The climate data wars have taken a new turn. A leading British university to an amateur climate analyst and climate sceptic.
The ruling, which could have important repercussions for environmental research in the UK, comes from the government鈥檚 deputy information commissioner Graham Smith. In January he caused consternation at the height of the 鈥�climategate鈥� affair by criticising the way that the University of East Anglia in Norwich, UK, handled sceptics鈥� requests for data from its Climatic Research Unit.
Now, following a three-year dispute between banker and climate sceptic Doug Keenan and , Smith has told the university to hand over to Keenan the results of its 40-year investigation of Irish oak-tree growth rings.
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The ruling sends a strong signal that scientists at public institutions such as universities cannot claim their data is their or their university鈥檚 private property.
Intellectual property
The researcher whose work is now public property, palaeoecologist , says: 鈥淪ets of measurements made using personal expertise and involving specialised decision-making are no longer regarded as intellectual property. In future any scientist researching on any topic which can be regarded in any way as 鈥榚nvironmental鈥� must live under the threat that they can be made to hand over their measurements.鈥�
Keenan says he believes the Irish data could bolster the sceptics鈥� case that a thousand years ago there was a widespread medieval warm period on Earth not unlike current warming. But last year Baillie and his colleague Ana Garcia-Su谩rez showing that Irish oak growth rings are a good proxy for summer rainfall, but not for temperature.
Keenan is one of a number of climate sceptics who have submitted freedom-of-information requests to the beleaguered Climatic Research Unit over the past few years. According to the British newspaper Financial Times, all those who submitted such requests are now being interviewed by police as part of a police investigation into who acquired and published a file of the unit鈥檚 emails last November, sparking the climategate controversy.
The that one of its readers, businessman and climate sceptic Sebastian Nokes, has been interviewed by police, who asked about his political and scientific opinions.
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