Climategate

[steelish]

Climategate U-turn as scientist at centre of row admits: There has been no global warming since 1995
By JONATHAN PETRE

Data for vital 'hockey stick graph' has gone missing
There has been no global warming since 1995
Warming periods have happened before - but NOT due to man-made changes


The academic at the centre of the ‘Climategate’ affair, whose raw data is crucial to the theory of climate change, has admitted that he has trouble ‘keeping track’ of the information.

Colleagues say that the reason Professor Phil Jones has refused Freedom of Information requests is that he may have actually lost the relevant papers.
Professor Jones told the BBC yesterday there was truth in the observations of colleagues that he lacked organisational skills, that his office was swamped with piles of paper and that his record keeping is ‘not as good as it should be’.

The data is crucial to the famous ‘hockey stick graph’ used by climate change advocates to support the theory.

Professor Jones also conceded the possibility that the world was warmer in medieval times than now – suggesting global warming may not be a man-made phenomenon.

And he said that for the past 15 years there has been no ‘statistically significant’ warming.

The admissions will be seized on by sceptics as fresh evidence that there are serious flaws at the heart of the science of climate change and the orthodoxy that recent rises in temperature are largely man-made.

Professor Jones has been in the spotlight since he stepped down as director of the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit after the leaking of emails that sceptics claim show scientists were manipulating data.

The raw data, collected from hundreds of weather stations around the world and analysed by his unit, has been used for years to bolster efforts by the United Nation’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change to press governments to cut carbon dioxide emissions.

Following the leak of the emails, Professor Jones has been accused of ‘scientific fraud’ for allegedly deliberately suppressing information and refusing to share vital data with critics.

Discussing the interview, the BBC’s environmental analyst Roger Harrabin said he had spoken to colleagues of Professor Jones who had told him that his strengths included integrity and doggedness but not record-keeping and office tidying.

Mr Harrabin, who conducted the interview for the BBC’s website, said the professor had been collating tens of thousands of pieces of data from around the world to produce a coherent record of temperature change.
That material has been used to produce the ‘hockey stick graph’ which is relatively flat for centuries before rising steeply in recent decades.

According to Mr Harrabin, colleagues of Professor Jones said ‘his office is piled high with paper, fragments from over the years, tens of thousands of pieces of paper, and they suspect what happened was he took in the raw data to a central database and then let the pieces of paper go because he never realised that 20 years later he would be held to account over them’.
Asked by Mr Harrabin about these issues, Professor Jones admitted the lack of organisation in the system had contributed to his reluctance to share data with critics, which he regretted.

Asked about whether he lost track of data, Professor Jones said: ‘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.

‘There’s a continual updating of the dataset. Keeping track of everything is difficult. Some countries will do lots of checking on their data then issue improved data, so it can be very difficult. We have improved but we have to improve more.’

He also agreed that there had been two periods which experienced similar warming, from 1910 to 1940 and from 1975 to 1998, but said these could be explained by natural phenomena whereas more recent warming could not.
He further admitted that in the last 15 years there had been no ‘statistically significant’ warming, although he argued this was a blip rather than the long-term trend.

And he said that the debate over whether the world could have been even warmer than now during the medieval period, when there is evidence of high temperatures in northern countries, was far from settled.

Sceptics believe there is strong evidence that the world was warmer between about 800 and 1300 AD than now because of evidence of high temperatures in northern countries.

But climate change advocates have dismissed this as false or only applying to the northern part of the world.

Professor Jones departed from this consensus when he said: ‘There is much debate over whether the Medieval Warm Period was global in extent or not. The MWP is most clearly expressed in parts of North America, the North Atlantic and Europe and parts of Asia.

‘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.

‘Of course, if the MWP was shown to be global in extent and as warm or warmer than today, then obviously the late 20th Century warmth would not be unprecedented. On the other hand, if the MWP was global, but was less warm than today, then the current warmth would be unprecedented.’

Sceptics said this was the first time a senior scientist working with the IPCC had admitted to the possibility that the Medieval Warming Period could have been global, and therefore the world could have been hotter then than now.

