Here is an important US "political" angle which should be incendiary if the right people focus attention upon it. An email from the notorious Phil Jones notes that he has "happy" support from CRU's "main funder" which turns out to be the US Dept. of Energy (!!!) for the policy of "hiding" original station data from public scrutiny. In other words, US federal funding going to CRU with the specific understanding (of unnamed US bureaucrats) that CRU would stonewall all attempts to obtain original station data. Email as quoted by a poster on the Watt blog:
from blog "Watts Up With That" Ecotretas says:
November 22, 2011 at 7:59 am
Best email till now, from Phil:
Here are a few other thoughts. From looking at Climate Audit every few days, these people are not doing what I would call academic research. Also from looking they will not stop with the data, but will continue to ask for the original unadjusted data (which we don’t have) and then move onto the software used to produce the gridded datasets (the ones we do release). CRU is considered by the climate community as a data centre, but we don’t have any resources to undertake this work. Any work we have done in the past is done on the back of the research grants we get –
and has to be well hidden. I’ve discussed this with the main funder (US Dept of Energy) in the past and they are happy about not releasing the original station data. (…)
Some of you may not know, but the dataset has been sent by someone at the Met Office to McIntyre. The Met Office are trying to find out who did this. I’ve ascertained it most likely came from there,
as I’m the only one who knows where the files are here.