UPDATE: UEA/CRU has responded!
http://www.uea.ac.uk/mac/comm/media/press/CRUstatements/guardianstatement
Looks like a homogenized data comparison. h/t to WUWT reader “splice”
==============================
It looks like Doug Keenan has been right all along. He must feel vindicated tonight. See more about Doug’s long road here in an earlier WUWT report.
Excerpts from the Independent and the Guardian
Climategate scientist ‘hid flaws in data’, say sceptics
Professor in leaked email scandal tried to hide fact that numbers he used were wrong
The “climategate” controversy intensified last night when the senior British scientist at its centre, Professor Phil Jones, faced fresh accusations that he attempted to withhold data that could cast doubt on evidence for rising world temperatures.
…
But the new allegations go beyond refusing FOI requests and concern data that Professor Jones and other scientists have used to support a record of recent world temperatures that shows an upward trend.
Climate sceptics have suggested that some of the higher readings may be due not to a warmer atmosphere, but to the so-called “urban heat island effect”, where cities become reservoirs of heat and are warmer than the surrounding countryside, especially during the night hours.
Professor Jones and a colleague, Professor Wei-Chyung Wang of the State University of New York at Albany suggested in an influential 1990 paper in the journal Nature that the urban heat island effect was minimal – and cited as supporting evidence a long series of temperature measurements from Chinese weather stations, half in the countryside and half in cities, supplied by Professor Wei-Chyung. The Nature paper was used as evidence in the most recent report of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
However, it has been reported that when climate sceptics asked for the precise locations of the 84 stations, Professor Jones at first declined to release the details. And when eventually he did release them, it was found that for the ones supposed to be in the countryside, there was no location given.
Climate sceptics have demanded the two professors now withdraw their heat island paper. Professor Wei-Chyung was investigated by his university, but exonerated, but the emails indicate there was also concern among Professor Jones’ s colleagues at UEA, including from Dr Tom Wigley, his predecessor as head of the CRU, about the Chinese weather station data and Professor Jones’s continuing reliance on it.
From The Guardian:
Leaked climate change emails scientist ‘hid’ data flaws
Exclusive: Key study by East Anglia professor Phil Jones was based on suspect figures
By Fred Pearce
Phil Jones, the beleaguered British climate scientist at the centre of the leaked emails controversy, is facing fresh claims that he sought to hide problems in key temperature data on which some of his work was based.
A Guardian investigation of thousands of emails and documents apparently hacked from the University of East Anglia’s climatic research unit has found evidence that a series of measurements from Chinese weather stations were seriously flawed and that documents relating to them could not be produced.
Jones and a collaborator have been accused by a climate change sceptic and researcher of scientific fraud for attempting to suppress data that could cast doubt on a key 1990 study on the effect of cities on warming – a hotly contested issue.
Today the Guardian reveals how Jones withheld the information requested under freedom of information laws. Subsequently a senior colleague told him he feared that Jones’s collaborator, Wei-Chyung Wang of the University at Albany, had “screwed up”.
…
The apparent attempts to cover up problems with temperature data from the Chinese weather stations provide the first link between the email scandal and the UN’s embattled climate science body, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, as a paper based on the measurements was used to bolster IPCC statements about rapid global warming in recent decades.
Wang was cleared of scientific fraud by his university, but new information brought to light today indicates at least one senior colleague had serious concerns about the affair.
It also emerges that documents which Wang claimed would exonerate him and Jones did not exist.
The revelations come at a torrid time for climate science, with the IPPC suffering heavy criticism for its use of information that had not been rigorously checked – in particular a false claim that all Himalayan glaciers could melt by 2035 – and UEA having been criticised last week by the deputy information commissioner for refusing valid requests for data under the Freedom of Information Act.
The Guardian has learned that of 105 freedom of information requests to the university concerning the climatic research unit (CRU), which Jones headed up to the end of December, only 10 had been released in full.
The temperature data from the Chinese weather stations measured the warming there over the past half century and appeared in a 1990 paper in the prestigious journal Nature, which was cited by the IPCC’s latest report in 2007.
