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By the way, also note that if permissions are truly being refused because of the "economic value of the data", then the fact that this data is unavailable is qu

By the way, also note that if permissions are truly being refused because of the "economic value of the data", then the fact that this data is unavailable is quite significant. No one would put up a fight over releasing insignificant data, so there must be some unique and critical information there. Hence this is not a fuss over nothing. (by the by, the thing that pisses me off so much about this as a scientist is that data hiding is a direct assault on reproducibility. I can understand a company keeping some secret sauce to themselves -- no one expects Google to open source GFS. But the whole point of putting out a paper is so that the community of scholars can build on it.)

Joeboy 17y ago
> if permissions are truly being refused because of the "economic value of the data", then the fact that this data is unavailable is quite significant. No one would put up a fight over releasing insignificant data Its significance is that the people who supply the data can continue charging for it and are able to continue collecting data without being bankrupted. (Edit: how are you supposed to quote text on Hacker news?)
- ramanujan 17y ago
  My understanding is that these are national services, i.e. government run and publicly financed. This is only my understanding -- to the best of my knowledge CRU has not actually responded to inquiries for exactly which countries and services are involved (so even that is secret). In any case we should surely be able to pay for the data to be publicly accessible if it is just a question of money. To upper bound it, let's say this data is worth a billion dollars. That is still a lot less than estimated mitigation costs (and is likely a very liberal upper bound!). Whatever it costs, funds for a public database should be the first line item on any climate change bill, with NIH-style penalties for failure to deposit government funded research data.
  - Joeboy 17y ago
    I agree with you, although I suspect most of the people criticizing the CRU aren't going to respond well to the suggestion that an extra billion dollars is required for climate research.

Joeboy 17y ago

> if permissions are truly being refused because of the "economic value of the data", then the fact that this data is unavailable is quite significant. No one would put up a fight over releasing insignificant data Its significance is that the people who supply the data can continue charging for it and are able to continue collecting data without being bankrupted. (Edit: how are you supposed to quote text on Hacker news?)

ramanujan 17y ago
My understanding is that these are national services, i.e. government run and publicly financed. This is only my understanding -- to the best of my knowledge CRU has not actually responded to inquiries for exactly which countries and services are involved (so even that is secret). In any case we should surely be able to pay for the data to be publicly accessible if it is just a question of money. To upper bound it, let's say this data is worth a billion dollars. That is still a lot less than estimated mitigation costs (and is likely a very liberal upper bound!). Whatever it costs, funds for a public database should be the first line item on any climate change bill, with NIH-style penalties for failure to deposit government funded research data.
- Joeboy 17y ago
  I agree with you, although I suspect most of the people criticizing the CRU aren't going to respond well to the suggestion that an extra billion dollars is required for climate research.