THE CLIMATE-CHANGE scientist at the centre of a storm over hacked e-mails broke his silence yesterday to call for more transparency in his field of research.
“We do need to make more of the data available – I fully accept that,” said Phil Jones, of the University of East Anglia’s climatic research unit.
“We are facing more and more public scrutiny, and any future work we do is going to have much greater scrutiny by our peers and by the public.”
Prof Jones first came under fire last autumn when a series of e-mails, hacked from the UEA’s servers, were posted anonymously on the internet.
Some appeared to show scientists attempting to prevent their data from being disseminated to the public or even in some cases threatening to destroy some results rather than handing them over to climate-change sceptics.
Since then, Prof Jones has been criticised by the UK information commissioner for failing to respond to requests under the Freedom of Information (FoI) Act, although the incidents in question happened too long ago for the commissioner to take action.
This week, a new allegation that Prof Jones had refused to reveal his data in response to an FoI request was reported in the Guardian newspaper.
The data in question allegedly cast doubt on a 1990 study, co-authored by Prof Jones, which examined findings from weather stations in China and found that temperatures were rising across the country – not just in urban areas.
Douglas Keenan, who describes himself as an independent student of climate change, requested information on the location of the weather stations in 2007, on the basis that if some stations had moved, some of the findings would be doubtful.
Prof Jones, who has stepped aside as head of UEA climate research while an inquiry takes place, dismissed the latest allegations. The university said yesterday: “The FoI request [in question] was responded to by the university in full in 2007. The data used in the 1990 paper were indeed sent [and] uploaded on to [our] website.” – (Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2010)