Climate change sceptics asked the UEA, via FOI requests, for location data for the 84 weather stations in eastern China, half of which were urban and half rural.
The history of where the weather stations were sited was crucial to Jones and Wang’s 1990 study, as it concluded the rising temperatures recorded in China were the result of global climate changes rather the warming effects of expanding cities.
The IPCC’s 2007 report used the study to justify the claim that “any urban-related trend” in global temperatures was small. Jones was one of two “coordinating lead authors” for the relevant chapter.
The leaked emails from the CRU reveal that the former director of the unit, Tom Wigley, harboured grave doubts about the cover-up of the shortcomings in Jones and Wang’s work. Wigley was in charge of CRU when the original paper was published. “Were you taking W-CW [Wang] on trust?” he asked Jones. He continued: “Why, why, why did you and W-CW not simply say this right at the start?”
Read the complete report at the Guardian here
See also this story from the Guardian:
• How the location of weather stations in China undermines data
As I’ve been saying for a long time, the dodgy surface data is the key and UHI is a real issue. The Menne et al 2010 preemptive strike against my surfacestations work (using my own early data they purloined) shows just how desperate NCDC’s Tom Karl is becoming.
What I find most interesting though is that Phil Jones appeared to have a crisis of conscience, because in 2007 he authored a paper that appeared in JGR without much notice (but known now thanks to Warwick Hughes).
The paper is titled: Urbanization effects in large-scale temperature records, with an emphasis on China
In it, Jones identifies an urban warming signal in China of 0.1 degrees C per decade. Or, if you prefer, 1 degree C per century. Not negligible by any means. Here is the abstract:
Global surface temperature trends, based on land and marine data, show warming of about 0.8°C over the last 100 years. This rate of warming is sometimes questioned because of the existence of well-known Urban Heat Islands (UHIs). We show examples of the UHIs at London and Vienna, where city center sites are warmer than surrounding rural locations. Both of these UHIs however do not contribute to warming trends over the 20th century because the influences of the cities on surface temperatures have not changed over this time. In the main part of the paper, for China, we compare a new homogenized station data set with gridded temperature products and attempt to assess possible urban influences using sea surface temperature (SST) data sets for the area east of the Chinese mainland. We show that all the land-based data sets for China agree exceptionally well and that their residual warming compared to the SST series since 1951 is relatively small compared to the large-scale warming. Urban-related warming over China is shown to be about 0.1°C decade−1 over the period 1951–2004, with true climatic warming accounting for 0.81°C over this period.
Even though Jones tries to minimize the UHI effect elsewhere, saying the UHI trends don’t contribute to warming in London and Vienna, what is notable about the paper is that Jones has been minimizing the UHI issues for years and now does an about face on China.
It was almost as if Jones was trying to appease his own conscience by publishing a paper that supported a UHI effect in China.
But then we see in his comments about my praise of the paper and WUWT commenters as a “load of plonkers”
http://eastangliaemails.com/emails.php?eid=965&filename=1237474374.txt
From: Phil Jones <p.jones@xxxxxxxxx.xxx>
To: Gavin Schmidt <gschmidt@xxxxxxxxx.xxx>, “Michael E. Mann” <mann@xxxxxxxxx.xxx>
Subject: FYI
Date: Thu Mar 19 10:52:54 2009
Gavin, Mike,
See the link below! Don’t alert anyone up to this for a while. See if they figure it out for themselves.
I’ve sent this to the Chief Exec of the RMS, who said he was considering changing data policy with the RMS journals. He’s away till next week. I just wanted him to see what a load of plonkers he’s dealing with! I’m hoping someone will pick this up and put it somewhere more prominently.
The responses are even worse than you get on CA. I’ve written up the London paper for the RMS journal Weather, but having trouble with their new editor. He’s coming up with the same naive comments that these responders are. He can’t understand
that London has a UHI of X, but that X has got no bigger since 1900.
I’m away all next week.
