Excerpt from the Nature article here
Central to the Russell investigation is the issue of whether he or his CRU colleagues ever published data that they knew were potentially flawed, in order to bolster the evidence for man-made global warming. The claim specifically relates to one of Jones’s research papers1 on whether the urban heat island effect — in which cities tend to be warmer than the surrounding countryside — could be responsible for the apparent rise in temperature readings from thermometers in the late twentieth century. Jones’s study concluded that this local effect was negligible, and that the dominant effect was global climate change.
In the paper, the authors used data from weather stations around the world; those in China “were selected on the basis of station history: we chose those with few, if any, changes in instrumentation, location or observation times”, they wrote.
But in 2007, amateur climate-data analyst Doug Keenan alleged that this claim was false, citing evidence that many of the stations in eastern China had been moved throughout the period of study. Because the raw data had been obtained from a Chinese contact of one of Jones’s co-authors, Wei-Chyung Wang of the University at Albany in New York, and details of their location had subsequently been lost, there was no way of verifying or refuting Keenan’s claim.
Jones says that approaching Wang for the Chinese data seemed sensible at the time. “I thought it was the right way to get the data. I was specifically trying to get more rural station data that wasn’t routinely available in real time from [meteorological] services,” says Jones, who asserts that standards for data collection have changed considerably in the past twenty years. He now acknowledges that “the stations probably did move”, and that the subsequent loss of the details of the locations was sloppy. “It’s not acceptable,” says Jones. “[It’s] not best practice.” CRU denies any involvement in losing these records.
Jones says that he did not know that the weather stations’ locations were questionable when they were included in the paper, but as the study’s lead author he acknowledges his responsibility for ensuring the quality of the data. So will he submit a correction to Nature? “I will give that some thought. It’s worthy of consideration,” he says.
The full Nature article is here
======================================
Doug Keenan writes in a comment to the nature article:
This news report discusses my work on the Chinese weather-station data, but provides no references for that work. The main reference is this: Keenan, D. J. Energy & Environment, 18, 985-995 (2007). It is freely available on the web.
The news report also misrepresents my allegations.
My principal allegation is that some of the data on station histories never existed. Specifically, Jones et al. (1990) claim to have sourced their data from a report that was published by the U.S. Department of Energy and the Chinese Academy of Sciences. Yet for 49 of the 84 meteorological stations that Jones et al. relied upon, the DOE/CAS Report states “station histories are not currently available” and “details regarding instrumentation, collection methods, changes in station location or observing times … are not known”. Those statements imply that the quoted claim from Jones et al. is impossible: “stations were selected on the basis of station history: we chose those with few, if any, changes in instrumentation, location or observation times”. My paper presents more details; some updates are available via http://www.informath.org/apprise/a5620.htm .
I have also alleged that, by 2001, Jones knew there were severe problems with the Chinese research and yet he continued using that research–including allowing it to be relied on by the IPCC 2007 Assessment Report. Evidence is in Section 2.4 of my 2007 paper. Jones was one of the reviewers for my paper (the reviewer tally was 2-1 for acceptance, with Jones being the 1). Although Jones had many comments, he did not attempt to dispute this allegation.
Additional support for the latter allegation is given in my submission to the UK House of Commons Science and Technology Committee. A copy of my submission is available via http://www.informath.org/apprise/a5610.htm . The submission additionally alleges that Jones acted unscrupulously when he was reviewing my paper.
The news report further claims that “e-mails and documents were illegally obtained from the university”. In fact, it is not known whether the leak of the e-mails and documents was illegal: the leak might be covered under whistle-blower legislation.
Lastly, with regard to Jones’ question “Why don’t they do their own reconstructions?”, the answer is that the data has not been released. In particular, regarding the Medieval Warm Period, what is arguably the most valuable tree-ring data extant remains unavailable. Details on that are at http://www.informath.org/apprise/a3900.htm .
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Dr. Robert (10:04:49) :
Smart man indeed!
Well….. He certainly is now making more factual statements
and leaving it to the minions to justify their positions. As the
red in their faces overwhelms the flesh tones an audible
pop may be heard.
