From the BBC
By Roger Harrabin, Environment analyst, BBC News
Phil Jones, the professor behind the “Climategate” affair, has admitted some of his decades-old weather data was not well enough organised.
He said this contributed to his refusal to share raw data with critics – a decision he says he regretted.
But Professor Jones said he had not cheated the data, or unfairly influenced the scientific process.
He said he stood by the view that recent climate warming was most likely predominantly man-made.
But he agreed that two periods in recent times had experienced similar warming. And he agreed that the debate had not been settled over whether the Medieval Warm Period was warmer than the current period.
These statements are likely to be welcomed by people sceptical of man-made climate change who have felt insulted to be labelled by government ministers as flat-earthers and deniers.
‘Bunker mentality’
Professor Jones agreed that scientists on both sides of the debate could suffer sometimes from a “bunker mentality”.
He said “sceptics” who doubted his climate record should compile their own dataset from material publicly available in the US.
“The major datasets mostly agree,” he said. “If some of our critics spent less time criticising us and prepared a dataset of their own, that would be much more constructive.”
His colleagues said that keeping a paper trail was not one of Professor Jones’ strong points. Professor Jones told BBC News: “There is some truth in that.
“We do have a trail of where the (weather) stations have come from but it’s probably not as good as it should be,” he admitted.
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h/t Andrew Montford, See more at the BBC here
Professor Jones is quoted as saying:
“The major datasets mostly agree,” he said. “If some of our critics spent less time criticising us and prepared a dataset of their own, that would be much more constructive.”
This kind of thinking might work in politics. During the Sixties, it was popular to say that hippies offer no alternative to the culture that they reject. Maybe that charge has some political resonance. But science does not work that way.
In science, one party puts forth a hypothesis along with the confirming results of some experiments. Critics may criticize the experiments, may present their own experimental results that disconfirm the hypothesis, or may use other means to criticize the hypothesis. It does not work to say that the critic must have his own competing hypothesis before proceeding with criticism. Reasoning or evidence that destroys a hypothesis stands on its own and cannot be criticized for failing to offer a replacement hypothesis. In fact, some of science’s greatest achievements have involved killing hypotheses without offering replacements. Phlogiston and Ether come to mind.
I can buy this explanation. Good documentation is hard to do. That he should of been a lead author in any study is a mystery.
“But Professor Jones said he had not cheated the data, or unfairly influenced the scientific process.”
Uh-huh. And I don’t get hungry after not eating for a while. To be honest with you, Dr. Jones, I would trust a thief with my wallet full of $100 bills before I would trust you. At least the thief can only steal what I have on me; you want to steal my money for years on in.
tornadomark writes:
“OMG. He destroys Mann’s Hockey stick by admitting there was a MWP! This is huge! First time an alarmist has admitted that anything about AGW is not settled!”
Bravo! You get the prize for emphasizing the most important thing that was said in this interview. Yes, for the first time someone from the Hockey Stick circle has admitted that something about AGW is not settled science. Al Gore’s head just exploded. (Just kidding. Al Gore would not understand.)
Good for Prof. Jones!
I applaud him for being “Mann” enough to admit his mistake. 🙂
Hopefully, as has seem to be happening lately, we can get past this tribalism, and construct a “robust” agreement on GW.
Prof. Jones, imo, has started the ball rolling, let all of us pro/con’s alike take this offer and do what is right for ALL of the Earth!
““sceptics” who doubted his climate record should compile their own dataset from material publicly available in the US.”
I have done just that. you are gonna love this, especially where I run through some 80 years of raw temperature graphs in an animation, correlated with the average of the yearly mean temperature.
It sure is amazing how complex Nature is.
A body that does not organize and document its data and findings should not be relied upon for advising international policy makers. These FOI requests should be able to be fulfilled with the press of a button. Instead they accuse sceptics of hounding them for data.
NASA wouldn’t launch a mars explorer with 1 million lines of unprovable, undocumented spaghetti code; and this climate change nonsense will cost a helluva lot more than that! These people are amateurs at best.