Cheers
Phil
“Phil Jones, the director of the Hadley Climate Center in the UK.”
—
Thomas C. Peterson, Ph.D.
NOAA’s National Climatic Data Center
151 Patton Avenue
Asheville, NC 28801
Voice: +1-828-271-4287
Fax: +1-828-271-4876
Prof. Phil Jones
Climatic Research Unit Telephone +44 (0) 1603 592090
School of Environmental Sciences Fax +44 (0) 1603 507784
University of East Anglia
Norwich Email p.jones@xxxxxxxxx.xxx
NR4 7TJ
UK
Too funny. “X” got no bigger since 1900.
We’ll see when this all gets sorted out who is a “load of plonkers” and who isn’t.
Leon Brozyna (21:10:16) :
Climategate
Pachaurigate
TERIgate
Disastergate
Glaciergate
Amazongate
Bootgate
and now … Chinagate.
The new collective is Claim-itgate!
ie someone just has to claim it and they stick it in the IPCC report.
The warm is turning.
I agree this is old news. I said so in Tips & Notes yesterday when the first alert & link on this Guardian-item was posted. But let them take the credit. If they credited the story to WUWT, there’d be lots of Guardian-reader warmists commenting there that WUWT has no credibility. At least they gave Anthony a heads-up, which I interpret as an awkward attempt to sooth him for their behavior. I hope this site adopts a policy of “let the credit go.”
In the big picture, the most underplayed aspect of this affair (to me) is the ease with which the CRU managed to effect “regulatory capture” of their FOI officer. This has disturbing implications far and wide. I urge the UK press to do a thumb-sucker series on the topic in general. It would be a statesmanlike thing to do.
Richard North says that Fred Pearce has not been happy with his treatment by Pachauri and Hasnain recently.
That may explain the reason for the two articles that did not tow the ‘agreed’ line.
It’s a rip tide, anyway.
This is amazing! When even the Guardian starts writing articles like this, the dam really is leaking. Naturally they’re very careful to say that AGW is still certain, concrete, settled and undeniable, yet the whole article really denies this. Cognitive dissonance indeed.
I’ve blogged about this at http://sunriseconsulting.blogspot.com/2010/02/climategate-something-very-strange-is.html, naturally linking to this excellent post.
I was reminded of Comical Ali speaking during the Iraq invasion: while the bombs were going off behind him he continued to state that there was “nothing to see here”. That seems to be the situation now.
Is Albany still a University?
Not being able to see the fraud in Wang’s paper classifies Albany more or less as High School.
But seriously: it is amazing how short sighted Albany behaves when it comes to differentiate between short term and long term damage. And Penn State?
Jones and Wang presented a fraudulent paper… but the Earth is still warming, the rest of the science is still ok
Translated: Investors, this is your warning. Get the **** out of carbon trading. Nobody believes you any more. But we’re giving you time to cover your *****.
I can’t understand what the email from Jones ‘that London has a UHI of X, but that X has got no bigger since 1900.’ is about. Surely X has increased very considerably as can be seen from this very global warming centric report from ‘Red’ Ken Livingstone’s department when he was Mayor of London.
http://www.london.gov.uk/mayor/environment/climate-change/docs/UHI_summary_report.pdf
[snip]
London’s UHI was first ‘discovered’ at the turn of the 19th century by Luke Howard, who is widely known as the man who named the types of clouds. Over the course of 9 years he noted an UHI effect of approximately 2oC (warming) during the night and -0.2oC (cooling) during the day. By the middle of the 1960’s an average difference of 4-6oC in nocturnal temperature between the central city of London and its surroundings was evident. More recently urban climatologists have noted extreme UHI intensities in excess of 7oC. For example during the August 2003 heat wave, the UHI intensity reached 9oC on occasions.
