CRU's Dr. Phil Jones, world renowned climatologist, can't even plot a trend in Excel

Joe Romm would call this a “head exploding moment“. If this were a skeptic, Tamino aka Grant Foster, would sharpen his invective ginsu knives and launch a fusillade of cutlery in a blog post claiming how stupid and inept skeptics are for not being able to work a simple program like Excel.

But this is professional climate science, so none of that will happen.

Over at Climate Audit, Steve McIntyre writes:

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Phil Jones spends much of his time looking down his nose at the heathen, but then confesses to Bob Ward that he is unable to calculate a trend on his own, as in this hilarious exchange at Bishop Hill:

I’m not adept enough (totally inept) with excel to do this now as no-one who knows how to is here.

Nor it seems in Matlab, R, ODL, Fortran or any other language. No wonder that he regarded someone who could calculate principal components (like Mann) as a sort of computational prodigy.

Last year, Phil was ranked one of England’s top 100 scientists. Just imagine the ranking that he could have achieved if he knew how to calculate a trend by himself.

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This is from FOIA2011 email 1885.txt

Don’t worry Dr. Phil, help is on the way!

I’d like to suggest to our readers that they purchase copies of this book and send them to Phil as a Christmas gift. Click image to order a copy. For UK residents, use the Amazon UK Link.

Here’s Dr. Phil’s address below. Amazon allows Christmas gift giving, and you can send a nice note along too. I suggest we fill his messy office (From Climategate1) with these books.

Maybe if gets so many he’ll give them to students, and he’ll actually be doing something useful. As for Romm and Foster, send them coal.

Prof. Phil Jones

Climatic Research Unit

School of Environmental Sciences

University of East Anglia

Norwich

NR4 7TJ

UK

Here’s the full email, note what Bob Ward concludes at the end (my bold):

 From: Phil Jones

Sent: 20 December 2007 13:58

To: Bob Ward

Subject: Re: More nonsense on climate change

Bob,

Quickly re-reading this it sounds as though I’m getting at you. I’m not – just at the idiots who continue to spout this nonsense. It isn’t an issue with climatologists. All understand. If I tried to publish this I would be told by my peers it was obvious and banal. I will try and hide it in a paper at some point. I could put it on the CRU web site. I’ll see how I feel after the Christmas Pud.

I would have thought that this writer would have know better! I keep on seeing people saying this same stupid thing. I’m not adept enough (totally inept) with excel to do this now as no-one who knows how to is here.

What you have to do is to take the numbers in column C (the years) and then those in D (the anomalies for each year), plot them and then work out the linear trend. The slope is upwards. I had someone do this in early 2006, and the trend was upwards then. It will be now. Trend won’t be statistically significant, but the trend is up.

This is a linear trend – least squares. This is how statisticians work out trends. They don’t just look at the series. The simpler way is to just look at the data. The warmest year is 1998 with 0.526. All years since 2001 have been above 0.4. The only year before 2001 that was above this level was 1998. So 2cnd to 8th warmest years are 2001-2007

The reason 1998 was the warmest year was that it resulted from the largest El Nino event of the 20th century in 1997/8. We’ve not had anything resembling a major El Nino event since – they have all been minor.

Using regression, it is possible to take the El Nino event into account (with a regression based on the Southern Oscillation Index). This accounts for about 0.15 deg C of 1998’s warmth. Without that 1998 would have been at about 0.38.

There is a lot of variability from year-to-year in global temperatures – even more in ones like CET. No-one should expect each year to be warmer than the previous. The 2000s will be warmer than the 1990s though. This is another way of pointing out what’s wrong with their poor argument. The last comment about CET is wrong. 2007 will be among the top 10 warmest CET years – it will likely be 2cnd or 3rd.

Cheers

Phil

Ward responds:

Dear Phil,

Thanks for responding so comprehensively. I have plotted the data before, and as you observe, the trend is up but the result isn’t statistically significant, which I think makes it open to attack. I think the problem is that NOAA made the following statement in its report on the 2006 data:

“However, uncertainties in the global calculations due largely to gaps in data coverage make 2006 statistically indistinguishable from 2005 and several other recent warm years as shown by the error bars on the [1]global time series.”

I’m not sure how to argue against this point – it appears to imply that there is no statistically significant trend in the global temperature record over the past few years.

Best wishes,

Bob