Sure, we’ve all made some doozies (me included) but you have to admit this exchange between top climate scientists Tom Wigley and Phil Jones is downright hilarious.
No wonder he has trouble with Excel.
Tom Nelson nails the decadal scale error:
Email 3235, Mar 2004, more stellar paleo work by Phil Jones. Given that he was born in 1952, he calculates that he must have been 28 in 1970
[Phil Jones] Tom, I presume you meant Jan 18, 2005 ! In 1965 you would have been 25 – your heydey. Mine was when I was 28 in 1970 ! Some people do work beyond 65, but the examples I’ve heard of have only been doing teaching
[Wigley] Phil, Good news. You are correct, my 65th bithday is Jan. 18, 1965. I thought retired persons were allowed to be employed up to one-third time for the next 5 years?
Phil Jones (climatologist) – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Philip D. Jones (born 1952) is a climatologist at the University of East Anglia,
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Amusing, but not really worthy of comment on this site. Part of the pleasure of reading this site is the general refusal to go for the cheap shot.
All those who would like the post removed say: “Aye!”
Like some responses here, the alarmists will probably cry “they’re even calling us out for typos.. desperate, much?”, however DonK31 sums it up well:
“Those who claim to have all the answers better have them”.
Make no mistake (pun intended): these guys are strongly influencing the livelihoods of everyone on the planet.
Leave the post up. This is the highest level of mathematics most journalism majors can check for themselves.
Richard deSousa says:
January 17, 2012 at 12:21 pm
“So, here is Jones denying access to his work because he’s afraid of somebody finding errors? Then he flubs math 101… hehe”
Hmmmm… maybe we don’t want the data after all…… too….. painful….
Kasuha says:
January 17, 2012 at 11:52 am
Is this blog still about science?
Have you noticed the opening words at the top of every page?
“Commentary on . . . ”
At issue here is that PJ sent him the email to correct an error on the year and age, and then screws up his own. I know if I was going to point out the error, even nicely like he did, that I would not have a similar error in my reply. Too funny.
“Tom, I presume you meant Jan 18, 2005 ! In 1965 you would have been 25 – your heydey.”
These guys would be dangerous if allowed out with a checkbook!
A far most revealing Jonesian Slip – I think – appears later on in this email. With retirement on his mind and after outlining the various machinations for getting more tax-payers money in hand, Phil states: “So busy times the nest few weeks getting the best deal”.
we all make ’em! 🙂
We know that Professor Doctor Phil Jones mentions that he cannot use Excel to create a graph, and then calculate a trendline with the data.
Yet, the MSM ignored this issue.
Now, what is so important about this statement?
We know that Ponzi was found out when he asked a close associate of his how to transfer some cash to his family in Italy. This alerted people to the fact that this clever financier can’t even transfer money to relatives; yet, his scheme was based on foreign exchange differences.
Now I know that as a British subjects we accept the fact that our Prince Royal is challenged by the workings of a toothpaste tube, and that his butler is there to do it for him, yet we would expect that even Fred the Shred know how to use his own bank card and PIN number as head of a bank. In the same vein, what use is newspaper reporter that doesn’t know a simple task such as hacking a phone 🙂
Ponzi was found out when his ignorance of basic foreign exchange transactions came to light. We would have expected that in a normal environment, the fact that Phil Jones was shown to be a ten-thumbed idiot, his credentials as a serious scientists would have been questioned.
A simple slip is not worthy of a post and risks becoming a personal attack.
Not really the way to go.
Maybe we can cut him in half and count the rings.
tib et al, yes, unfortunately this post is a misjudgement, unworthy of the blog. Please file it under “Failed Humor”. There are plenty of reasons to ridicule Prof Jones but this is not one of them.
Well, the world is ready to spend trillions of dollars based in no small part on this man’s ability to do math and stats and to exercise his logical ability. Pointing out that the man has trouble with math and stats and arithmetic is probably fair game.
He s apparently in good company as so many of the people of a climatological bent seem to have trouble with these matters.
