Volume 1

The disclosure of climate data from the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia : eighth report of session 2009-10.

  • Great Britain. Parliament. House of Commons. Select Committee on Science and Technology
Date:
2010
Catalogue details

Licence: Open Government Licence

Credit: The disclosure of climate data from the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia : eighth report of session 2009-10. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    the organization writing the [other] code did not adhere to standards one might find in professional software engineering. The code had easily identified bugs, no visible test mechanism, was not apparently under version control and was poorly documented. It would not be surprising to find that other code written at the same organization was of similar quality. And given that I subsequently found a bug in the actual CRUTEM3 code only reinforces my opinion.” 45. The conspiracy claims were fuelled by CRU’s refusal to share the most detailed aspects of its methodologies, for example, the computer codes for producing global temperature averages. We note that the research passed the peer review process of some highly reputable journals. However, we note that CRU could have been more open at that time in providing the detailed methodological working on its website. We recommend that all publicly funded research groups consider whether they are being as open as they can be, and ought to be, with the details of their methodologies. Repeatability and verification 46. These complaints and concerns surrounding transparency cut to the heart of the scientific process. It has been argued that without access to the raw data and detailed methodology it is not possible to check the results of CRU’s work. The Institute of Physics pointed out that: Published reconstructions may represent only a part of the raw data available and may be sensitive to the choices made and the statistical techniques used. Different choices, omissions or statistical processes may lead to different conclusions. This possibility was evidently the reason behind some of the (rejected) requests for further information.” 47. This has substance if one considers CRU’s work in isolation. But science is more than individual researchers or research groups. One should put research in context and ask the question: what would one hope to find by double checking the processing of the raw data? If this were the only dataset in existence, and Professor Jones’s team had been the only team in the world to analyse it, then it might make sense to double check independently the processing of the raw data and the methods. But there are other datasets and other analyses that have been carried out as Professor Jones explained: There are two groups in America that we [CRU] compare with and there are also two additional groups, one in Russia and one in Japan, that also produce similar records to ourselves and they all show pretty much the same sort of course of instrumental temperature change since the nineteenth century compared to today.” [...] we are all working independently so we may be using a lot of common data but the way of going from the raw data to a derived product of gridded temperatures and 65 Ev 196 66 Ev 167, para 4 67 Q78
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