You can rely on me to do my job correctly – why can’t I rely on you? Why must we double-check your work and treat everything you do with such a heavy dose of cynicism? If you had to produce something that actually worked, you would have been laughed out of business long ago.
There is a whole lot of backing and filling going on here. Trying to fit under the Sir Muir wings are we?
So does this mean they recognize growing grapes in London, naming streets after wines, might after all have been a sign that the MWP was real? Else how would the grapes grow … hmmm.
The scam is circling the drain.
It has to be some kind of “motivation” behind this.
Did he receive a note from Russel saying ” sorry Phil, but we won’t be able to solve this problem as we’ve planed ?
I can be wrong, but I think that this interview will send a very “warm” shock wave around the globe, and a lot of its energy will be absorbed by Mann and IPCC.
I have to admit that I like it.
“When the science has this big of an impact, you better believe an army of critics with microscopes need to crawl over every square inch of data. Why would you expect anything less?”
EXACTLY!! And they should be thankful we do, not try and ignore us. That’s the big crime here.
They could never hide the medieval warming period.
There are Vikings that were buried (interred) in the permafrost in Greenland.
The permafrost was not disturbed since it froze.
It was not frozen when they were buried.
I would call that warmer then today, a lot warmer.
The Fate of Greenland’s Vikings
http://www.archaeology.org/online/features/greenland
February 28, 2000 by Dale Mackenzie Brown
They were interred hundreds of years before the Industrial Revolution.
Note for realclimate/CRU people that say the medieval warming period is based on anecdotal evidence. An artifact is something you can hold in you hand, like say, a skeleton that you chipped out of the permafrost. An anecdote is some kind of hearsay that only exists in the minds of people, like say, human induced global warming.
Also, the medieval warming period was global.
Note for realclimate/CRU people that say the medieval warming period was a local event. Do you know how absurd that sounds, Greenland alone really hot for 300 years, all on it’s own. Did they ban the jet stream or the gulfstream or did space aliens use a really big magnifying glass on Greenland. 300 years, seriously, a local event?
Trying to hide the medieval warming period was a bridge to far.
For those of you old enough to remember, Mr. Jones’ comments reminds me of 1970, when Flip Wilson won a Grammy Award for his comedy album The Devil Made Me Buy This Dress.
‘“sceptics” . . . should compile their own dataset from material publicly available in the US’
There are several data sets already in the literature that predated the IPCC’s self-serving “science.” Rhodes Fairbridge’s work reconstructing the Holocene sea levels is major among them. Modern sea levels have not come close to established sea levels of the MWP. One need not limit themselves to geophysical sciences. Anthropology, botany, and literature all provide plenty of evidence that it was warmer then than now.
History — well documented and discussed here on WUWT — shows that the proponents of the IPCC’s global warming agenda recognized as early as 1995 that the MWP posed a serious problem for them. It was out of that concern that the CRU and others deliberately worked to massage science to diminish the importance of the MWP. The discussion now cannot be limited to comparing one data set to another. It must be evaluated in the context of the deliberate effort to disparage a long-standing understanding of the climate in Europe only 1000 years ago.
Hmm. I enjoy how (non)specific climate scientists can be. “He said he stood by the view that recent climate warming was most likely predominantly man-made.” In other words, we kinda think that maybe about half of the warming is manmade–or maybe not.
“He said many people had been made sceptical about climate change by the snow in the northern hemisphere – but they didn’t realise that the satellite record from the University of Alabama in Huntsville showed that January had been the warmest month since records began in 1979. ”
WOW, a whole 40 years!!! Right when we were coming out of the era these guys were warning us was of a coming ice age. OF COURSE IT’S “Warmer”, oops, no it’s not. It’s less cold, I’ll betcha the summers in Alabama are just as hot today as they were in the previous 100 years.
