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.
This article could use some feedback on some of the latest news post-Climategate because, it would appear, that the Globe and Mail has some sort of a policy regarding not publishing any stories on the IPCC or the CRU. Comments, as usual, are open.
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/politics/prentice-attacks-quebecs-climate-strategy/article1452601/
Here’s Mark Steyn on the Independent, the Guardian, the US liberal minority media (LMM) and (hilariously) James Delingpole’s response to those who’ve been slagging him off for years – and are now on Delingpole’s side:
http://corner.nationalreview.com/post/?q=M2QyM2E1MTk2N2FiNWVlYzA0ZTI0MDgzZThkNmE2NzQ=
American Business Practices, British Integrity, Western Ethics, it doesn’t get more “X”-rated than that. It matters not what the issue may be, weather, medical care, climate, autism, banking practices, contracts, perks for politicians, spacetravel, measles-mumps-rubella (MMR) vaccines, if there’s a buck to be made, you can bet your last dollar some worthless lowlife business ‘person’ (sorry ladies) will pay some other worthless lowlife “scientist”, who will hire some politician to poison, rape, and/or murder some innocent good for very little nobody to get their hands on her pitiful life’s savings (or real estate).
___________
Check link below. Sounds so much like Climategate
http://abcnews.go.com/Health/AutismNews/autism-british-doctor-andrew-wakefield-started-autism-vaccine-debate-ethics-debacle/story?id=9713197
How can the IPPC honestly claim that they rely on peer-reviewed research when they cite a paper, which makes claims about the supposed minimal effect of UHI based on weather stations, which only exist somewhere in Narnia? It beggars belief.
On the response by CRU… that must certainly be Jones that wrote that letter. Else, there is someone else pulling the strings there… the same AGW strings as before.
Interesting that Phil Jones earned Tom Wigley’s opprobrium. From what I can piece together, it was Wigley who presided over CRU’s most active period of deletions and “improvements” (in the name of data storage).
Now, of course, he’s ensconced amidst teraflops of storage at the Univeristy Corporation of Atmospheric Research (UCAR), modelling away out of the limelight.
Tim Ball’s take on Wigley:
http://www.canadafreepress.com/index.php/article/17364
Doug Keenan,
where are you? Can you comment on the UEA statement?
Mike D. (21:23:56) :
You are you an incorrect approach to scientific fraud and cover ups. Jones et al are co-conspirators. The crime is multiple counts of criminal conspiracy to defraud, falsify, misrepresent and cover up scientific research and underlying data, etc. They can all go down for the count.
Congratulations to the Guardian and The Independent, two ‘Green’ papers who obviously put principal before ideology on this occasion. Perhaps they will be seen to be the catylist that will bring the house of cards crashing down forcing the BBC and the other big dailys to give far more balanced reporting on the subject.
Do Americans Understand the Significance of these Stories?
Mirroring some of the comments of other UK based readers I am still in a state of mild incredulity at reading these stories published in the Guardian and Independent.
These two journals, but particularly the Independent, have been stalwart promoters of the AGW cause. This turnaround defies belief. What has caused it? Even with all the criticisms of AGW in the wake of the Himalayan debacle there was no evidence in recent days of any real change in the attitude of these two papers.
From a British perspective it’s quite astonishing: It’s as though the Papacy conceeded Martin Luther had a point. Do American ( and Aussies, Kiwis, Springboks, Canadians, Germans et al ) do Americans appreciate the significance of these articles?
Another Hockey Team — More Problems in Journal Peer Review
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/8490291.stm
This is a report on the BBC concerning leading stem cell researchers writing an open letter about papers being blocked from publication by a clique. Members of the clique also ensure that their or their followers’ papers are published in prestigious journals even if there is only a modest element of scientific worth in them. It seems that complaints about hockey teams are not limited to climate science.
From the article:
This is all very curious. It’s only been a few weeks since the Guardian carried this banner headline (referring to Copenhagen):
And since the Independent published a special section entitled:
Pielke on the 2008 paper of Jones
http://pielkeclimatesci.wordpress.com/2009/03/23/a-new-paper-has-appeared-urbanization-effects-in-large-scale-temperature-records-with-an-emphasis-on-china-by-jones-et-al-2008/
It looks to me as if Phil Jones is being thrown under the bus in a big way.
Still no major stories in NZ press other than the usual “this looks awful but really, it changes nothing” spin.
I saw the revelations on the front page of the Guardian today and I nearly bought a copy. But I came to my senses just in time!
It might interest non-British readers to know that the Guardian is where all left-leaning levels of local and national government advertise their highly paid, politically correct jobs such as “diversity outreach officers” – a process which is is otherwise known as buying votes.
I think CRU clarification lacks credibility on several points:
– It should include the actual Chinese locations used on Jones 1990 paper instead of the statement that they where handled on response to FOI request.
– A link to the FOIA record where it gives record of the fullfilment of this FOI request.
– It should include a link to used raw data for the used stations, and also the processed data after adjustments.
