Topic: Where’s the data?

[sam]

http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2009/11/wheres-the-data/

Much of the discussion in recent days has been motivated by the idea that climate science is somehow unfairly restricting access to raw data upon which scientific conclusions are based. This is a powerful meme and one that has clear resonance far beyond the people who are actually interested in analysing data themselves. However, many of the people raising this issue are not aware of what and how much data is actually available.

Therefore, we have set up a page of data links to sources of temperature and other climate data, codes to process it, model outputs, model codes, reconstructions, paleo-records, the codes involved in reconstructions etc. We have made a start on this on a new Data Sources page, but if anyone has other links that we’ve missed, note them in the comments and we’ll update accordingly.

[GillE]

That's a step in the right direction, but I have a lot of sympathy with JP Sobel who says:

The problem is more than just access to raw data. It is knowing which data has been used in which papers. It is knowing how the data has been manipulated and the justification of that manipulation. This is particularly true in a field that requires as much statistical analysis as palaeoclimatology.

Replication of results is key to the scientific method. Data and data analysis should be released with all published papers. It should be released when requested for academic study. And it should definitely be released when demanded under the FOIA.

Of course, it is extremely difficult to imagine climatologists reviewing their papers over the last 40 years!  Yet we now have a situation whereby the integrity of IPCC scientific research is at risk of being seen as compromised because of the email insecurity at UEA.  It will be sad if all the IPCC research is discredited one day; I'm sure there are some very worthy scientists whose work could suffer by association.  The problem will be in sorting the wheat from the chaff.