Keenans paper is at http://multi-science.metapress.com That link takes you to a list of journals including Energy & Environment, click on it and scroll down until you find Keenans paper. If I read the CRU emails correctly, Mann was suggesting putting the lawyers on E&E and Keenan. Wish he had, what a laugh that would have been!
nature cannot do a simple question-answer interview without considerable (re-?)framing.
What’s in the interview, then?
-Jones says, he acted in good faith
-he was wrong
-science was bad
-critics are bad
-therefore, science is right and he is right
-critics are bad for true science, must not be listened to
OMG
The UEA seem to think differently:
http://www.uea.ac.uk/mac/comm/media/press/CRUstatements/guardianstatement
“1. The FOI request was responded to in full
2. The accuracy of the data and results was confirmed in a later paper
3. The CRU findings were corroborated by other papers used by the IPCC”
/mango
This ship is sinking fast! As a consequence of AGW unraveling ConocoPhilips, BP, Caterpillar and a raft of other corporate heavy-hitters have withdrawn from the U.S. Climate Action Partnership.
That is really good news. Those companies and many others were only “on board” in the first place as a defensive measure. Many were “bought” with promises to their lobbyists of special consideration under cap-and-trade rules by the U.S. administration. Their membership in “the club” gave the illusion of consensus when they were really there under duress.
Rats off a sinking ship! Toot, toot goes the warning horn! Three cheers go the attacking skeptics!
http://online.wsj.com/article/BT-CO-20100216-707790.html?mod=WSJ_latestheadlines
They say confession is good for the soul, and I commend Jones for trying to come clean. Maybe he has no choice, because the AGW fraud is finally being covered by the main stream media. For those who haven’t seen it, I’m pasting below the lead editorial from today’s Wall Street Journal:
The Continuing Climate Meltdown
More embarrassments for the U.N. and ‘settled’ science.
It has been a bad—make that dreadful—few weeks for what used to be called the “settled science” of global warming, and especially for the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change that is supposed to be its gold standard.
First it turns out that the Himalayan glaciers are not going to melt anytime soon, notwithstanding dire U.N. predictions. Next came news that an IPCC claim that global warming could destroy 40% of the Amazon was based on a report by an environmental pressure group. Other IPCC sources of scholarly note have included a mountaineering magazine and a student paper.
Since the climategate email story broke in November, the standard defense is that while the scandal may have revealed some all-too-human behavior by a handful of leading climatologists, it made no difference to the underlying science. We think the science is still disputable. But there’s no doubt that climategate has spurred at least some reporters to scrutinize the IPCC’s headline-grabbing claims in a way they had rarely done previously.
Take the rain forest claim. In its 2007 report, the IPCC wrote that “up to 40% of the Amazonian forests could react drastically to even a slight reduction in precipitation; this means that the tropical vegetation, hydrology and climate system in South America could change very rapidly to another steady state.”
But as Jonathan Leake of London’s Sunday Times reported last month, those claims were based on a report from the World Wildlife Fund, which in turn had fundamentally misrepresented a study in the journal Nature. The Nature study, Mr. Leake writes, “did not assess rainfall but in fact looked at the impact on the forest of human activity such as logging and burning.”
The IPCC has relied on World Wildlife Fund studies regarding the “transformation of natural coastal areas,” the “destruction of more mangroves,” “glacial lake outbursts causing mudflows and avalanches,” changes in the ecosystem of the “Mesoamerican reef,” and so on. The Wildlife Fund is a green lobby that believes in global warming, and its “research” reflects its advocacy, not the scientific method.
The IPCC has also cited a study by British climatologist Nigel Arnell claiming that global warming could deplete water resources for as many as 4.5 billion people by the year 2085. But as our Anne Jolis reported in our European edition, the IPCC neglected to include Mr. Arnell’s corollary finding, which is that global warming could also increase water resources for as many as six billion people.