[cont]
Sooo, looks like X is getting bigger to me. I doubt that there are many places in the UK that are completely free of modern influence because we’re so heavily built upon. That may explain why the UK stations referenced on the GISS station data site
http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/station_data/
are such an odd mix. There are many stations listed as going back to 1880 but most were discontinued in the 50s, 60s and 70s. Only 3 stations seem to run the full span from 1880 to 2009 and they don’t much look like each other. Most of those stations currently being used seem to have started 1931 or later. The current clutch of stations might be chosen in an attempt to minimise the UHI but it would be nice to see the oldest stations continued for comparison.
@neil Hampshire (00:09:20) :
“My radio wakes me here in the UK.
I listen to “The Today Programme” on the BBC.
I could not believe my ears. The BBC, yes the BBC, covered the story on at least three occassions this morning. The tide has turned.”
Wakes me too, though this morning, despite the apparent good news, I was listening whilst shaving when ‘Thought for the Day’, the religious slot came on. Bishop Tom Butler reminded us that it was Candlemas, half way between midwinter and spring etc etc and then launched into a sermon on how it was fine to be sceptical but, if the sceptics are proved wrong, we in the evil, big carbon-booted west should be ready, like Christ, to sacrifice ourselves on behalf of others. I now have a nasty shaving cut.
Bishop Tom is renowned here for his apparently relaxed attitudes to refreshments at Christmas:
“The Bishop of Southwark escaped disciplinary action even though a report by a senior judge found “substantial evidence” to indicate he was drunk.
He was said to have been the worse for alcohol in December after he climbed into the back of a stranger’s car and threw toys out of it, saying “I’m the Bishop of Southwark. It’s what I do.”
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-460220/Whitewash-claims-bishop-cleared-drunkenness.html
Oh, and ‘Thought For The Day’ doesn’t permit religious sceptics to put *their point of view either. Maybe WUWT could take this up for us secular humanists when AGW is finally put down with a stake in its heart!
London UHI has not changed since 1900? I can’t go back to 1900, but I go back as far as when Croydon was London’s only airport. There was a lot more tarmac in London last time I was there, than what there was when I was a boy. The biggest difference, though, was the number of high rise buildings. When I was a boy there was nary a one, unless you want to count St. Paul’s. There were no motorways, of course, and there was still a fair amount of heavy horse drawn traffic, brewer’s drays hauled the beer barrels and great shire horses pulled the wagons that brought the coal. To me it would be astounding to find that there has not been a sharp increase in London’s heat signature since the late ‘thirties, regardless of any climate element.
“He can’t understand that London has a UHI of X, but that X has got no bigger since 1900.”
Might well be. A study about Klementinum temperatures (a former Jesuite college in the center of Prague, a long record) compared with those of neighboring rural stations has shown that UHI effect stopped increasing in 60’s, when the ring of concrete neighborhoods around the city was more or less finished. Any further developer activities did not add a iota to this level.
Seems that it is not possible to adjust for an UHI by a general algorithm.
Yes, most of us knew about this months ago. As I wrote in a comment to another post, The Times basically cribbed information from my blog post http://buythetruth.wordpress.com/2010/01/26/un-ipcc-rotting-from-the-head-down/ four days earlier without giving me credit and made it out to be a new finding last Saturday. What the heck! The MSM tried desperately to ignore Climategate (with few exceptions in the UK, such as the Daily Express) hoping it would go away. We heard ridiculous noises from commentators that it was a storm in a teacup and it would all blow over. It wasn’t and it hasn’t. Instead, it is opening the floodgates. Little by little the MSM are beginning to realize that the tide is going out and they are being left stranded. But they can’t tell their readers that this was all revealed months ago, so it has to be presented as new scoops. It’s cynical, but let’s be grateful that the information is getting a wider hearing. I thought it was quite ironic that the Guardian piece was written by none other than Fred Pearce, the journalist who has written a lot of green alarmism, and who was of course the route to getting Syed Hasnain’s ridiculous 2035 date into New Scientist, for it to be cited by WWF, and WWF cited by IPCC AR4.
Here in UK this morning the main story is that the peer review process had been subverted in the biological sciences on stem cell research, with a small coterie of scientists involved in review slowing down or keeping out certain papers. It’s covered on the Web as well, see here
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/8490291.stm
-“Stem cell experts say they believe a small group of scientists is effectively vetoing high quality science from publication in journals.
