Climatic Research Unit

The establishment of the Unit owed much to the support of Sir Graham Sutton, a former Director-General of the Meteorological Office, Lord Solly Zuckerman, an adviser to the University, and Professors Keith Clayton and Brian Funnel, Deans of the School of Environmental Sciences in 1971 and 1972.

[8] The first director of the unit was Professor Hubert Lamb, who had previously led research into climatic variation at the Met Office.

[9] Lamb and others in the climatological community had for years argued that the climate system was in fact highly variable on timescales of decades to centuries and longer.

The establishment of the CRU enabled Lamb and his colleagues to focus on this issue and eventually to win the argument decisively.

In August 2009 its director, Phil Jones, told the science journal Nature that he was working to make the data publicly available with the agreement of its owners but this was expected to take some months, and objections were anticipated from National Meteorological Organisations that made money from selling the data.

Two FOIA requests for data shared with another researcher were refused by the university, and the requestors appealed this to the Information Commissioner's Office (ICO).

[23] In November 2009, hackers gained access to a server used by the CRU and stole a large quantity of data, anonymously posting online more than 1,000 emails and more than 2,000 other documents.

[24][25] Some climate change deniers including bloggers falsely asserted that a number of the leaked e-mails contain evidence supporting their global warming conspiracy theory that scientists had allegedly conspired to manipulate data[26][27][28] and to keep scientists who have contrary views out of peer-review literature.

[36] In 2011, a new analysis of temperature data by the independent Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature group, many of whom had stated publicly that they thought it was possible that the CRU had manipulated data, concluded that "these studies were done carefully and that potential biases identified by climate change sceptics did not seriously affect their conclusions".