I see that Fox News has latched on to the Climategate2 email(s) revealing Phil Jones saying the DoE were happy with him not releasing station data. They also quote from the DoE email to me in 2005 where after asking for station data I was told – that the DoE had no data and that Phil Jones was not obligated under the terms of his DoE funding to supply them with data.

This follows on from the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI) late November FOI action in the US to get the DoE to reveal their correspondence with Phil Jones from 2007. We await with interest the result of the CEI efforts. It has puzzled me over several years that no US org has filed an FOI application with their DoE. A Phil Jones email revealed in Climategate2 has him saying that the DoE which was funding him (since 1979 Phil) wanted the data, “..to be well hidden.” Phil goes on to say – “I’ve discussed this with the main funder (US Dept of Energy) in the past and they are happy about not releasing the original station data.”

It is important to know that this was not always the case. Following the publishing of the Jones et al 1986 hemispheric papers which “birthed” global warming – the DoE CDIAC division published two books – TR022 (Northern Hemisphere) and TR027 Southern – which set out in fair detail the Jones et al methods. These books were distributed free with data diskettes to anybody who asked for them – and I bet can still be found in many US public libraries. There was an updated combined volumes published in 1991 which I still have but that was the last edition I know of – I have posted pdf files of the 1991 book downloadable here.
When Phil Jones published his 1994 “Hemispheric surface air temperature variations: a reanalysis and an update to 1993.” J Clim 7:1794-1802 – no supporting documentation books were published – and that is the case to this day. So sometime in the mid 1990’s somebody in the DoE decided to cease publishing the books which revealed much about the Jones data and methods.