-In some cases they say it might be done to deliberately stifle research that is in competition with their own.
-It has also emerged that 14 leading stem cell researchers have written an open letter to journal editors in order to highlight their dissatisfaction.
-Billions of pounds of public money is spent on funding stem cell research.
-The open letter to the major scientific journals claims that “papers that are scientifically flawed or comprise only modest technical increments often attract undue profile. At the same time publication of truly original findings may be delayed or rejected”. ”
Two of the journals mentioned as involved in this conspiracy are Nature and Science. Well, who would have guessed!? Since publication is sometimes necessary to secure future funding, these reviewers have been able to make sure that their friends’ papers get published first and get the funding, whilst denying publication and funding to the ‘competition’. Sound familiar? The BBC ran the story strongly this morning, and when their science correspondent Pallab Ghosh (who also wrote the piece linked above) was asked on the radio whether this had occurred in other sciences he failed to mention climate science. There none in his Web posting either. This failure is evidence that the BBC is still trying to ‘hold the line’. An honest correspondent would have stated that such things were under investigation in the Climategate debacle. We could add that this has been a regular feature in astronomy and astrophysics as well for many years, where this sort of corruption runs very deep and one of the worst offenders in Astronomer Royal and president of the Royal Society.
“Ralph (22:28:02) :
Firstly, London has grown considerably in the last century. The population has increased, from about 5m in 1900 to about 7m in 1990.
http://data.london.gov.uk/datastore/package/historic-census-population”
And lets not forget the daily worker migration down the M1, M3, M4 and other arterial road corridors, rail, bus and airplanes which is ~4million, the population of New Zealand. Every day!
Well, the population – and maybe some industries – in London haven’t changed by more than 20% since 1900 but I am still convinced that there are many “luxurious” sources of heat that didn’t exist 110 years ago.
Equally importantly, it’s very interesting that Jones chose London for his paper when speaking about the year 1900 – because the British Empire was near the peak at those times when Britain was a superpower (sorry, Britons) which is why the city already resembled the contemporary cities.
But virtually the whole rest of the world was growing intensely afterwards, as Britain was losing its exclusive position, and the UHI effect “X” was surely increasing since 1900 virtually everywhere else. I would have a big trouble to believe that Jones chose London “by chance” or that he doesn’t realize that he would get very different results with other cities. This is all deliberate, I guess. These are universally just propaganda tricks to confirm predetermined conclusions.
I am not really warming to the idea of adding “gate” to every controversy. I look at the whole interwoven and multifaceted problem as something more akin to a syndrome. Watergate was sooo 1970’s anyway.
So rather than “chinagate” how about the “china syndrome”. And speaking of melt-downs perhaps we should be talking about the “climate-science syndrome”.
No doubt someone can come up with something vastly more witty. Jae? Mosh?
This is devastating. For those who do not live in Europe, the Guardian and the Independent are the leading UK center left papers. Moderate in tone, supportive of ‘New Labor’, the Guardian more so, environmentally oriented, strongly in favor of the AGW thesis, strongly supporting IPCC, in favor of Kyoto, very much supporting ‘green’ energy. The Guardian is the main home of public sector job ads, and is heavily read by teachers and the public sector in general. Its sort of the house organ of New Labour.
When you find stories like this in such papers, its game over. Poor Jones. This is the home crowd, and they are booing and slow handclapping as you walk on the pitch. He did rather ask for it, but one still has to feel sorry for him.
Good grief. First the Times, which just a few months ago ran a massive advertising campaign on the London Metro based on bogus alarmist claims. And now: The Guardian?! *rubbing my eyes*
This makes life easier. Now next time somebody thinks I’ve turned into some wacko right-wing just because I question the AGW propaganda, I can point to those signs of doubt being expressed in what used to be THE newspaper preaching the holy gospel of the church of warming.