The IPCC report made aggressive claims that “extreme weather-related events” had led to “rapidly rising costs.” Never mind that the link between global warming and storms like Hurricane Katrina remains tenuous at best. More astonishing (or, maybe, not so astonishing) is that the IPCC again based its assertion on a single study that was not peer-reviewed. In fact, nobody can reliably establish a quantifiable connection between global warming and increased disaster-related costs. In Holland, there’s even a minor uproar over the report’s claim that 55% of the country is below sea level. It’s 26%.
Meanwhile, one of the scientists at the center of the climategate fiasco has called into question other issues that the climate lobby has claimed are indisputable. Phil Jones, who stepped down as head of the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit amid the climate email scandal, told the BBC that the world may well have been warmer during medieval times than it is now.
This raises doubts about how much our current warming is man-made as opposed to merely another of the natural climate shifts that have taken place over the centuries. Mr. Jones also told the BBC there has been no “statistically significant” warming over the past 15 years, though he considers this to be temporary.
* * *
All of this matters because the IPCC has been advertised as the last and definitive word on climate science. Its reports are the basis on which Al Gore, President Obama and others have claimed that climate ruin is inevitable unless the world reorganizes its economies with huge new taxes on carbon. Now we are discovering the U.N. reports are sloppy political documents intended to drive the climate lobby’s regulatory agenda.
The lesson of climategate and now the IPCC’s shoddy sourcing is that the claims of the global warming lobby need far more rigorous scrutiny.
In the Nature article:
“I don’t think we should be taking much notice of what’s on blogs because they seem to be hijacking the peer-review process.” – Phil Jones
Dr. Jones has realized his past world has ceased to exist and is making strides in learning a new world view. However, he’s missed something here. Blogs are not hijacking the peer review process, they’ve found that the peer review process needs major reform. I’m a bit surprised Jones made this comment, several journals also see it’s time to reform the process and are exploring new and quicker routes to publication.
It may well be that Climategate may deserve some credit for hastening that process. Yet another benefit of opening the process and letting the light in.
Several years ago, New Hampshire impeached the head of its Supreme Court and a wave of reform into the courts procedure and judicial review ensued. However, since then thay’ve managed to sew the rents in the curtain back up and citizens have as little visibility into judicial process as before.
I don’t think that will happen at CRU or science in general, but Thomas Jefferson’s line “The price of liberty is eternal vigilance” applies quite well here.
From today’s Wall Street Journal in case you haven’t seen it:
The Continuing Climate Meltdown
More embarrassments for the U.N. and ‘settled’ science.
It has been a bad—make that dreadful—few weeks for what used to be called the “settled science” of global warming, and especially for the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change that is supposed to be its gold standard.
First it turns out that the Himalayan glaciers are not going to melt anytime soon, notwithstanding dire U.N. predictions. Next came news that an IPCC claim that global warming could destroy 40% of the Amazon was based on a report by an environmental pressure group. Other IPCC sources of scholarly note have included a mountaineering magazine and a student paper.
Since the climategate email story broke in November, the standard defense is that while the scandal may have revealed some all-too-human behavior by a handful of leading climatologists, it made no difference to the underlying science. We think the science is still disputable. But there’s no doubt that climategate has spurred at least some reporters to scrutinize the IPCC’s headline-grabbing claims in a way they had rarely done previously.
Take the rain forest claim. In its 2007 report, the IPCC wrote that “up to 40% of the Amazonian forests could react drastically to even a slight reduction in precipitation; this means that the tropical vegetation, hydrology and climate system in South America could change very rapidly to another steady state.”
But as Jonathan Leake of London’s Sunday Times reported last month, those claims were based on a report from the World Wildlife Fund, which in turn had fundamentally misrepresented a study in the journal Nature. The Nature study, Mr. Leake writes, “did not assess rainfall but in fact looked at the impact on the forest of human activity such as logging and burning.”
The IPCC has relied on World Wildlife Fund studies regarding the “transformation of natural coastal areas,” the “destruction of more mangroves,” “glacial lake outbursts causing mudflows and avalanches,” changes in the ecosystem of the “Mesoamerican reef,” and so on. The Wildlife Fund is a green lobby that believes in global warming, and its “research” reflects its advocacy, not the scientific method.
