cc: "Glenn McGregor" , David Parker , Ben Santer date: Thu Mar 19 08:45:33 2009 from: Phil Jones subject: See the link below to: "Chief Exec" Paul, I sent you this last night, but in another email. I should have sent you two emails - apologies. The issues were not linked. This email is to bring your attention to the link at the end. The next few sentences repeat what I said last might. I had been meaning to email you about the RMS and IJC issue of data availability for numbers and data used in papers that appear in RMS journals. This results from the issue that arose with the paper by Ben Santer et al in IJC last year. Ben has made the data available that this complainant wanted. The issue is that this is intermediate data. The raw data that Ben had used to derive the intermediate data was all fully available. If you're going to consider asking authors to make some or all of the data available, then they had done already. The complainant didn't want to have to go to the trouble of doing all the work that Ben had done. I hope this is clear. Another issue that should be considered as well is this. With many papers, we're using Met Office observations. We've abstracted these from BADC to use them in the papers. We're not allowed to make these available to others. We'd need to get the Met Office's permission in all cases. This email came overnight - from Tom Peterson, who works at NCDC in Asheville. [1]http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/03/18/finally-an-honest-quantification-of-urban-warmi ng-by-a-major-climate-scientist/ "Phil Jones, the director of the Hadley Climate Center in the UK." We all know that this is not my job. The paper being referred to appeared in JGR last year. The paper is Jones, P.D., Lister, D.H. and Li, Q., 2008: Urbanization effects in large-scale temperature records, with an emphasis on China. J. Geophys. Res. 113, D16122, doi:10.1029/2008/JD009916. The paper clearly states where I work - CRU at UEA. There is no mention of the Hadley Centre! There is also no about face as stated on the web page. Sending this as it gives a good example of the sort of people you are dealing with when you might be considering changes to data policies at the RMS. Several years ago I decided there was no point in responding to issues raised on blog sites. Ben has made the same decision as well. There are probably wider issues due to climate change becoming more main stream in the more popular media that the RMS might like to consider. I just think you should be aware of some of the background. CRU has had numerous FOI requests since the beginning of 2007. The Met Office, Reading, NCDC and GISS have had as well - many related to IPCC involvement. I know the world changes and the way we do things changes, but these requests and the sorts of simple mistakes, should not have an influence on the way things have been adequately dealt with for over a century. Cheers Phil -- Thomas C. Peterson, Ph.D. NOAA's National Climatic Data Center 151 Patton Avenue Asheville, NC 28801 Voice: +1-828-271-4287 Fax: +1-828-271-4876 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 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------