I’m wondering how good are the ground weather stations in the UK and has anyone done an independant survey of those?? Do we even know where they are??
Looks like they’re stacking fuel under a scapegoat, so that those that remain will appear cleansed.
The reason that the MSM in Britain have picked up on the story at last, is that the evidence of fraud perpetrated by the CRU and the rest of the IPCC cabal is now beyond refutation and many influential former ‘believers’ have changed their mind.
The owners of the MSM are the same people behind the scam and they are more interested in salvaging what they can of the credibility of the MSM, rather than continuing to support a failed stratagem. If the MSM fail in their role as the ‘creators of public opinion’, a powerful propaganda tool will be lost and would be very costly to replace.
Oliver K. Manuel (20:48:56) :
“Great news!
As the climate scandal unfolds, a lot more filth may be revealed.
Scientists have become instruments of propaganda for those who control grant funds.
The very foundations of astronomy, astrophysics, climatology, cosmology, nuclear, particle and solar science have been weakened by ~50 years of deceit and data manipulation.
What a sad state of affairs for science!
What a sad state of affairs for world government!
With kind regards,
Oliver K. Manuel
Emeritus Professor of
Nuclear & Space Science
Former NASA PI for Apollo”
I think it will be a good think to get people thinking about science and applying the skills of analytical thinking they have learned during the CAGW scam. Belief in science is just as dangerous as a belief in religion. Belief makes people easy to manipulate and only the truth can guarantee personal freedom.
OT.
Oliver, where do you think the standard solar model stands with the the Fermilab MiniBooNE project failing to confirm the neutrino oscillation results obtained from the earlier LSND experiment?
The MSM have started reporting around the edges of the AGW scandal. The scare stories used by the IPCC can be shot down to make entertaining news articles but Milliband and his band of Government scientists (and equivalents in other countries) will say that the basic science is still sound, unchanged and supported by the science commmunity, etc.
The killer blow for me is the excellent work that shows how the data has been manipulated to produce record warming around the planet. It demonstrates how a very small clique can produce phoney evidence, which the rest of the scientific community accepts, supports and proceeds to build on, all in good faith. If the data upon which it is all based is shown to be bad, then the peer review and scientific consensus is worthless.
That addresses the whole argument in my view, but the MSM are not running with it. Obviously they haven’t got the guts to proceed because it is such a huge story with profound consequences. They would be accusing the US Government of fraud. The agencies concerned have not responded officially as far as I can see, though I’m aware that Gavin has been rubbishing the work, so the story has been suppressed apart from in the blogosphere.
What is the next step? How do we overcome the MSM blockage? Do we start with a rock solid case study that the MSM might buy? This site has been full of these for months, without getting MSM interest. Is there a US legal route to lodge a challenge or trigger an investigation? There must be something we can do.
I would be interested to hear the views of the gentlemen who did such a fantastic job identifying and reporting the manipulation.
Luboš Motl (02:13:12)
I think most of us have got used to the idea of our not being top dog anymore so no offence taken. At least we showed the way. One thought, there is far less heavy industry in the centre of London now. There used to be breweries, foundries, glass works, power stations; all gone. Brick terraces have been replaced by glass covered office blocks. There might have been a dip after 1900 but there must have been a rise recently. Cherry picking dates again? Why not 1666 (the Great Fire) in that case.
michel (02:22:12) :
[i]This is devastating. For those who do not live in Europe, the Guardian and the Independent are the leading UK center left papers.[/i]
I live in Hong Kong, and the only thing that I know is that Guardian is the leftest newspaper in UK. When even the Guardian leave that topic that is pro-left, than it is usually quite safe to call it dead. This kind of betrayal is just like Julius Caesar seeing his son joining the force that murder him.
Et tu, Guardianus?
SFT (02:07:11): I listened to those reports too and was astounded at the failure to make the link between the stem cell controversy and this one. It’s inconceivable that those concerned didn’t spot it so it does look like obfuscation.
Even more stupidly it would have made a far better story if the link had been made so it was lousy journalism too.