Date published: 2009/12/05
The BBC says (link later trampled by the BBC and replaced with another story):
The Met Office (MO) is to announce it will publish the raw data it uses to analyse man-made global warming.
It follows a row about the reliability of data from the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia which has been dubbed "Climategate".
The MO has written to 188 countries for permission to publish the historic data it says proves that the world is warming up due to man-made emissions.
A spokesman denied reports ministers had tried to block the publication.
The material, dating back 160 years from more than 1,000 weather stations around the world, is expected to be released this week.
...
An MO spokesman denied it would spend up to three years re-examining the climate change data, and said it had already planned to publish the material long before the "Climategate" controversy broke.But the spokesman admitted the e-mail row had made the whole exercise more urgent.
Well this is possibly the only beneficial outcome of the spurious "ClimateGate" controversy. This kind of data should have been made public years ago but unfortunately governments decided that their commercial interest overrode scientific responsibility. Scientific journals should have insisted and should insist that pretty much all data underpinning published articles should be available free for others to download. This already happens in some areas, e.g. structural biology, but does not happen in others, e.g. conservation biology. This data is almost all paid for by the public (via taxes) and should be available to the public and not kept in the hands of the few.
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