Global Temperature Records – Above the Law

As a young man doing research, the first thing we learned was to record our raw data in detail. Results must be reproducible from scratch or you are not doing science. Requests by people to see this data are always granted to a reasonable degree because reproducibility is key. The reason that people are so interested in global temperatures is that the large positive adjustments to the records provide most of the signal in the GISS global temperature record. In the case of the case of the more popular, higher slope CRU record, we don’t know what ‘adjustments’ were made to these records.

For years people have been asking CRU to explain their global temperature record with no success. All requests for data and methods by reasoned experts were stonewalled. It got so bad that people started issuing freedom of information act requests for the data. To counter that Phil Jones colluded with government officials to ignore the law. This thread is about temperature record reproduction rather than FOIA so I bolded the important bit and decided to leave the emails up so you can see the DOT GOV’S of the people who were notified of this apparently illegal activity.

From: Phil Jones <p.jones@uea.ac.uk>
To: santer1@llnl.gov, Tom Wigley <wigley@ucar.edu>
Subject: Re: Schles suggestion
Date: Wed Dec 3 13:57:09 2008
Cc: mann <mann@psu.edu>, Gavin Schmidt <gschmidt@giss.nasa.gov>, Karl Taylor <taylor13@llnl.gov>, peter gleckler <gleckler1@llnl.gov>

Ben,
When the FOI requests began here, the FOI person said we had to abide
by the requests. It took a couple of half hour sessions – one at a screen, to convince
them otherwise
showing them what CA was all about. Once they became aware of the types of people we were
dealing with, everyone at UEA (in the registry and in the Environmental Sciences school
– the head of school and a few others) became very supportive. I’ve got to know the FOI
person quite well and the Chief Librarian – who deals with appeals. The VC is also
aware of what is going on – at least for one of the requests, but probably doesn’t know
the number we’re dealing with. We are in double figures.

One issue is that these requests aren’t that widely known within the School. So
I don’t know who else at UEA may be getting them. CRU is moving up the ladder of
requests at UEA though – we’re way behind computing though. We’re away of
requests going to others in the UK – MOHC, Reading, DEFRA and Imperial College.
So spelling out all the detail to the LLNL management should be the first thing
you do. I hope that Dave is being supportive at PCMDI.
The inadvertent email I sent last month has led to a Data Protection Act request sent by
a certain Canadian, saying that the email maligned his scientific credibility with his
peers!
If he pays 10 pounds (which he hasn’t yet) I am supposed to go through my emails
and he can get anything I’ve written about him. About 2 months ago I deleted loads of
emails, so have very little – if anything at all. This legislation is different from the
FOI –
it is supposed to be used to find put why you might have a poor credit rating !
In response to FOI and EIR requests, we’ve put up some data – mainly paleo data.
Each request generally leads to more – to explain what we’ve put up. Every time, so
far, that hasn’t led to anything being added – instead just statements saying read
what is in the papers and what is on the web site! Tim Osborn sent one such
response (via the FOI person) earlier this week. We’ve never sent programs, any codes
and manuals.
In the UK, the Research Assessment Exercise results will be out in 2 weeks time.
These are expensive to produce and take too much time, so from next year we’ll
be moving onto a metric based system. The metrics will be # and amounts of grants,
papers and citations etc. I did flippantly suggest that the # of FOI requests you get
should be another.
When you look at CA, they only look papers from a handful of
people. They will start on another coming out in The Holocene early next year. Gavin
and Mike are on this with loads of others. I’ve told both exactly what will appear on
CA once they get access to it!
Cheers
Phil

….

At 04:53 AM 5/9/2008, you wrote:

Mike, Ray, Caspar,

A couple of things – don’t pass on either.

[snip – long discussion of adjusting SST to be warmer. I wonder why it wasn’t to be forwarded.]

2. You can delete this attachment if you want. Keep this quiet also, but
this is the person who is putting in FOI requests for all emails Keith and Tim
have written and received re Ch 6 of AR4. We think we’ve found a way
around this.

Prof. Phil Jones

….

Phil Jones said the following on 6/19/2007 4:22 AM:

Wei-Chyung and Tom,
The Climate Audit web site has a new thread on the Jones et al. (1990)
paper, with lots of quotes from Keenan. So they may not be going to
submit something to Albany. Well may be?!?
Just agreed to review a paper by Ren et al. for JGR. This refers
to a paper on urbanization effects in China, which may be in press
in J. Climate. I say ‘may be’ as Ren isn’t that clear about this in
the text, references and responses to earlier reviews. Have requested
JGR get a copy a copy of this in order to do the review.
In the meantime attaching this paper by Ren et al. on urbanization
at two sites in China.
Nothing much else to say except:
1. Think I’ve managed to persuade UEA to ignore all further FOIA
requests if the people have anything to do with Climate Audit.
2. Had an email from David Jones of BMRC, Melbourne. He said
they are ignoring anybody who has dealings with CA, as there are
threads on it about Australian sites.
3. CA is in dispute with IPCC (Susan Solomon and Martin Manning)
about the availability of the responses to reviewer’s at the various
stages of the AR4 drafts. They are most interested here re Ch 6 on
paleo.
Cheers
Phil

