“Swedes call out Jones on data availability“. Anthony Watts wants us to think that The Stockholm Initiative is an objective scientific institution commenting honestly, and of course critically, on the Climategate false controversy.

In fact, The Stockholm Initiative is simply a collection of Swedish denialist cranks. They claim “For more than 20 years, a few dozen researchers, but above all, politicians and media, have spread the notion that carbon dioxide emissions will cause a global climate catastrophe.” (Their website was down while writing this, the quote is from Google’s cache.)

Ah, cranks with Photoshop and a poor grasp of English.

Their accusation is that Dr. Phil Jones was lying when he said that Sweden had refused to allow their climate data to be released. According to The Stockholm Initiative, it is actually already in the public domain.

This leads to some interesting questions. If this claim is true, why were the denialists demanding the Swedish data from Dr. Jones? Why did they never contact the original data holders? Why was their Freedom of Information demand necessary?

My answer is that they weren’t really interested in the data, they simply wanted to harass a researcher whose conclusions didn’t suit their agenda.

2010-03-17 Update: There’s a good look at this deception on Stoat. He draws attention to the fact that The Stockholm Initiative’s legal submission about the availability of the Swedish Meteorological and Hydrological Institute’s data is false. The data was not publicly available until a few days ago. Sadly, The Stockholm Initiative is out of reach of the British legal system.