Testing Time for Climate Science

On 31 March 2010, a British parliamentary committee exonerated Philip D. Jones, director of the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia, of personal wrongdoing in his conduct and management of research. Climate science fared less well. The Science and Technology Committee concluded in its report that the focus on a single individual had been misplaced: “we consider that Professor Jones's actions were in line with common practice in the climate science community” ( 1 ). Those practices included routine refusals to share raw data and computer codes. The committee judged that this had to change and that all future raw data and methodological work should be publicly disclosed.