by Aldyen Donnelly

Do you think last week’s release of emails, code and calculations from the CRU wil undermine the Copenhagen process?

No.  This is a serious situation, but it will take the larger scientific and academic community time to sort it out.  What the emails and other documents reveals is the authors’ disdain for Freedom of Information legislation and the peer review process.  Of course, I am of the view that peer review has fallen on event that might motivate the academic and publishing community to clean this situation up.

The most significant problem that the released documents reveal is that the CRU appears to have destroyed the raw data records they used to model climate trends.  Given raw data, the scientist made many adjustments to the data before it was incorporated in their modelling.  I don’t think the released documents PROVE that the data modifications were inappropriate (however they do suggest that might be the case).  But the fact is that the only record CRU can release, now, is the modified data, not the raw data.

Since a large share of other climate change research has relied on CRU for basic temperature/climate data, it is toing to prove expensive to address this problem.  Hopefully, the weather stations and research initiatives from whom CRU initially sourced raw data still have complete files, so the raw dataset can be reconstructed.  It will only be through the release of both the raw dataset and the modified dataset, along with explanations for the data modifications, that the wider scientific community will be able to determine what is good and what is not so good in this situation.

I agree that the CRU crew has behaved arrogantly and unprofessionally.  It will take some time to determine whether their analysis and modelling should be rejected.