Question for Phil et al: You are known by the company you keep — so if you and your buddies can’t even perform simple arithmetical operations…how can you keep the world’s temperature records? It’s a fair question…
“A little nonsense now and then is relished by the wisest men.” – Willy Wonka (Roald Dahl)
Alan Wilkinson,tib et al….the biggest mistake climate skeptics have been making is NOT taking the fight to the enemy. The AGW cultists kill us with every little error,the same should be reciprocated. And no. Doing so does NOT lower us to their level.That is just a saying for moral cowards. “Pleasing your enemies does not make them friends” (h/t SDA).
Photoshop is much easier than Excel, even Al Gore says so, and he invented the internet.
Here’s some hard fact expressed as math.
The rank of 2011 in weather related insurance pay out: #1.
The second place year, 2008
regardless of the cause it is time for all you smart guys to get to work on ways to feed us
cause things are going badly and fast
There are 10 types of people in this world, those who understand binary and those who don’t.:-)
The more you look at him, the more Phil Jones seems the perfect example of the Peter Principle – someone promoted to his level of incompetence. But this says nothing in favor his Wigley, his predecessor, either.
Tom Nelson is finding some priceless email exchanges, isn’t he?
Justthinkin says: “The AGW cultists kill us with every little error,the same should be reciprocated.”
No, they don’t. They merely expose themselves as propagandists and consequently they are losing the public debate. WUWT must not fall into the same traps.
In 3254.txt, Phil Jones wrote:
“Chris Vincent will be Dean from August, when Trevor takes on his new PVC post for
research here at UEA ! Chris seems much more honest than Trevor – hopefully not famous
last wrods.”
Interesting to read a UEA professor’s opinion of Trevor Davies’s honesty.
@Tom 3:35 pm:
Speculation, speculation, speculation. Please, prove cause and effect – and in your own words, do it with math.
tom, you say you are expressing something as math, then give us two bytes of statistics resultants. Please, show your work. In real math you have to show your work. You can’t just pop a number down and get credit for it.
Can you tell me, mister mathematician, are these payouts adjusted for inflation? What stat method was used to compile the results? Did they consider if there were any facts that might assign some cause other than global warming?
The old record for tornadoes in a day, week, moth and year was, for all I believe, 1974 (which was a helluva month, right when Hank Aaron was going after Babe Ruth’s all-time home run record), right in the middle of the 1940-1975 negative curve on the temperature reconstructions. Were you out there before this year, telling everybody that cool trends cause tornadoes to proliferate?
With hurricanes since 2005 in a long lull and 2011 one of the “lulliest” years n record, what are we to think, about tornadoes being up and hurricanes down?
Do you think it might be more complex than one statistics resultant? or is everything one-cause-equals-one-and-only-one-effect?
Did you notice that Antarctic ice mass is growing and growing, even if the Arctic (which is much much less ice, overall) ice is not? Should we conclude that the South Pole ice is correlated with ONE year of really, really active tornadoes?
A one-off correlation means – well, really… nothing. One offs? Even 6 decades of tree-rings correlation with temperatures between 1880 and 1940 (the Golden Age of tree-rings?) can’t make the a long-recognized non-correleation for the last 70 years go away. And even if the correlation comes back, those 70 years of non-correlation (known as the “Divergence Problem”) will have to be explained. According to the trees, we are in a cold spell.
In complex systems like climate, everything is correlated with everything else. (That is what makes it a system.) Trying to point at ONE cherry-picked statistic and assigning it ONE cause out of the multitude – if you can pick out that one cause and be proven correct in the long haul, would you please pick my next Lotto numbers?
BTW: The global warming>tornado connection has already been found to be a wrong speculation.
Steve Garcia
@hum 2:07 pm:
“At issue here is that PJ sent him the email to correct an error on the year and age, and then screws up his own. I know if I was going to point out the error, even nicely like he did, that I would not have a similar error in my reply. Too funny.”
There is a term for this kind of mistake. Under Muphry’s Law, Wikipedia opens with
It is not being presented as science, just as a bit of fun at Phil Jones’ expense. I don’t see a problem.
Now that fact that this genius cannot handle basic XL, well, that might be a bit more revealing.