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Letter: Data freeze

Published 16 December 2014

From Stephen Jewson

Bravo to the physicists at CERN for making their data freely available online (29 November, p 6). Can we hope that climate scientists will be inspired to follow suit?

One might think that helping solve the world’s climate problems is a more pressing issue than finding new types of boson, but basic observational data on the world’s climate is still frustratingly difficult and expensive to get hold of.

Many countries can be criticised, but the UK is one of the worst offenders, where climate data access and use is restricted by Crown copyright, and the Met Office has a team dedicated to trying to sell information on the climate.
London, UK

Issue no. 3000 published 20 December 2014

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