LONDON — Russia and Canada are among the nations that won’t allow the British university at the center of the “climategate” leaked-e-mail dispute to release their temperature data, researchers at the school said.
Seven of 59 nations asked to allow the University of East Anglia to release weather station data have declined, according to testimony given to a British parliamentary committee Monday by Phil Jones, director of the school’s Climatic Research Unit, and UEA Vice Chancellor Edward Acton.
The data is of interest because it is used by the school and the Met Office, the government’s forecaster, to produce one of the three main global average temperature datasets used by the United Nations to show that the Earth is warming. Skeptics of climate change have been pushing for the data to be published to allow them to reproduce the series themselves.
“Several of these countries impose conditions saying ‘no, you can’t pass it on,'” Acton told the Parliament’s multiparty Science and Technology Committee in London. “Canada and Poland are among those countries saying ‘no you can’t.’ Also Sweden. And Russia is reluctant.”
The Met Office in December released records for more than 1,500 weather stations and said it would publish records for about 5,000 more outposts once the necessary permission had been obtained. About 80 percent of the data has now been released, Jones told lawmakers.
Jones, author of many of the leaked e-mails, stepped aside from his post in December, pending completion of an investigation. In one e-mail, he spoke of deleting files rather than handing data to skeptics. In a Nov. 24 statement, the school said “no record” had been deleted or altered.
Jones and Acton didn’t name all the countries that have resisted requests for the data to be published by the UEA.
“Canada has said they would rather we sent requests for their data to their web site,” Jones said. “They don’t want it on our web site.”
He didn’t provide reasons for the other nations.
“Canada releases its temperature data to anyone who requests it,” Brigitte Lemay, a spokeswoman with Environment Canada, said in an e-mailed response. “We have in the past and we will continue to make our data public. All Environment Canada official climatic data is made available without restriction to the public through our web site.”
Calls made to the embassies of Russia, Poland and Sweden in London weren’t answered.
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