Email 3497, Aug 2009, Phil Jones on McIntyre's requests for data: "it soon became clear that it was a concerted action to waste my time"

Email 3497

[Olive Heffernan] I initially tried to help him out but it soon became clear that it was a concerted action to waste my time, says Jones, who believes that McIntyre is simply interested in finding holes in the data.

[Jones] OK

Ive become markedly less responsive to the public over the past few years as a result of this

[Jones] OK

"Ive worked amazingly hard to get the data from people and now Im having this FOI act thrown at me. They appear to me to think its funny to waste my time

[Jones] maybe add .. with all these requests. Might be better to omit the second sentence altogether.

Jones, who is on the Atmospheric Observation Panel for Climate, which is a part of Global Climate Observing System, set up by the World Meteorological Organization, says that he has been working on trying to enable better access to data for 30 years. Although he agrees that the data should be made publicly available, he says that it needs to be done in a systematic way. And that may take several months, he says, as some nations will likely object if they are hoping to make money from the data. Even in the UK there are limits to making meteorological data available; daily wind, sunshine and precipitation data, for example, are a source of commercial revenue for the Met office.

[Jones]OK - except for the Panel name...