The University of East Anglia Climatic Research Unit

[meteorologist]

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-14315747

http://www.uea.ac.uk/mac/comm/media/press/2011/July/crutem3

http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/research/climate/climate-monitoring/land-and-atmosphere/surface-station-records

[Clifford]

Excellent.

Now.. What they need to do is to upload the RAW data.

I.E. actual high/low temperature readings with some kind of explanation of all adjustments for each individual station, including the actual adjustment numbers.

I know there is some generic information, and this becomes a much bigger task, but it would open a lot of inroads to transparency. The same is true with other climate groups that "process" the data before publishing it.

[valkhorn]

Releasing raw data, on the surface, may seem like a great idea. After all, we all love freedom of information, right?

However, in science, it's not always a good idea for a number of reasons. First, just because it's called data doesn't mean it's accurate. Raw data could be incorrect or skewed, and ordering someone to release it doesn't change that fact if it is true. Second, research done with the data usually checks along the way to see if the data is true and still holds. This verifies the data, and because this research eventually verifies the data whether it is correct or not, the data is usually released when a paper is published so it can be peer-reviewed. If it's bad data, it gets corrected or thrown out before peer-review.

Transparency isn't an altogether bad thing, but this field is notorious for pseudo-scientists and lobbyists clamoring for 'new' data in order to bolster their sides all while skipping doing any actual science themselves, or even knowing how to interpret or scrutinize the data.

[Clifford]

Transparency isn't an altogether bad thing, but this field is notorious for pseudo-scientists and lobbyists clamoring for 'new' data in order to bolster their sides all while skipping doing any actual science themselves, or even knowing how to interpret or scrutinize the data.

True.... more or less... Many individuals or organizations don't have the resources to do exhausting data consistency checking, and repairs of data set problems.

But any reanalysis needs to start with the raw data, and perhaps a detailed list of every step that was taken to transform the raw data in to final data. Detailed enough that one should be able to take the raw data and reprocess it to arrive at the final data set.

While some data does get misinterpreted, this field also has major issues with data adjustments, many of which tend to skew the data towards a greater global warming effect. In most cases such transformations are appropriate. However, they do need to be carefully scrutinized.

For example... The seawater bucket issue.

The idea is that if you toss a bucket overboard and hoist up the bucket full of water. Then take the temperature, the water actually warms up by a fraction of a degree before one gets the final temperature reading. So, the bucket sea water temperatures were adjusted downward by about a half a degree to compensate for a false high reading. However, it has never been clear how this was applied. For example, a warming effect would only seem to apply if the sea water is actually colder than the ambient temperature. In the case where the sea water is warmer than the ambient temperature, one might expect a cooling effect.

Or.

The Rate of sea level rise.

About 10% of the estimated sea level rise is not due to the sea rising at all, but rather an estimate that the ocean basins are getting larger (0.3mm/yr added by the University of Colorado). And, thus, they aren't actually reporting the change in sea level, but an estimate of the vertical component of the volume. So, the rate of change in the sea level is increased by about 10%. This estimated increase in the volume of the basin would be important if one is trying to calculate an acceleration of the change in sea level. However, it is very misleading if one is wanting to figure out when a particular landmark will become submerged. Many modern land based sea level gauges are apparently far more sophisticated than those from the past. Yet, again, the raw data sets would be important for understanding changes over time.