The Climatic Research Unit (CRU) is a component of the University of East Anglia and is one of the leading institutions concerned with the study of natural and anthropogenic climate change.[1]
It has around thirty research scientists and students and has developed a number of the data sets widely used in climate research, including the global temperature record used to monitor the state of the climate system,[2] as well as statistical software packages and climate models.[3]
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The CRU was founded in 1971 as part of the university's School of Environmental Sciences. The establishment of the Unit owed much to the support of Sir Graham Sutton, a former Director-General of the Meteorological Office, Lord Solly Zuckerman, an adviser to the University, and Professors Keith Clayton and Brian Funnel, Deans of the School of Environmental Sciences in 1971 and 1972.[4][5] Initial sponsors included British Petroleum, the Nuffield Foundation and Royal Dutch Shell.[5] The Rockefeller Foundation was another early benefactor, and the Wolfson Foundation gave the Unit its current building in 1986.[4] Since the second half of the 1970s the Unit has also received funding through a series of contracts with the United States Department of Energy to support the work of those involved in climate reconstruction and analysis of the effects on climate of greenhouse gas emissions.[6]
The first director of the unit was Professor Hubert Lamb.[5] He had led research into climatic variation at the Met Office and was chair of the UN's World Meteorological Organisation, which already studied climate trends and the effect of pollution upon them.[5] The possibility of major weather changes and flooding attracted attention to the unit and sponsorship by major insurance companies wanting to mitigate their potential losses.[5] Prior to the Unit's establishment, it had widely been believed by the meteorological establishment that the climate was essentially constant and unvarying.[7] Lamb and others in the climatological community had for years argued that the climate system was in fact highly variable on timescales of decades to centuries and longer. The establishment of the CRU enabled Lamb and his colleagues to focus on this issue and eventually to win the argument decisively.[4]
Hubert Lamb retired in 1978. His successors were Tom Wigley (1978-93), Trevor Davies (1993-1998), Jean Palutikof and Phil Jones (jointly 1998-2004) and Phil Jones (2004-2009).[8] In 1984, the unit moved to a new cylindrical building designed by Rick Mather.[9] In 2006, this was named the Hubert Lamb Building in honour of the first director.
At the time of its establishment the CRU set out four key aims, which still remain valid:
One of the CRU's most significant products is the global near-surface temperature record compiled in conjunction with the Hadley Centre for Climate Prediction and Research. First compiled in the early 1980s, the record documents global temperature fluctuations since the 1850s. The CRU compiles the land component of the record and the Hadley Centre provides the marine component. The merged record is used by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in all its publications.[6] It is also involved in a study of Eurasian climate over the last 10,000 years based upon tree ring data and a study of European climate in the last 200 years based upon temperature records.[11] It is a participant in MEDALUS — the Mediterranean Desertification and Land Use project.[11] The ultimate custodians of the raw data are the national meteorological services that originated the data; CRU retains most but not all the raw data.[12]
It published a quarterly journal, Climate Monitor.[11] This ceased publication in 1998, being replaced by an online version, Climate Monitor Online.[13]
The CRU collates data from many sources around the world. The CRU's director, Phil Jones, told the science journal Nature that he was working to make the data publicly available with the agreement of its owners but this was expected to take some months, and objections were anticipated from national meteorological services that made money from selling the data. It was not free to share that data without the permission of its owners because of confidentiality agreements, including with institutions in Spain, Germany, Bahrain and Norway, that restricted the data to academic use. In some cases the agreements were made orally, and some of the written agreements had been lost during a move. Despite this, the Climate Research Unit has been the focus of attention by climate change sceptics who have made numerous requests under the Freedom of Information Act for data used by the unit's scientists. Nature reported that in the course of five days in July 2009 the CRU had been "inundated" with 58 FOI requests from Stephen McIntyre and people affiliated with his blog Climate Audit requesting access to raw climate data or information about their use.[14]
In November 2009 hackers gained access to a server used by the CRU and stole a large quantity of data, anonymously posting online more than 1,000 emails and more than 2,000 other documents.[15][16] Some climate change sceptics and bloggers have asserted that a number of the leaked e-mails contain evidence that scientists had conspired to manipulate data[17][18] and to keep scientists who have contrary views out of peer-review literature.[19][20] Critics of the climate change consensus assert that the e-mails undermine the theory that global warming is being caused by human activities and have dubbed the incident "Climategate."[21] All these accusations have been denied by CRU spokepersons, and the CRU's researchers stated that the e-mails had been taken out of context and merely reflect an honest exchange of ideas.[22] [23]
Professor Phil Jones, Director of the Climatic Research Unit, temporarily stood aside from his post on 1 December 2009 pending an independent review.[24] He has called the charges that the emails involve any "untoward" activity "ludicrous."[20]
Sir Muir Russell has been named as the independent reviewer with a mandate to examine the e-mails and other information "to determine whether there is any evidence of the manipulation or suppression of data which is at odds with acceptable scientific practice and may therefore call into question any of the research outcomes."[25]
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