UPDATE: A prescient comment from Willis Eschenbach has been added to the body of the story, see below.
There’ an article in Nature Magazine which is an interview with Phil Jones of the CRU regarding his role in Climategate and what has happened in the past year. It seems to be mostly a sappy rehabilitation piece where Dr. Jones gets to play the victim and the reporter is fully sympathetic. Even more troublesome, Dr. Jones seems to have fully rationalized everything that has happened in the past year.
For example, we all vividly remember this email:
From: Michael Mann mann@xxxxx.xxx To: Phil Jones p.jones@xxxxx.xxx Subject: Re: IPCC & FOI Date: Thu, 29 May 2008 08:12:02 -0400 Reply-to: mann@xxxxx.xxx Hi Phil, laughable that CA would claim to have discovered the problem. They would have run off to the Wall Street Journal for an exclusive were that to have been true. I'll contact Gene about this ASAP. His new email is: generwahl@xxxxxx.xxx talk to you later, mike Phil Jones wrote: > >> Mike, > Can you delete any emails you may have had with Keith re AR4? > Keith will do likewise. He's not in at the moment - minor family crisis. > > Can you also email Gene and get him to do the same? I don't > have his new email address. > > We will be getting Caspar to do likewise. > > I see that CA claim they discovered the 1945 problem in the Nature > paper!! > > Cheers > Phil > > Prof. Phil Jones > Climatic Research Unit Telephone [removed] > School of Environmental Sciences Fax [removed] > University of East Anglia > Norwich Email p.jones@xxxxx.xxx > NR4 7TJ > UK
Look at what he says now about email deletion in the context of the ongoing FOI requests:
“We just thought if they’re going to ask for more, we might as well not have them.”
Regarding the Chinese Weather Station fiasco:
Jones said in a separate interview with Nature2 that he was considering a correction. He now says such a step is unnecessary and that he stands by the claims in the paper. He was on medication during the previous interview, he says, and felt under pressure then to publicly concede that he had made mistakes. He says the description of weather-station
movement “has been completely misinterpreted”.
The set of 84 Chinese stations referred to in the paper were drawn from a larger group of 265, for which the Chinese had location histories. Jones and his colleagues did not claim
that none of the selected stations had moved, only that they picked out ones that had moved the least, he says.
Such shifts do not significantly affect results, Jones says, because there was no general pattern to the station relocation: on average, ones moving to colder places were balanced by ones moving to warmer spots. But the Chinese scientist who supplied the station information has now retired and the authorities there have not released the full station-history data — making it impossible for Jones, he says, to provide the evidence to support the statement.
Okaaaayyyy. I call BS on this, because 20 years later, NCDC’s Dr. Matt Menne developed USHCN2, with a change point detection algorithm in it specifically to detect and correct change points in temperature data resulting from station moves. If station moves “don’t significantly affect results”, why did NCDC dedicate so much time and effort to develop such an algorithm? Either Dr. Jones is in CYA mode, uninformed, or both.
Professor Jones apparently hasn’t learned anything except this:
“I’m a little more guarded about what I say in e-mails now,” he says. “One thing in particular I’m doing is not responding so quickly. I might have got an e-mail in the past and responded with an instant thought in the next 10 to 15 minutes, whereas now I might leave it a day.”
In a time-line of the career of Professor Jones, the November 2010 entry is interesting:
Jones tells Nature he is on the mend, but still fears more e-mails could be released in the future.
“Jones and others connected to the CRU fear the hackers may be sitting on more stolen e-mails, but Jones feels confident the worst is behind him.”
Hmmm…
Here’s the article in Nature Magazine (PDF)
h/t to Shub Niggurath
UPDATE: I’ve added this from comments as it is very germane to the story”
I enjoyed this from the Nature article:
The e-mails also triggered several official investigations, including one by the UK Parliament, which ultimately determined that Jones had not committed any serious offences. Case closed.
As my daughter says, “In your dreams, Dad”.