So recently the media picked up on the fact that CRU deleted the raw data for this important global temperature set long ago. We’ have known this for some time now. The interesting point is that it also seems each time they come across a new dataset it is simply replaced. So what we have is a process which allows the systematic choosing of ever warmer records over time which is so convoluted nobody can figure out what really happened.

Comment by Prof. Phil Jones
> <http://www.cru.uea.ac.uk/cru/people/pjones/&gt;, Director, Climatic
> Research Unit (CRU), and Professor, School of Environmental Sciences,
> University of East Anglia, Norwich, UK:
>
> No one, it seems, cares to read what we put up
> <http://www.cru.uea.ac.uk/cru/data/temperature/&gt; on the CRU web
> page. These people just make up motives for what we might or might
> not have done.
> Almost all the data we have in the CRU archive is exactly the same
> as in the Global Historical Climatology Network (GHCN) archive used
> by the NOAA National Climatic Data Center [see here
> <http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/oa/climate/ghcn-monthly/index.php&gt; and
> here <http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/oa/climate/research/ghcn/ghcngrid.html>%5D.
> The original raw data are not “lost.” I could reconstruct what we
> had from U.S. Department of Energy reports we published in the
> mid-1980s. I would start with the GHCN data. I know that the effort
> would be a complete waste of time, though. I may get around to it
> some time. The documentation of what we’ve done is all in the
> literature.
> If we have “lost” any data it is the following:
> 1. Station series for sites that in the 1980s we deemed then to be
> affected by either urban biases or by numerous site moves, that were
> either not correctable or not worth doing as there were other series
> in the region.
> 2. The original data for sites for which we made appropriate
> adjustments in the temperature data in the 1980s. We still have our
> adjusted data, of course, and these along with all other sites that
> didn’t need adjusting.
> 3. Since the 1980s as colleagues and National Meteorological
> Services <http://www.wmo.int/pages/members/index_en.html&gt; (NMSs)
> have produced adjusted series for regions and or countries, then we
> replaced the data we had with the better series.
> In the papers, I’ve always said that homogeneity adjustments are
> best produced by NMSs. A good example of this is the work by Lucie
> Vincent in Canada. Here we just replaced what data we had for the
> 200+ sites she sorted out.
> The CRUTEM3 data for land look much like the GHCN and NASA Goddard
> Institute for Space Studies data
> <http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/&gt; for the same domains.
> Apart from a figure in the IPCC Fourth Assessment Report (AR4)
> showing this, there is also this paper from Geophysical Research
> Letters in 2005 by Russ Vose et al.
> <http://www.climatesciencewatch.org/file-uploads/Vose-etal-TempTrends-GRL2005.pdf&gt;
> Figure 2 is similar to the AR4 plot.
>
> I think if it hadn’t been this issue, the Competitive Enterprise
> Institute would have dreamt up something else!
>

So my question is, if they have all the ‘adjusted’ data and all these ‘adjustments’ are above board honest science, why don’t they provide a station and dataset list so that objective observers not paid 22 million dollars over 19 years can’t review it. We shouldn’t forget this reply from Phil Jones to earlier pre – FOIA requests for the data.

We have 25 or so years invested in the work. Why should I make the data available to you, when your aim is to try and find something wrong with it. There is IPR to consider.

It sure sounds different now doesn’t it.

So since Phil Jones is so massively funded, does it make any sense that the ‘raw’ data used to create this temperature series would be discarded each time they have a ‘better’ version. Is this dataset the one scientists should trust so blindly when publishing or should they use the GISS dataset because with all of its known flaws, they were at least forced to put them in the open.

Just to make the point about corrections, here is a plot of how the US temperature record is corrected. These corrected station data are used in Jones CRU temperatures some how. I think the curves speak for themselves but they’ve been hidden in plain sight for years.

This text is WRT the figure above from the Jennifer Marohasy blog.

Figure 2. Form of individual corrections applied by NOAA. The black line is the adjustment for time of observation. The red line is for a change in maximum/minimum thermometers used. The yellow line is for changes in station siting. The pale blue line is for filling in missing data from individual station records. The purple line is for UHI effects (this correction is now removed). [Click on the chart for a better larger view or visit the same website as for Figure 1.]

Maybe we should just shut up, pay our taxes and trust Phil Jones and this Team of perfectly honest individuals.