Email 752, Aug 2009, Willis Eschenbach to UEA: ""My dog ate the confidentiality agreements" doesn't cut it in the scientific world, where billions of dollars hang on your data"

Email 752

Call me crazy, but I don't think that "we think we might have made a confidentiality agreement sometime with somebody from somewhere, but we don't know who or where or when" is an adequate excuse to shield data from an FOI request...Science depends on replicability. You are promoting your dataset as a suitable basis for making billion-dollar decisions on what we should do on regarding the "global warming" supposedly shown by your dataset. But under your secrecy policy, your results cannot be replicated...."My dog ate the confidentiality agreements" doesn't cut it in the scientific world, where billions of dollars hang on your data. If you can't show your figures, you should be ashamed to publish them under the guise of scientific data.