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
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One still needs that data flowchart.
With boxes explaining where “added value” and “homogenisation” and “fudging” and removal of rural stations is done…..
Otherwise one will never understand who is doing what….
Did CRU only use ready-fudged data from others? Or did they add some fudging themselves? Was rural stations already “removed” when CRU used the data?
Richard Wakefield–may I make one minor constructive suggestion: Please have the text in your presentations absolutely perfect; have several people proofread it. Some critics will disregard your message completely if they find a grammatical or spelling error or two. Give them no leway; give them no excuse.
Otherwise, excellent job.
Pity this question was not asked:
“When you talk about the MWP you state it may not be global because of lack of reconstructions for the SH, even though you state “MWP is most clearly expressed in parts of North America, the North Atlantic and Europe and parts of Asia.”. How does this relate to relying on a single site (Yamal) to apparently derive a global temperature reconstruction?”
Or has this be covered elsewhere?
Folks – it occurs to me that Professor Jones nibbling at the crust of humble pie is all well and good – but we must NOT lose sight of the bigger picture.
He was the boss of the department which was the main driver of the alarmist IPCC report which initiated ALL the ‘carbon reduction’ policies of every government on the planet. One or two have since wisely stepped away (China for one) – but the fact remains that most are still blundering on with policies which will have a detrimental – in some cases catastrophic – effect on the way of life of millions of people in the so-called ‘developed’ world.
This guy and his casual approach to record-keeping, and if-I can’t-think-of-another-reason-it-must-be-human-activity reasoning, MUST be pointed out to every politician on the planet (with the obvious exception of Messrs Lawson and Monckton).
The effects of his UN-funded ‘adventure’ cannot be over-emphasised – this is the single biggest scam visited on the citizens of this planet in recent history – makes the tulip episode and the South Sea Bubble look like the three cup trick in comparison.
We must keep up the pressure – vigorously and with every piece of evidence at our disposal..!
“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.”
Now I thought some of the major Skeptics did make there own datasets from avalible records and when it didn’t match they were accused of fudging the data, cherry picking, not being scientists, and Charlatans
The first rat to jump ship will probably find the softest landing. Jones screwed up – this interview is a sign of weakness. It may very well convince one of the others on the team to for full disclosure and public atonement. Which ever one of them writes the narrative of the fraud first will define it for the public, my money is on Ken. WUWT should start a poll.
A C Osborn (03:31:57) :
“Vukcevic (01:17:01) : There is perfectly good explanation, and it is not to do either with the solar or volcanic forcing :
http://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/docs/00/41/83/04/PDF/NATA.pdf
That looks a great piece of work and adds yet another level of complexity to the way that Climate works.”
Thanks, it is only part one, eventually I will add the rest (all material is collected and waiting patiently for my attention), whenever I get around to do it. For time being suffice to say there is also good correlation from 1750
http://www.vukcevic.talktalk.net/LFC8.htm
or even earlier if one assumes that climatologist H.Lamb got dating errors of 25-40 years prior to 1700, on the other hand magnetic reconstructions were not entirely reliable for that period.
http://www.vukcevic.co.uk/GandF.htm
” But Professor Jones said he had not cheated the data, or unfairly influenced the scientific process.”
Leaving aside the first claim, has not Dr Jones’s admitted dereliction in what would seem to be the nuts-and-bolts of research, i.e. being a meticulously careful custodian of data, ‘unfairly influenced the scientific process’ by rendering his conclusions uncheckable and non-reproducible?
Jones’ rationalisations sound exactly like the excuses from a 16 year-old school boy when asked to prove he has completed an assignment; hardly the sort of thing one would expect from the very highly-paid and qualified head of a major science establishment which has recieved millions in grants for what he now says he was not very good at.
And thanks, Richard Wakefield – brilliantly clear exposition.
Ane Gordon Brown is still in his own nice warm bubble, totally adrift from reality – he has spent all the UK’s money and thinks there is more out there for him to give to ‘poor countries’ – the UK is, thanks to him, a ‘poor country’!
The older I get the slower my mind works (and it was never a race car to begin with…)
Seems to me that here in the US of A we have a bit of a legal conundrum – that being the Supreme Court decided against the state of Massachusetts in a landmark case involving AGW and CO2. Now we know, from Jones’ own mouth the evidence presented was false, tainted and not to be trusted.
Sooooo,
That means the SC needs to be presented with the folly of the first case to “make things right”. Also this really calls into question the EPA rulemaking on CO2. Strikes me that any legal case defended by the Feds is a non-starter at this point. As far as Cap ‘n Tax, anyone presenting that law in congress is a dead lame duck politically.
We do have quite the tragic opera going, don’t we!
Mike
@richard Wakefield: Maybe argue that warmer nights are consistent with UHI effects. (Heat stored in asphalt and stone buildings leaching out.)
I’m astounded at our huge battalion of allies in the letters columns this year. A year or two ago they were comparatively rare. How did so many people bone up on the topic, despite the lack of assistance from Wikipedia and the online reprints on the topic from the MSM back then? Someone should write an article on this unusual popular refusal to swallow the swill.