Climate email row: scientists speak out
http://www.channel4.com/news/articles/science_technology/climate+email+row+scientists+speak+out/3524137
As Phil Jones, the man at the center of the climate change emails row, finally gives an account of himself, Peter Liss, his temporary replacement at the head of the University of East Anglia’s climate research unit, tells Channel 4 News Jones will get his job back and be vindicated.
Professor Phil Jones, of the University of East Anglia’s climatic research unit, has faced allegations that he covered up flawed data on temperature rises. But he said the 20-year-old study questioned by sceptics “stands up to scrutiny” and was corroborated by more recent work.
The research centre has been under fire from climate sceptics since 13 years of emails were stolen from university’s servers and posted online in November in the run-up to the UN climate talks in Copenhagen. One newspaper claimed Professor Jones withheld information from sceptic Douglas Keenan, who queried data from Chinese weather stations used in a 1990 study on global warming.
Professor Jones said he was confident the paper, which drew on 42 urban and 42 rural sites, was correct because it was validated by the new data. And he said: “I am confident in my mind the site movements that might have taken place at some of the sites were not that important to affect the average of the 42 sites.”
The paper also used records from Australia and what was then the USSR, over which no questions have ever been raised, he said. He said that some of the Chinese sites may have moved to warmer or cooler places, and that it was the large scale average that was the key issue. The later study showed an average 0.1ºC warming per decade due to urbanization and 0.15ºC of climate warming each decade between 1951 and 2004.
Peter Liss, acting director of the university’s climatic research unit, told Channel 4 News: “I think there is no question that the global temperature record produced by the climatic research unit is absolutely correct and of course it is vindicated by two other institutions in the United States, who have looked at the data and processed it in their ways. It is almost impossible to see a difference between the results so I think the results from the climatic research unit are rock solid.”
Reports claim the Met Office has found mistakes in the research, but Professor Peter Liss insists any problems will not have a major effect on the report’s findings. He said: “Of course flaws are worrying and as soon as we know about them they will be corrected if they are flaws. But I think these flaws will be rather small details and I very much doubt they will make any significant difference to the global data set and the temperature record the climatic research unit has developed over the years. I don’t think the accusation of sloppiness will stand. I think the scientists involved, who I know rather well, are very serious scientists. I think sloppiness is a statement you can easily make but is very hard to sustain. Obviously there is a concern because the media have been leaping on what I consider to be small details, sometimes accurately but generally not accurately.
“I think that does make doubts in the public’s mind but I think the politicians seem to still be fully on board, they are making their commitments following the Copenhagen conference and all the major nations have signed up to their commitments. So I think the politicians judge it rather differently to some of the public. Of course if we are to cut carbon emissions it is all of us that will have to do the cutting.”
Professor Liss also criticized the information commissioner for a lack of communication with the university. He added: “As far as I am aware, the university has not received from the office of the information commissioner the judgment on the case. The last university heard about it was last August and the university has complied with all requests from the freedom of information office to provide data or reasons why they cannot provide data. I was extremely surprised to read about the information commissioner’s thoughts and opinions in the newspapers rather than from the office directly. It sounds rather irregular. The university has been in contact and I don’t think they’ve had any definitive answers out of them.”
For the iterested
http://ams.allenpress.com/perlserv/?request=get-abstract&doi=10.1175%2F2007JCLI1348.1
http://ams.allenpress.com/perlserv/?request=forward-links&doi=10.1175%2F1520-0442%282003%29016%3C2941%3AAOUVRI%3E2.0.CO%3B2&ct=1
Kate (11:49:33) : Lie, lie, that something….Well, it seems that they will keep singing their global warming (now Climate Change) mantra until a world binding agreement is reached ,…occidental civilization collapses and green paradise blooms.
Cheers with Kool-Aid!!
Anthony – screaming “ewwww” won’t change anything, you are becoming part of the MSM. Over the long term, the internet and the blogosphere will obliterate other forms of media. The evidence to support this is already clear with newspapers and others clearly suffering from a negative feedback loop caused by the creation of the internet. They should probably sue Al Gore for inventing it. Of course that assumes a high level of sensitivity to internet creation. There could very well be a positive feedback loop unaccounted for which has not yet emerged.
LEAKED!
Both the Guardian and the Independent actually referred to the CRUtape letters as “leaked,” not “hacked.”
In related news, squadrons of aerobatic swine were sighted over Fleet Street…..
….as an aside and slightly OT, swear words are a huge part of my vocabularly which I refrain from using on other people’s blogs. May I use h-e-hockeystick-hockeystick instead? and will the moderators all me to shorten this to h-e-briffa-briffa? Or would h-e-double-Jones be more appropriate?
In defence of the CRU, it must seem the world is getting warmer when your bum is on fire.
Sam
UK Met office have all their min/max/median (they call average) temps available here : http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/climate/uk/stationdata/ – pick station from pull down & there’s the data.
I put Oxford & Argmah into an SQL data base & play from time to time – don’t have enough time to work out how to publish