The IPCC has also cited a study by British climatologist Nigel Arnell claiming that global warming could deplete water resources for as many as 4.5 billion people by the year 2085. But as our Anne Jolis reported in our European edition, the IPCC neglected to include Mr. Arnell’s corollary finding, which is that global warming could also increase water resources for as many as six billion people.
The IPCC report made aggressive claims that “extreme weather-related events” had led to “rapidly rising costs.” Never mind that the link between global warming and storms like Hurricane Katrina remains tenuous at best. More astonishing (or, maybe, not so astonishing) is that the IPCC again based its assertion on a single study that was not peer-reviewed. In fact, nobody can reliably establish a quantifiable connection between global warming and increased disaster-related costs. In Holland, there’s even a minor uproar over the report’s claim that 55% of the country is below sea level. It’s 26%.
Meanwhile, one of the scientists at the center of the climategate fiasco has called into question other issues that the climate lobby has claimed are indisputable. Phil Jones, who stepped down as head of the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit amid the climate email scandal, told the BBC that the world may well have been warmer during medieval times than it is now.
This raises doubts about how much our current warming is man-made as opposed to merely another of the natural climate shifts that have taken place over the centuries. Mr. Jones also told the BBC there has been no “statistically significant” warming over the past 15 years, though he considers this to be temporary.
* * *
All of this matters because the IPCC has been advertised as the last and definitive word on climate science. Its reports are the basis on which Al Gore, President Obama and others have claimed that climate ruin is inevitable unless the world reorganizes its economies with huge new taxes on carbon. Now we are discovering the U.N. reports are sloppy political documents intended to drive the climate lobby’s regulatory agenda.
The lesson of climategate and now the IPCC’s shoddy sourcing is that the claims of the global warming lobby need far more rigorous scrutiny.
Dave F (09:18:22) :
Seems like Jones is realizing the complaints against his work actually have merit, as opposed to being oil-funded attacks on his credibility. Still, it seems he owes Mr. Keenan a big fat apology.
And the rest of the world as well. Of course, he’s not the only one that needs to apologize. And, I don’t think apologies will suffice.
This paper doesn’t need to be corrected — it needs to be thrown out. A search should be done on the literature and any paper citing this work should also be withdrawn.
Start over, and this time provide the raw data.
gcb (10:15:55) :
Personally, I think CO2 is affecting tree rings. I know some white pine saplings that are growing at an astounding rate. (At least to me and I’m not qualified to generalize.) I may get some photos of them this spring.
In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised that is the issue that required the decline to be hidden. If it’s something else, then whatever is behind the divergence may taint the entire history that lies in the treering data.
Doug Keenan,
I think you should be happy with what you’ve accomplished. Expecting Wang’s superiors find him fraudulent, or hoping that Jones would admit to Science that he committed fraud is now too much to hope for. A fair reading of this article makes it clear that at best, the station data was faulty and should not have been used. (This work is clearly not repeatable.) At worst, it appears that the station data was fraudulently put together to bolster the case for AGW. In either case, both Wang and Jones look like poor excuses for scientists.
Jones himself says that “the stations probably did move”, and that the subsequent loss of the details of the locations was sloppy. “It’s not acceptable,” says Jones. “[It’s] not best practice.”
I think that’s as close as anyone can get to a mea culpa and continue to work in his field. If Jones said much more than that, he’d be admitting to fraud, and he won’t ever do that.
Congrats, Doug! You’ve done a great thing here.
The article in Nature is itself quite questionable. They obviously did not fact-check anything with Keenan before publication. They didn’t fact-check and independently verify any of what Jones claimed, either.
If Jones is trying to rehabilitate himself, he has a long way to go. He is still in “CYA” mode and seems to be justifying himself, not apologizing for anything.
We can all thank Al Gore for his invention of the interweb. Otherwise, the other side of the story would never come to light.
A most probable “Submission to Court” scenario..
OT but relevent in a small way
Here we have some comments from the last major project Mr Muir was involved in, the building of the New Scottish Parliment Building, orginal budget £50M, actual £360M ish.
The Accounting Officer and Permanent Secretary, Muir Russell, was semi-detached
from the process.