They were more subtle in their timeline, lying by omission.
2005 Britain introduces the Freedom of Information (FOI) Act, giving critics a legal route to demand data from Jones and the CRU (above).
July 2009 The CRU receives 58 FOI requests in under a week as part of a blog campaign.
Makes it sound like things were going swimmingly, then suddenly the CRU is bombed with FOI requests.
In fact, I made the first request in (IIRC) 2006 for the CRU data. It was turned down. Other requests were made. We got the list of stations but not the data. They claimed there were secrecy agreements. We said OK, show us the agreements. They refused. We filed FOI requests for specific countries, about six countries at a time. That was to avoid any one of them being rejected because they entailed too much work.
That’s how we got to 58 requests in a week. Because they had blown off all of our FOI requests that had gone in one by one.
You don’t want to get 58 FOI requests, Phil?
Try answering the first one. If he had answered my initial FOI request, that would have been it for requests for the data. He could have avoided a host of grief.
Of course, the emails about the IPCC subversion were a different matter. Those are the ones that mysteriously vanished … Phil says he didn’t delete them, but somehow, they’re still gone.
Curiously, I find I feel sorry for him. He was caught in a paradigm shift, where suddenly his scientific work was being used to justify billions of dollars in expenditures. His knowledge and standards of data handling and documentation were insufficient, perhaps even wildly insufficient, to the task. They were fine when it was just him in his office fiddling with the global temperature. But …
For example, when I asked Phil for the data, I assumed it would be like almost every other database of climate information I’d dealt with. It would be in one single block, with the rows representing years and columns for station identification, monthly data, and the like. I thought it would be easy for him to email me that single block of data.
Instead, as the CRU HARRY_READ_ME file showed, there were hundreds and hundreds of individual data files. In addition, there were often identically named files that were for different stations, there was no semblance of version control, and no overall record of what files were, or where they might be located.
I was astounded when I read that. Everybody puts their data in a single block, with perhaps a second block for metadata … everybody but CRU, it seems …
That’s what I mean about how his skills and knowledge weren’t up to the task.
I see. So Nature has become Vanity Fair for scientists.
They probably wanted to get this article published before another rare and exciting winter event comes to the Isles.
The reason why Prof Jones is still in place and why the whitewashes were organised by the establishment?
“Greek PM says it at last: carbon taxes are just another way to raise revenue”
“I’ve never actually heard a major politician (let alone a national leader) admit this before: what Mr Papandreou is saying is that carbon taxes would have not have the effect of reducing emissions – because if they did, they would be useless as an additional form of revenue.”
http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/janetdaley/100063854/greek-pm-says-it-at-last-carbon-taxes-are-just-another-way-to-raise-revenue/
It is all about tax not temperature
Mike Roddy says:
November 16, 2010 at 7:39 am
How about looking at the science itself, instead of individual scientists’ private emails? “”
Ha.
Because, Mike, the emails reveal that they knew that they had no “science”. They refused requests because they had no “science”. They couldn’t defend their actions because they have no “science”.
This leaves the rest of us to the scraps we have been given. The “individual scientists’ private emails”.
They don’t want to let us see their “science”.
I am betting that there is no there, there. If, on the other hand, you are in possession of some (any at all, even the smallest amount) evidence that mankind’s piffling addition to the total CO2 flux has shifted “global temperatures” in any direction, please reveal it here and not somewhere most of us have been barred from commenting as we refused to just lie down and take a kicking because we refused to drink the kool-aid.
Why was he reinstated at all? Is his stellar worldwide reputation going to bring new business and grants flocking to the CRU? Is his high media profile likely to bring active benefit to UEA? Will Norwich become the new Seattle…global home of cutting-edge data analysis and control?
Or has he got something on Trevor Davies?
The latest article for Cancun Week covers the new scare in town – Ocean Acidification.
http://ourmaninsichuan.wordpress.com/
Pointman
Such shifts do not significantly affect results, Jones says, because there was no general pattern to the station relocation: on average, ones moving to colder places were balanced by ones moving to warmer spots.
