their beliefs. We probably differ on the issue of access to data. I’ll suggest again as I have since 2007 that arguments against total transparency dont play well, and losing these fights is more costly than just complying with requests in the first place.
chek:
July 30th, 2011 at 5:50 PM
So …. how’s your temperature reconstruction with the available data going, Mosher?
That was of course a rhetorical question that everybody here already knows the answer to.
J Bowers:
July 30th, 2011 at 6:01 PM
The thing is, Steven Mosher, Jones did it and followed through with the goods. Even if it was just to get the jackals off his back, the deed is done.
Now, if I had a whipround, do you think McIntyre would do a temperature series for once?
Paul S:
July 30th, 2011 at 7:49 PM
steven mosher – Out of interest, why didn’t you go directly to the relevant owners of the data to get hold of it?
Perhaps you did? If so, what response did you get?
Hank Roberts:
July 30th, 2011 at 11:23 PM
> arguments against total transparency dont play well
“Information wants to be free marketed” works for Poland.
J Bowers:
July 31st, 2011 at 6:50 AM
57 Hank. Good point. In Britain’s case the data isn’t paid for by the taxpayer, it’s paid for by sales of services and product. The UK Met Office is self-sufficient, the opposite to a taxpayer burden. But to do this they have to make profit and pay the owners dividends (the Ministry of Defence in the UKMO example). A libertarian’s dream. How ironic that (generally) it’s libertarians and neoliberals who queue up to condemn such agencies for not giving them something for free. Have they really thought any of this through?
Paul S:
July 31st, 2011 at 9:32 AM
J Bowers – The irony of the situation is highly striking, at least on a superficial level. It appears a group of overwhelmingly libertarian-leaning people have achieved their ends only because a Government regulatory body ruled by-fiat that a set of freely entered contracts should be ignored.
Carrick:
July 31st, 2011 at 2:17 PM
This seems slightly misleading to me. As I understand it, the ability to model ENSO has more to do with the spatial and temporal resolution of the model (and accuracy of the physics in the model over those scales). What climate sensitivity you end up with seems to have more to do with the assumed aerosol forcings, so it seems to me in principle you could have either a low sensitivity good fit to ENSO or a high sensitivity good fit to ENSO. [Maybe Gavin could correct me if my impressions are wrong on this.]
That said, I do think that looking at whether a model can produce realistic short-period climate fluctuations is a necessary prerequisite to comparing that model to short-period trends. Which brings up an OT comment: I think it’s misleading to compare the global mean of models to the global mean temperature… Not all models are created equally, and physics isn’t a democracy. It doesn’t matter what the average of the models say, it’s what the best models say (paraphrase of Dick Feynman there.)
Amanda:
August 1st, 2011 at 3:56 PM
This is great! Finally the station temperature measurements are available… Now all we have to do is convince Poland to fork over the information. Hopefully it won’t take too much longer; this information is gold.
steven mosher:
August 10th, 2011 at 10:42 AM
steven mosher – Out of interest, why didn’t you go directly to the relevant owners of the data to get hold of it?
Perhaps you did? If so, what response did you get?
Comment by Paul S — 30 Jul 2011
#####
1. That would not have answered the question people wanted answered.
2. We had good reason to believe that the agreements referred to either did not exist or were being misrepresented.
3. we were told that some small number of nearly 200 countries refused access. We did the logical thing. Before bothering all 200 ( as cru had to do ) we asked CRU.. which countries exactly had a problem releasing data.
steven mosher:
August 10th, 2011 at 10:49 AM
RE54:
“So …. how’s your temperature reconstruction with the available data going, Mosher?
That was of course a rhetorical question that everybody here already knows the answer to.”
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My own personal goal has never been a reconstruction. ( odd word to use here ) But I’ve done several emulations of CRU’s method. I’m very happy to say that I was able to match their results, nearly perfectly in some cases.A few emails back and forth and the last bits were squared away. If you thought I was an AGW skeptic well you are wrong. For me its more about putting tools and power in people’s hands. Pretty dang simple.
steven mosher:
August 10th, 2011 at 11:03 AM
57
““Information wants to be free marketed” works for Poland.”