Well I don’t buy it. This was his job and he knew full well the magnitude of any pronouncements or conclusions by him and his team. Being a sloppy scientist is ok if you are doing experiments in your basement, it is not acceptable when you run one of the most important scientific teams in the world with trillions of dollars at stake. If an employee of any company acted as he has he would have been fired post haste.
The emails show us that they talked openly of destroying data, subverting lawful requests for information and did everything in their power to silence scientists and “peers” who disagreed with them. Jones, Mann, all of them had a duty to the public to provide open and transparent information not biased, agenda driven results. They failed.
I’m sorry, but I’m not willing to cut him any slack. He has compromised his responsibilities and tarnished science as a respected discipline.
It is interesting to read the explanation for hiding the decline (in the Q&A section of the BBC site): ‘The 1999 WMO report wanted just the three curves, without the split between the proxy part of the reconstruction and the last few years of instrumental data that brought the series up to the end of 1999.’
…so it was actually the WMO report’s fault…
It is not hard to find papers reporting a MWP in the southern hemisphere…e.g. Mauquoy et al, Quaternary Research Volume 61, Issue 2, March 2004, Pages 148-158…..which begins “A ca. 1400-yr record from a raised bog in Isla Grande, Tierra del Fuego, Argentina, registers climate fluctuations, including a Medieval Warm Period, although evidence for the ‘Little Ice Age’ is less clear.”
I am mentioning this because Jones says ‘For it to be global in extent the MWP would need to be seen clearly in more records from the tropical regions and the Southern Hemisphere. There are very few palaeoclimatic records for these latter two regions.’ (also in the Q&A section of the BBC site).
I guess it was the “bunker mentality” that “forced” him to “hide the decline”. Yeah, not his fault, it’s that darn BM.
Probably caught it from Pachy.
Here’s the link to the Q&A: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/8511670.stm
Fantastic. Jones admits there has been no statistically significant global warming since 1995, and admits non statistically significant global cooling since 2002.
And he straight up admitted to deleting emails to avoid a FOIA request.
I think he’s still “full of it” on the “hide the decline” answer. I don’t see where one of the lines was completely tree ring data – there are three, and his email says:
“I’ve just completed Mike’s Nature trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years (ie from 1981 onwards) and from 1961 for Keith’s to hide the decline. Mike’s series got the annual land and marine values while the other two got April-Sept for NH [Northern Hemisphere] land North of 20’N. The latter two are real for 1999, while the estimate for
1999 for NH combined is +0.44C with respect to 61-90. The Global estimate for 1999 with data through Oct is +0.35C cf. 0.57 for 1998.”
Anyway, this is a pretty remarkable interview. I imagine the “warmists” are pooping their pants right now.
marchesarosa (17:20:27) :
I’m sure Phil will feel much better now, having got that off his chest. He sounds the perfectly reasonable human being we expected him to be deep down.
Well done BBC. My goodness what a change in tone!
Hurrah!
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Don’t bank on it. He is surfing the wave of the current AGW backlash, throwing the tiniest bits of what ALMOST sound like a change in his position. However, it’s strictly a CYA show designed to deflect away some of the heat from the backlash while trying to appeal to human emotion, rather than reason.
How ironic; a scientist banking on feelings to maintain his scientific position (and job), rather than using thinking and ironclad data.
“His colleagues said that keeping a paper trail was not one of Professor Jones’ strong points. Professor Jones told BBC News: “There is some truth in that.””
In other words……I’m not very good at the basic aspects of my job! But I’m honest!!! (just don’t read those emails!!)
We’d love to compile some data sets, Phil. Can you direct us to some temperature readings that haven’t been truncated, discarded, or homogenized by you, NASA, NOAA or the Kiwis? Thanks for the help, Phil.
It would be good to see the language change too. I don’t really think presenting climate science as a two sided debate is really helpful, and has led to this tribal mentality.
Open source, transparent process. Community driven.
It seemed to work for Linux
For all the grant funding funneled thru UEA, they should expect a top flight organized operation. I won’t write about the Psychological stuff he is exposing in this comment section above.