November
29, 2009
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.
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
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.