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 CR

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.