Climatic Research Unit

Policy

Data and information laws

As part of a University the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) is subject to a number of laws regarding the processing of data and information. Two of these laws are:

Under these regulations people have the right to request access to information held by public bodies such as universities, and public bodies are under obligation to publish certain types of information about their activities. However, not all information has to be made available, there are various exemptions.

Data requests

In 2009, the University of East Anglia received a significant number of requests under these Acts (61 in July alone) regarding the work of CRU, including a request for copies of some of the weather station data underlying CRUTEM that had been sent to Georgia Tech University in the USA. These requests were refused by the University under various exemptions detailed below.

CRU hacking

In November 2009, weeks before the UN Copenhagen Summit on Climate Change, the Climatic Research Unit was hacked and over 1,000 emails to and from CRU staff were leaked and published on Wikileaks alongside various documents, code and models.

Using this leaked information climate change sceptics worked to bring the reputation of CRU and climate science into question in the media and strengthen the position of climate change sceptics at the 2009 United Nations Climate Change Conference.

The Unit was accused of misrepresenting the data they were processing in order to fit preconceived opinions about climate change resulting from human activity. However, after a thorough inquiry this accusation was found to be “patently” false by the House of Commons Science and Technology Committee. After thorough investigation the Committee found that CRU had “no case to answer”, however there was a potential breach of the Freedom of Information Act whose responsibility lay with the University rather than CRU.

Environmental Information Regulations

The request for access to the weather station data used by CRU that was received by the University of East Anglia in July 2009 fell under the Environmental Information Regulations (2004).

The Environmental Information Regulations (2004) are transposed from the EU Directive 2003/4/EC on public access to environmental information, which in turn was the EU implementation of the Aarhus Convention (1998) on access to information, public participation in decision-making and access to justice in environmental matters.

The University refused to provide the weather station datasets using the following exemptions:

  • Regulation 6 – most of the information already publicly available and accessible via the Global Historical Climatology Network website.

  • Regulation 12 (5)(a) – adverse affect on international relations due to the potential for damaging relations between UK climate research and foreign meteorological organisations who had provided data in confidence.

  • Regulation 12(5)(c) – adverse affect on intellectual property rights held by the University of East Anglia, national meteorological services and weather stations.

  • Regulation 12(5)(f) – adverse affect on the interests of the information provider (national meteorological services) many of whom had supplied the data to CRU under particular terms and conditions and had not given permission for disclosure.

The verdict

The Information Commissioner’s Office considered the University’s use of these exemptions and in June 2011 it ruled that the decision was in breach of the Regulations. The University was instructed to provide the applicant with the datasets.

Whilst the Information Commissioner’s Office recognised some of the arguments made by the University, it was ruled that it could not be evidenced that any of the issues surrounding the release of the datasets would lead to a “more probable than not... adverse affect” [ICO] on international relations, intellectual property rights or the interests of national meteorological services that provided the data to CRU. Further, the data that was available via the Global Historical Climatology Network was perceived to be too difficult to access without specific technical skills.

Since this time CRU have played an active role in ensuring that the station data used in producing CRUTEM4 is publicly available. Today, only station data that can be published online is used in the production of CRUTEM4.