But Jones simply doesn’t have the metadata for his UHI study to prove this contention – why no “materials and methods”, if he did the study? – and he doesn’t have the surface station and sea data for his HADCRUT reconstruction, nor any coherent algorithm for what might have been done with any data. So did Jones ever have any “research” or “science”?
@Mike Roddy
Because in ‘climate science ‘ context is very important.
Once upon a time the ‘community’ decreed: ‘We must get rid of the Medieval Warm Period’, and within a short space of time up popped Mikey Mann who produced a paper that purported to do so (though nobody really knows if it does, because not enough information is available to replicate it, and it has since been discredited).
This ‘authoritative’ (and wrong) paper was fully peer-reviewed by fellow climatarians, and they failed to spot the errors – whether for lack of ability , lack of attention or just because they wanted the results to be true. Peer review in climatology is now a meaningless concept…it gives no certainty of any ‘correctness’ other than the author has correctly produced ‘results’ acceptable to the Hockey Team…whose Grand Vizier, plucked from obscurity by a single very very well-timed paper is none other than that Parfait Knight – Mikey Mann!
And as very few authors have published their data or methods in sufficient detail to allow replication, we are asked to take the results on trust – effectively on the word of the cliamtologists c0ncerned.
Yeah right! I expect any independent observer who has read the Climategate e-mails would give a climatologist about as much credibility as I do – something less that I give to lawyers, MPs and Estate Agents.
So for the general observer to be left without any way of determining whether the ‘science’ might be true or just a complete fiction dreamt up to get another attribution under the author’s belt (or worse), then the context remains the only way to make any sort of judgment.
If , for example, some person – let us call him ‘PJ’…writes in an e-mail ‘I have just used a trick to hide the decline’, and a wee while later publishes a paper where no ‘decline’ is apparent, the context of the paper tells us a great deal about how and why ot was written.. and obviously about what was left out or concealed.
You can read a lot of the context of the Climategate e-mails in Mosher and Fuller’s excellent book ‘Climategate – The CRU Tape Letters’. And very very disturbing it is too if you care at all about the quality and integrity of science.
It is generally considered bad form to ‘diss’ a scientist in public – but dissing their work is ok if you can show that its wrong. The trouble is, we have only Phil’s word (and those of his so called peers LOL) for it that his work is correct and therefore as long as the ‘data’ is protected, he is safe!
Yet again, the whole issue is about the data, the calcs, the method and the results all being openly available for ‘proper’ independent review – but is that ever going to happen? I think not, at least not on the scale required to result in prosecutions. More likely, Jones, Mann, et al are all keeping their heads down in the hope that time passes quickly and various discovered errors can be quietly corrected before any requirement for attribution is needed!
BCBill says:
November 16, 2010 at 12:13 am
It is a bit heart wrenching to watch cognitive dissonance in action. One of the big failings of our scientific education is that scientists are not trained to recognize and deal with self delusion.
__
Now that’s an interesting idea. How would we do that?
Yes, I heard this on Radio 5 Live yesterday afternoon.
Dellingpole skewers another piece apparently behind the pay-wall that’s now the Times.
Fenton have been busy boys. You’d have thought they’d have ventured an elbow before dropping poor old Phil in the bath though. Maybe these PR wollas aren’t up to speed on the missing heat problem.
He’s backpedaling against the tide at this point and it’s humorous to watch.
What’s really revealing is that he sounds like feels his previous work is still relevant after all that’s come out. It will be very interesting to read his next paper, to see if he internalized anything.
I would look forward to more email revelations but I suspect there are none whatever Jones says. The whistleblower fired his ammo and in the end it didn’t bring Jones down. The political class cleared him and he can go back to his alarmist theories justifying more tax on average Joe. If something fresh emerges, I would be delighted but don’t hold your breath.