I think you’ve missed the argument entirely, Hank. The argument has been that there was no benefit to the science in using closed data. In fact, the whole argument was that you get the same answer with confidential data as you do without! Do you get it. That means there is no reason to use confidential data, no excuse for co mingling the two. My argument has been.
1. The science shows that you don’t need the small portion of data that is covered by confidential agreements.
2. If you insist on using this data, then you should take care to not comingle it with open data. That is, keep them separate.
3. Get a document control person in charge of requests for data.
Hank, people who opposed the release of the data have lost all the arguments. On the web, in your mind, you held your own. In the world, you lost. No shame in that.
[Response: There is shame in continuing to misrepresent the arguments and issues. The 'people who oppose the release of data' are the NWSs (and their governments - including the UK) who put commercial priorities ahead of openness, not CRU, and not Jones. - gavin]
dhogaza:
August 10th, 2011 at 11:31 AM
Thanks for that, Mosher, we all knew that access to the data wasn’t the issue, but it’s good to see you put it in black and white. No surprise that nothing’s really been done with it other than to use this as a stick with which to beat the climate science community over the head.
dhogaza:
August 10th, 2011 at 11:33 AM
Yes, I do – it’s called “revisionism”, and I think you’re wasting your time promoting it here.
J Bowers:
August 10th, 2011 at 1:01 PM
64 Mosher — “Hank, people who opposed the release of the data have lost all the arguments.”
Not in Poland. Will you somehow force them to admit they’re wrong, or just leave all the hard and patient work to Phil Jones and UEA, while “liberators of data” don’t lift a finger to help, content to just point fingers?
Hank Roberts:
August 10th, 2011 at 1:26 PM
Mosher asserts I’m one of the Polish/climatologist conspirators.
“There’s glory for you.”
Steve Jewson:
August 10th, 2011 at 4:47 PM
Various groups in the private sector have long campaigned for meteorological measurements, especially for the UK and France, to be made available more cheaply, as in the US. It’s nothing particularly to do with climate change, but just that met data is useful for business in a variety of ways. Right now the data is so expensive that almost no-one buys it, which is a lose-lose for everyone.
Does anyone know if the ICO ruling changes anything? Will the UKMO and MeteoFrance still be charging an arm and a leg for their data?
J Bowers:
August 10th, 2011 at 7:00 PM
69 Steve Jewson — “Does anyone know if the ICO ruling changes anything?”
Possibly not as the Met Office still pays dividends to its owner, the MoD (the level of dividends that means the MoD can buy more Apache helicopters and the like). You could always start a petition, but you’ll also be up against the Met Office being able to pay for itself through sales and services as a Trading Fund, thus becoming more of a burden on the taxpayer which flies in the face of Lib-Dem policies.
http://epetitions.direct.gov.uk/
dhogaza:
August 10th, 2011 at 11:30 PM
Ding ding! Compare to Mosher’s statement above.
And Mosher (not surprisingly) hasn’t come back.
M:
August 11th, 2011 at 9:35 AM
“1. The science shows that you don’t need the small portion of data that is covered by confidential agreements.”
You don’t need the data from Poland if all you care about it global mean temperature. But despite the blogospheric focus on the global mean*, these temperature datasets are used for more than that, and for some of those purposes (for examples, comparing Northern European temperatures against models), one _does_ want the data from Poland.
*One thing I can’t stand is the people who claim they can “duplicate GISS” by making a simple regression model that uses forcing inputs and temperature outputs and get r^2>0.9 over the historical record… for the global mean. I can’t stand their claims because a) it often turns out that their methods would _not_ work out of sample, even just for the global mean, and b) they often make snide comments about “why spend all this effort developing a complex model when I can duplicate it in a few lines of code”, totally ignoring the fact that global mean temperature is only one of a number of key outputs from the data…
Paul S:
August 11th, 2011 at 6:37 PM
#62, steven mosher – ‘1. That would not have answered the question people wanted answered.‘
What was the question? Was this not about gaining access to the data?
#64 – ‘Hank, people who opposed the release of the data have lost all the arguments.‘
Who is it you perceive was opposing release of the data, and what motive would they have for doing so?
Kevin:
August 23rd, 2011 at 12:50 PM
this info should be available for all countries so we can work together on fixing it