Tory peer Lord Fraser said there was no single “villain of the piece” when it came to the problems which plagued the building of the Scottish Parliament.
Announcing his findings, the inquiry head said it still astonished him that ministers were kept in the dark over cost increases.
He cleared the late First Minister Donald Dewar of misleading MSPs.
However, he named Sir Muir Russell, former head of the Scottish civil service, as a man with responsibility.
He said: “Clearly the top man was Sir Muir Russell – there was a number of very sharp criticisms made of him in the Scottish Parliament, and I respectfully adopt their recommendations.”
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/low/scotland/3656166.stm
There is nothing to rejoice in here regarding Jones’s new found ‘truthfulness’.
Jones says that approaching Wang —seemed sensible at the time. “I thought it was the right way to get the data. I was specifically trying to get more rural station data that wasn’t routinely available in real time—“
He now acknowledges that “the stations probably did move”, and that the subsequent loss of the details of the locations was sloppy. “It’s not acceptable,” says Jones. “[It’s] not best practice.”
Jones says that he did not know that the weather stations’ locations were questionable when they were included in the paper, but as the study’s lead author he acknowledges his responsibility for ensuring the quality of the data.
He was simply shifting the blame sideways.
So will he submit a correction to Nature? “I will give that some thought. It’s worthy of consideration,” he says.
“Nature” was simply on a fishing expedition for another story. This is simply more obfuscation on both Jones’ and “Nature’s” part.
In my view, Jones grabbed this stuff with alacrity. He didn’t care about its veracity because it fitted the story he wanted to tell. This is consistent with all the evidence of his behaviour in the ‘climategate’ emails. Now he excuses himself by hiding behind ‘sloppiness’
Doug Keenan’s response shines the light upon the value of both Jones’s words and “Nature’” motives.
Doug
“I thought it was the right way to get the data. I was specifically trying to get more rural station data that wasn’t routinely available in real time from [meteorological] services,” says Jones….
Right, when you’re after good “rural” station data it’s always best to go to China, because they’re all Peasants over there to begin with and thus their data would also be especially “pristine”, at least if things hadn’t been warmed up by “peasant unrest” – but which never happens in China anyway. Plus since the end of WWII they’re Communists, and we all know how scrupulous they are in preserving historical facts and data.
Doug Keenan is to be congratulated for identifying this deception and directly confronting it with Phil Jones and the editors of Nature.
Like a kid caught with his hand in the cookie jar, I do not expect Phil Jones or the editors of Nature will admit any wrongs.
With kind regards,
Oliver K. Manuel
Hope is the last thing to die.
I’m hoping Phil Jones will come clean and fess up, step-by-step, and drain this AGW swamp. He’d be doing science a great service is he did.
Of course my hopes here are hopelessly low.
Douglas J Keenan (10:10:53)
I’m really happy to see your comment here. Congratulations on being vindicated.
I know you and others have, in the past, contributed much to the ‘sane’ side of this controversy, but only since ‘Climategate’ is anyone listening. More power to you.
Frugal Dougal (09:46:18) :
I’m with Dr Robert: respect to Jones. We need to make it as easy as possible for people to shed their idées fixées and come over to the side of truth and transparency, heaven knows they must be getting it in the neck from former associates with a lot to lose.
————-
Reply
True, but consider all those high-powered, “peer-reviewed” research papers over the decades that have been based on the flawed CRU mantra. Perhaps between climate colleagues, love means never having to say you’re sorry.
gcb (10:15:55) :
why are the dendrochronology reconstructions not showing a CO2 effect?
Because the particular reconstructionists are not doing real science, which doesn’t mean they would necessarily be able to show a CO2 effect if they were. It just roughly means that they haven’t shown anything much because they don’t do real science.
I’d like to know to what degree the Jones and Wang paper has corrupted the whole temperature record. Is it true that this paper was used to help validate and verify the satellite tropospheric series?
====================================
It seems that all the data used by Jones et al and the CRU had so many issues that they were not fit for purpose.
Now that Jones is ‘fessing-up’ I suspect others will follow, or risk taking the drop. We are only seeing the very tip of the iceberg at the moment – soon much more will be revealed.