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From The Sunday Times

November 29, 2009

Climate change data dumped

Jonathan Leake, Environment Editor

SCIENTISTS at the University of East Anglia (UEA) have admitted throwing away
much of the raw temperature data on which their predictions of global warming
are based.

It means that other academics are not able to check basic calculations said
to show a long-term rise in temperature over the past 150 years.

The UEA’s Climatic Research Unit (CRU) was forced to reveal the loss
following requests for the data under Freedom of Information legislation.

The data were gathered from weather stations around the world and then
adjusted to take account of variables in the way they were collected. The
revised figures were kept, but the originals — stored on paper and magnetic tape
— were dumped to save space when the CRU moved to a new building.

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The admission follows the leaking of a thousand private emails sent and
received by Professor Phil Jones, the CRU’s director. In them he discusses
thwarting climate sceptics seeking access to such data.

In a statement on its website, the CRU said: “We do not hold the original raw
data but only the value-added (quality controlled and homogenised) data.”

The CRU is the world’s leading centre for reconstructing past climate and
temperatures. Climate change sceptics have long been keen to examine exactly how
its data were compiled. That is now impossible.

Roger Pielke, professor of environmental studies at Colorado University,
discovered data had been lost when he asked for original records. “The CRU is
basically saying, ‘Trust us’. So much for settling questions and resolving
debates with science,” he said.

Jones was not in charge of the CRU when the data were thrown away in the
1980s, a time when climate change was seen as a less pressing issue. The lost
material was used to build the databases that have been his life’s work, showing
how the world has warmed by 0.8C over the past 157 years.

He and his colleagues say this temperature rise is “unequivocally” linked to
greenhouse gas emissions generated by humans. Their findings are one of the main
pieces of evidence used by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which
says global warming is a threat to humanity.

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