cc: "Timothy L. Grove" <tlgrove@mit.edu>
date: Mon Sep  7 10:13:11 2009
from: Phil Jones <p.jones@uea.ac.uk>
subject: Re: AGU and Dr. P. Jones (fwd)
to: Alan Robock <robock@envsci.rutgers.edu>

    Tim, Alan,
       I said I would send a brief reply when I got back. Alan is right to ignore these sorts
   of letters.  I'm afraid I have become less responsive to the public over the years, but
   this has been as a result of continuous defamatory remarks on a number of blog sites. I
   have tried in the past discussing via email with a few of these people, but it is just a
   time wasting exercise. Many of the papers I'd been sending them have been published in JGR
   and one in Reviews of Geophysics.
       I recall giving lectures in the past when there would be one person who would disagree
   with something or all I said in an invited talk. The internet has allowed all these people
   to find one another unfortunately. Some
    of the emails are quite spiteful, but as yet not as bad as some of the things that have
   been said ot written about Ben Santer and Mike Mann.
       In the UK the head of the Natural Environment Research Council tried engaging with
   these people a couple of years ago, but gave up as it was just the deniers that responded.
   If you look at the Nature site, that Olive Heffernan set up, after the piece about a month
   ago, almost all of the responders were deniers.
       I've given up trying to engage them. I know I should persevere, but I just don't have
   the time.
    Cheers
    Phil
   At 13:11 03/09/2009, Alan Robock wrote:

     Dear Phil,
     We're always on holiday here in Jersey!
     Since the letter was to me, I have decided, with the concurrence of others at AGU, to
     ignore it and not reply.
     You, Mike Mann, and Ben Santer should form a club.
     Alan
     Alan Robock, Professor II
       Director, Meteorology Undergraduate Program
       Associate Director, Center for Environmental Prediction
     Department of Environmental Sciences        Phone: +1-732-932-9800 x6222
     Rutgers University                                  Fax: +1-732-932-8644
     14 College Farm Road                   E-mail: robock@envsci.rutgers.edu
     New Brunswick, NJ 08901-8551  USA      [1]http://envsci.rutgers.edu/~robock
     On Thu, 3 Sep 2009, P.Jones@uea.ac.uk wrote:

     Alan,> Dear Tim,
      On holiday in Jersey. Have found a wifi connection
     unfortuntely?
      Will get back to you when back at UEA.
      Getting fed up with all these skeptics.
     You've only seen the tip of the iceberg!
     Cheers
     Phil

     This is part of a coordinated attack by global warming deniers on Phil
     and other climate scientists.  To get a flavor of it, see the recent
     article in Nature at
     <[2]http://www.nature.com/news/2009/090812/full/460787a.html>, reproduced
     below.
     Since the writer is not a member of AGU, I recommend that we just ignore
     the letter, so it doesn't waste any more of our time as well as Phil's.
     If he wants to submit it to EOS, he should use the formal process and
     not expect us to do it for him.
     Alan
     Alan Robock, Professor II
        Director, Meteorology Undergraduate Program
        Associate Director, Center for Environmental Prediction
     Department of Environmental Sciences        Phone: +1-732-932-9800 x6222
     Rutgers University                                  Fax: +1-732-932-8644
     14 College Farm Road                   E-mail: robock@envsci.rutgers.edu
     New Brunswick, NJ 08901-8551  USA      [3]http://envsci.rutgers.edu/~robock
     ---------- Forwarded message ----------
     Date: Thu, 27 Aug 2009 17:03:46 +0100
     From: Rupert Wyndham <rupertwyndham@googlemail.com>
     To: robock@envsci.rutgers.edu, tlgrove@mit.edu
     Subject: AGU and Dr. P. Jones
     Gentlemen
     Please be advised that the letter attached has today been airmailed to
     you.
     Yours truly
     RCE Wyndham
     --------------------
     Published online 12 August 2009 | Nature  460, 787 (2009) |
     doi:10.1038/460787a
     Nature News
     Climate data spat intensifies
     Growing demands for access to information swamp scientist.
     Olive Heffernan
     A leading UK climatologist is being inundated by
     freedom-of-information-act requests to make raw climate data publicly
     available, leading to a renewed row over data access.
     Since 2002, Steve McIntyre, the editor of Climate Audit, a blog that
     investigates the statistical methods used in climate science, has
     repeatedly asked Phil Jones, director of the Climatic Research Unit
     (CRU) at the University of East Anglia, UK, for access to monthly global
     surface temperature data held by the institute. But in recent weeks,
     Jones has been swamped by a sudden surge in demands for data.
     Several organizations worldwide collect and report global average
     temperature data for each month. Of these, a temperature data set held
     jointly by CRU and the UK Met Office's Hadley Centre in Exeter, known as
     HadCRU, extends back the farthest, beginning in 1850. Although these
     data are made available in a processed format that shows the global
     trend, access to the raw data is restricted to academics.
     Between 24 July and 29 July of this year, CRU received 58
     freedom-of-information-act requests from McIntyre and people affiliated
     with Climate Audit, requesting access to the data or information about
     their use. In the past month, the UK Met Office, which receives a
     cleaned-up version of the raw data from CRU, has received ten requests
     of its own.
     McIntyre, based in Toronto, Ontario, is best known for questioning the
     validity of the statistical analyses used to reconstruct the past 1,000
     years of climate, but has more recently turned his attention to
     criticizing the quality of global temperature records. Jones concedes
     that raw climate data have imperfections such as duplication of
     stations but says that such minor errors would not alter the overall
     global temperature trend. McIntyre insists that he is not interested in
     challenging the science of climate change or in nit-picking, but is
     simply asking that the data be made available. "The only policy I want
     people to change is their data-access policy," he says.
     Jones says he can't fulfil the requests because of confidentiality
     agreements signed in the 1990s with some nations, including Spain,
     Germany, Bahrain and Norway, that restrict the data to academic use. In
     some cases, says Jones, the agreements were made verbally, and in others
     the written records were mislaid during a move.
     He says he is now working to make the data publicly available online. As
     Nature went to press, Jones was expected to post a statement on the CRU
     website to that effect, including any existing confidentiality
     agreements. Jones says any such data release "needs to be done in a
     systematic way".
     "We're trying to make them all available," says Jones. "We're consulting
     with all the meteorological services about 150 members [of the World
     Meteorological Organization] and will ask them if they are happy to
     release the data." A spokesperson for the Met Office confirmed this,
     saying "we are happy for CRU to take the lead on this, as they are their
     data".
     But getting the all-clear from other nations won't be without its
     challenges, says Jones, who estimates that it could take several months.
     In addition, some nations may object if they make money by selling their
     wind, sunshine and precipitation data.
     The dispute is likely to continue for some time. McIntyre is especially
     aggrieved that Peter Webster, a hurricane expert at the Georgia
     Institute of Technology in Atlanta, was recently provided with data that
     had been refused to him.
     Webster says his team was given the station data for a very specific
     request that will result in a joint publication with Jones. "Reasonable
     requests should be fulfilled because making data available advances
     science," says Webster, "but it has to be an authentic request because
     otherwise you'd be swamped."
     Indeed, Jones says he has become "markedly less responsive to the public
     over the past few years as a result of this".

     Prof. Phil Jones
     Climatic Research Unit        Telephone +44 (0) 1603 592090
     School of Environmental Sciences    Fax +44 (0) 1603 507784
     University of East Anglia
     Norwich                          Email    p.jones@uea.ac.uk
     NR4 7TJ
     UK
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