The inability to maintain a proper audit trail of your work is to my mind, a firing offence for any professional. Whether deliberate, or by incompetence is immaterial. When so much is at stake, the quality of your work, documentation and record keeping should be beyond reproach.
I am sorry, I have no sympathy for this man. This is a well orchestrated plan with a few soft mea culpa’s to divert attention and ensure a soft landing. Most of us on this forum would have been fired instantly had we shown such sloppy work and such deviousness, unless it was condoned by our superiors, and I therefore assume it was, and is, condoned by his.
Welcome to the real world Dr Jones!
“David (09:07:37) :
[…]
One or two have since wisely stepped away (China for one) – but the fact remains that most are still blundering on with policies which will have a detrimental – in some cases catastrophic – effect on the way of life of millions of people in the so-called ‘developed’ world.”
Our chancellor Angela Merkel had the nickname “Klima-Kanzlerin” (climate chancellor). Together with Gordon she spearheaded the EU group at COP15 (but wasn’t dumb enough to put a number on her financial willingness).
Since COP15 we have heard nothing of her, in January the germans were worrying that we don’t have a government anymore… could it be that they are busy planning their way out of the mess?
If you shorted some carbon trading stocks on Friday you are a very happy person today.
Richard Wakefield (17:52:17) :
Great video! Did you make that?
Any one really interested in temperatures should look at this video. It brought out a few concepts that I had not considered or seen elsewhere:
Great job! Richard, I will give you and others another concept that climate science tends to be overlooking but will take a while to compose. Will comment it here later under this post.
“in January the germans were worrying that we don’t have a government anymore.”
Our government over here in die Vereinigten Staaten has been down for a week due to the glut of snow in Washington, and the longer they’re snowbound the better for the country!
If Phil told me the sky was blue I’d check for myself.
Why would anyone ever believe anything he says about anything in future ?
Richard Wakefield (17:52:17) :
Great stuff. I would like to know how did you assembly gif or jpg into a video file.
Thanks.
RockyRoad, it was a bit of a rush job, point them out in a private email and I’ll fix them. I’m also looking for the right music for a background, got some possibilities that are appropriate.
Orson (04:37:58 on Eschenbach’s thread) …One is reminded of the famous Stanley Milgram experiments of the 1960s. In these, it was shown that people would inflict killing levels of pain on an innocent “test subject” merely on a scientists say so
Ah, at last another commenter refers to Milgram!
I feel that Phil Jones fits Milgram’s profile particularly well. Wants to please “scientific” authority, and still hasn’t a ******* clue of the level of scientific awareness of his critics. But now that the holder of “authority” is shifting, Jones is trying to shift… shiftily… IMO, he still has no clue of the maverick nature that a real scientist has to have, to question all evidence. I also think he is an archetypal example of “cleric in scientist’s clothing” whose power has grown and who tend to drive the real scientists out… Tennekes… Miskolczi and now his faithful Huxley, Zagoni… Soon and Baliunas… etc.
Thank you BBC. The operation still has a long way to drill down, and skeptics are watching, but this is real progress.
I really hope this isn’t actually an attempt to gather more funding to fix their archiving problem.. If they are desperate I have some blank CD’s, an old CD burner, an indelible black pen and a small lockable data safe they are welcome to have..
These guys really need to be taken out of the picture on any further work in this space; a failure to maintain original data in an area when it is ALL about the original data speaks volumes about how fragile their analysis really is.
Richard Wakefield
STEP AWAY FROM THAT COMPUTER AND NO ONE WILL BE HURT!!!
Seriously, before adding music please check the copyright on it – don’t put yourself in legal difficulties. If you want some licensed music let me know what type your thinking about and let me give you a few options. I have a licensed music library. If I have to say it – no charge…
Mike Bentley
INTHEDEN LLC (my production company)
Gordon Brown’s priority is the success of carbon trading which he sees tied to the success of London:
“No less chagrined must be Gordon Brown, who sees the carbon market as key to the global response to climate change, and to the economic fortunes of the City of London. As Brown told WWF in 2007, the government wanted binding limits on developed country emissions in a post-2012 climate agreement, because London was the world’s carbon trading capital, and “only hard caps can create the framework necessary for a global carbon market to flourish”.
* Thus he made it clear that the health of the carbon market took a rather higher priority than the health of the climate system.”…
“The great achievement of the (Kyoto) protocol was not to reduce carbon emissions –
* they actually rose at an increasing rate under its watch,
* three times faster in the early 2000s than during the 1990s –
but to create a market in emissions rights and notional emissions reductions worth tens of billions of dollars a year.”.. (paragraph 3 in article)
* Guardian UK, “Don’t let the carbon market die,” 1/25/10, by Oliver Tickell.
He said he stood by the view that recent climate warming was most likely predominantly man-made.
Phil buddy, could you put a robust number on that……….and a polar bear burger and fries to go.