Just like to second Alan The Brits view…….one has to understand the British culture. Whilst we may say publicly that he is a fine fellow and the ‘establishment’ has done nothing wrong, the reality, as we all understand here in Blighty, is that the whole CRU/AGW thing is a laughing stock. We just don’t like to say so…esp to you colonials.
And I kinda feel sorry for him too, he got carried away with his own importance, his uterences were used by snake oil salesman to push an agenda he had no idea about (tax revenue and business profit) leaving him hoist by his own petard. And when the money men have decided they can’t milk it any more, the finger will be pointed at him as the one responsible for the ‘unfounded alarm’. The similarity to David Kelly is amazing, another guy who shouted wolf, then when the axeman came, tried to pretend there was not really a wolf and he never really said that there was. I hope Jones copes better with the realisation of his actions better than poor Kelly did, both ordinary guys with ordinary failings that were stuffed by the establishment.
Of course…Phil could be the leaker? And turn out to be an honourable man yet…?
Mike Roddy says:
November 16, 2010 at 7:39 am
“How about looking at the science itself, instead of individual scientists’ private emails?
http://climateprogress.org/2010/11/15/year-in-climate-science-climategate/#comments
Or maybe you can figure out a way to discredit the 40 or so major studies cited here which indicate a high probability of future catastrophe.”
I will see your 40 appeals to authority, and raise you 760.
http://www.populartechnology.net/2009/10/peer-reviewed-papers-supporting.html
♫ Mr. Jones and me tell each other fairy tales… ♫
– Counting Crows
Mike Roddy demonstrates that the CO2 obsession of AGW is corrosive to IQ.
Not one e-mail released was ‘private’, Mikey.
Think about it if you can.
If you cannot tell the difference between ‘personal’ and what was leaked, then have the %CO2 of your blood level checked stat.
Also… My prediction for the year is complete and will be posted tomorrow. 2010 will not be the hottest year. It still might be for the UAH, but for the CRU, Hadley it isn’t going to be. RSS is still a toss up, but I still think that 1998 will remain the top dog.
If the AMO drops off anytime soon it could be decades before 1998 loses the title. If anything else happens it could even be longer. The Earth is really dumping energy into space fast right now.
John Kehr
What did they do about 1945 that was so bad?
I get from the e-mail that it was “front page news” bad & they know it.
DaveE.
Robinson says: Wasn’t Mann investigated by AMERICANS?
…No, he wasn’t “investigated” at all. He was asked some irrelevant questions by people who were either his friends and colleagues, or had a vested interest in not exposing Mann’s scientific deceit.
The REAL investigations will soon get under way, and this time Mann won’t get away with his usual blustering and absurd assertions, and he will have to produce actual evidence for everything he claims to be the truth.
Phil Jones has done for climate science what Dick Turpin did for highwayman.
I don’t feel sorry for Jones, he used dishonesty to cover for bias and lack of skill. I feel sorry for the rest of us who have paid billions for this crap and continue to do so. Doesn’t it even bother him that his refusal to share data and methods means that what he is doing is not science at all ?
In addition, the delusion that what they are doing is science makes it harder to train any future scientists to a decent standard. This self deluding junk has spread into supposedly professional scientific organizations resulting in rediculously anti science public statements like that of the APS recently. Or the steaming load of anti scientific rubbish from Art Hobson in “The Physics Teacher” this month.
http://tpt.aapt.org/
For those who do not know (and wiki leaves out) Dick Turpin not only asked his victims (male) to “stand and deliver” but to “bend over and deliver” as well. UK readers will be aware of wiki’s omission.
‘I want to be remembered for the science’ says Phil ‘Climategate’ Jones to chorus of titters
http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/jamesdelingpole/100063829/i-want-to-remembered-for-the-science-says-phil-climategate-jones-to-chorus-of-titters/
He may well be
http://www.unmuseum.org/piltdown.htm
Piltdown: The Man that Never Was