The Project

It’s been a busy summer for UEA’s Climatic Research Unit (CRU). Continually plagued with Freedom of Information requests for its raw data, the CRU and its Director, Phil Jones, have come under intense scrutiny.

Scrutiny, that is, from a number of internet journalists, all with one thing in common: their intense disbelief of human-caused climate change.

Climate-change sceptic Steve McIntyre requested the CRU’s raw data. CRU’s riposte to the FOIA request was that it couldn’t release much of its data, due to confidentiality agreements, and that some of its data had degraded, and so was unavailable.

McIntyre got the word out that this meant, perhaps, CRU had been giving the world data that was not 100 per cent accurate. Consequently, as with all climatic issues, the internet burst into flames and sites starting running with the story.

Phil Jones, told The Project: "They are just stirring things up – in some attempt to stop politicians doing anything about climate change."

The integrity of the CRU’s data is difficult to test, as it distributes it in a gridded form. However, this data is good enough for the world-renowned, UN-backed, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Added to that, the School of Environmental Science, which hosts CRU, was labelled the "strongest in the world" by Sir David King, the former Chief Scientific Advisor to the Government.

Steve McIntyre’s point ultimately seems to be ideological: "In my opinion," he says, "the maintenance of, say, the Consumer Price Index is not done by university professors in their spare time, but by a unit of a government statistics agency."

The data wars continue...

JACK CLARK
EDITOR