Professor Jones criticised those who complained he had not shared his data with them, saying they could always collate their own from publicly available material in the US. And he said the climate had not cooled ‘until recently – and then barely at all. The trend is a warming trend’.

Mr Harrabin told Radio 4’s Today programme that, despite the controversies, there still appeared to be no fundamental flaws in the majority scientific view that climate change was largely man-made.

But Dr Benny Pieser, director of the sceptical Global Warming Policy Foundation, said Professor Jones’s ‘excuses’ for his failure to share data were hollow as he had shared it with colleagues and ‘mates’.

He said that until all the data was released, sceptics could not test it to see if it supported the conclusions claimed by climate change advocates.
He added that the professor’s concessions over medieval warming were ‘significant’ because they were his first public admission that the science was not settled.


My conclusion...even the top scientists cannot agree, therefore why can't we take a step back and finish the investigation before spending trillions more on a project that will have profound effect on the country and our children's future?

[leo9]

Climategate U-turn as scientist at centre of row admits: There has been no global warming since 1995
By JONATHAN PETRE

And this shows just how wrong journalists can get it when they try to translate scientific language into journalese without understanding. (I'm doing Mr. Petre the courtesy of assuming it was an honest mistake and not deliberate distortion.)

If you read the actual text of the interview (which is here http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/8511670.stm , and I am following normal fair-use practioce, as well as good netiquette, by giving a link rather than cut and paste the whole text) you will find that what he says is that the increase in temperature (which is clear in the figures) is not quite "statistically signignificant". Which is to say that even though it's right there in the data, as a conscientious scientist he has to allow that it might be pure coincidence that every successive reading is higher than the last. That is a completely different thing from saying there has been "no warming", which would obviously be nonsense with the rising figures there for all to see.

The problem seems to be that the media, which wouldn't give the job of football correspondent to someone who never learnt the rules, happily give the job of "science correspondent" to journos who flunked Science 101.

Data for vital 'hockey stick graph' has gone missing

Again, this sounds most impressive if you don't have the actual facts available. If you bother to check:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environmen...t-weather-data
you will find that, after the hooraw suggesting that all the weather records in the world had been somehow deleted by one obscure British scientist, what's actually gone missing is the readings from a bunch of weather stations in northern China. (And if the Chinese don't have copies, they're not the bureaucratic state I take them for.)

Warming periods have happened before - but NOT due to man-made changes

Hold the front page! A journalist has just discovered what's in every elementary climatological textbook! World shaking admission!

It's this sort of invincible ignorance that makes the discussion so difficult. One has to educate people from scratch while they try to find a catch in everything one explains.

My conclusion...even the top scientists cannot agree, therefore why can't we take a step back and finish the investigation before spending trillions more on a project that will have profound effect on the country and our children's future?

Because in the meantime the disaster is already happening:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environmen...cts-tajikistan

And while climate change deniers were having lots of fun about the blizzards in Washington, the Winter Olympics have been having to truck in snow so the ski slopes won't be grass.

The investigation is finished, it was finished years ago. It's the political fight that is never going to be finished so long as Big Oil has a million to spare for PR.

[DuncanONeil]

I did read the text of the interview. I also have a modicum of understanding of scientific methods and numbers.
Basically Mr Jones sounded a lot like a lawyer in his answers. They all came across like; "yes, but ..."
In other words having to admit the truth, but trying to mitigate the damage to themselves.

In part you are correct about generic weather data. But in terms of a conclusion drawn from a study, or experiment, your are off base. If an experiment is conducted, and result arrived at, the rule of repeatable is not predicated on start all over from scratch. Some other person is to be able to, with the data, or materials, used reproduce the result. In this case if the missing data was from China one can not reproduce the results of East Anglia, as you do not know where in China to look. I know! I know! Your position is to just go get data and run your own analysis. But people have done that and achieved different results. That is the issue here. What kind of scientist makes little effort to protect all aspects of his data for peer review. Don't you find that a bit suspicious?

I note you make no reference to Mr Jones admission that the planet has been cooling since 2002. