date: Tue May 12 09:08:46 2009 from: Phil Jones subject: Data access and IPCC to: Thomas Stocker Dear Thomas, I hope you are enjoying your new job! Apologies in advance for upsetting your morning! Below there is a link to Climate Audit and their new thread with another attempt to gain access to the CRU station temperature data. I wouldn't normally bother about this - but will deal with the FOI requests when they come. Despite WMO Resolution 40, I've signed agreements not to pass on some parts of the CRU land station data to third parties. If you click on the link below and then on comments, look at # 17. This refers to a number of appeals a Brit has made to the Information Commissioner in the UK. You can see various UK Universities and MOHC listed. For UEA these relate to who changed what and why in Ch 6 of AR4. We are dealing with these, but I wanted to alert you to few sentences about Switzerland, your University and AR5. Having been through numerous of these as a result of AR4, I suspect that someone will have a go at you at some point. What I think they might try later is the same issue: Who changed what and why in various chapters of AR5? and When drafts of chapters come for AR5, we can't review the chapter as we can't get access to the data, or, the authors can't refer to these papers as the data haven't been made available for audit. Neither of these is what I would call Environmental Information,as defined by the Aarhus Convention. You might want to check with the IPCC Bureau. I've been told that IPCC is above national FOI Acts. One way to cover yourself and all those working in AR5 would be to delete all emails at the end of the process. Hard to do, as not everybody will remember to do it. I also suspect that as national measures to reduce emissions begin to affect people's lives, we are all going to get more of this. We can cope with op-ed pieces, but these FOI requests take time, as the whole process of how we all work has to be explained to FOI-responsible people at each institution. Keep up the good work with AR5! Cheers Phil Dear Mr Jones As a UK tax payer from the productive economy, could you please explain why you restrict access to data sets that are gathered using tax payer funds e.g. CRUTEM3. Can you believe how embarassing this is to a UK TAX PAYER, putting up with your amateurish non disclosure of enviromental information. For reference [1]http://www.climateaudit.org/?p=5962 refers to your absymal attitude to public data, although this is just the latest in an embarassing set of reasonable requests from CRU, who the hell do you think you are? There will of course be an FOI on the back of this Regards Ian Prof. Phil Jones Climatic Research Unit Telephone +44 (0) 1603 592090 School of Environmental Sciences Fax +44 (0) 1603 507784 University of East Anglia Norwich Email p.jones@uea.ac.uk NR4 7TJ UK ----------------------------------------------------------------------------