If I were a scientist in a controversial field, where every dropped decimal point, statistical anomaly, and speculative sentence (later to be disproved, and to make even its own author blush with the memory) was liable to be mined out of my notebooks and splashed all over the tabloids, I'd sure as hell refuse to release my raw data. Indeed, I might just decide not to release any data at all, but just switch to another field. That's obviously one of the goals of this campaign of intimidation.
But that's not the same as releasing everything you ever write down to anyone who asks, which is what the original comment seemed to be suggesting.
The problem with your raw data is that, in the hands of an opponent, especially one who argues in bad faith, the word raw is quickly and easily filed off and it gets described as "your data", despite the fact that you threw it away and didn't publish it, presumably for a reason.
It's easy to make a scientist look ridiculous -- to a nonscientist -- by poking fun at their unpublished data, just as it's easy to make a great novelist look ridiculous by poking fun at their grocery lists, their kindergarten handwriting assignments, or their unpublished first drafts.
I've done a lot of data cleaning over the years, some of it geological. Yeah, there are usually some problems. But I've never had one that I couldn't resolve. Your post implicitly assumes that only one or the other can be published. Not true. As a condition of receiving grant money, document and publish ALL raw data and any cleaned data, in addition. The interwebs still has a few bits left to hold the extra.
If you're going to insist that we spend $100s of billions because of your conclusions ....
And I'd be prepared to argue for the free availability of raw data as well, if we lived in a world where it wouldn't be cherry-picked by axe-grinders and used for character assassination. I don't think we live in that world. Maybe someday.
Unfortunately, that is exactly the current problem as well, without the data being available.
The article this discussion is keyed off of Flawed climate data (http://www.financialpost.com) which argues pretty convincingly that the AGW researchers cherry-picked their data to show the "hockey stick."
The article The Economics of Climate Change http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142405274870349940457455... argues very convincingly that the AGW promoters in question had a financial axe to grind.
The purloined emails (disclaimer, I only read the commonly reported quotes) were replete with character assassination.
Between my assertions and mechanical_fish's assertions, releasing and hiding both lead to nastiness. IMHO, hiding the data caused as much or more nastiness as releasing it. Given that Good Science is verifiable, that argues strongly that the data must be released.
There's an old legal aphorism that goes, "If you have the facts on your side, pound the facts. If you have the law on your side, pound the law. If you have neither on your side, pound the table." -- http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/pound_the_table
There is a lot of table pounding going on, and it sounds like it started with the AGW researchers not having quality data that could be pounded on, so they hid the data and pounded the table.
For example, there's currently a bit of a tiff among some climate scientists over whether the statistical methods used to produce the "hockey stick" graphs are mathematically valid. These other scientists use different statistical methods which produce a different graph, and they argue that there's no intrinsic reason why the "hockey stick" method is better.
However, the "hockey stick" graphs correlate much more closely with CO2 measurements. If this other method is valid, then there needs to be an explanation of the divergence between temperature and CO2, which otherwise has been assumed to be closely related.
Given this disagreement among actual scientists, I can imagine the raucous noise produced when a whole bunch of armchair scientists get ahold of "raw" data and say, "Aha! Your data doesn't match your graphs! We're yanking your funding!"
I fully support spending tax dollars on scientific research. That said, I think that the results of this particular bit of research have already been paid for.
I'm considering paying the nine bucks and putting it up for download. Any takers?
Also: http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/02/25/mendeley-snags-2-millio...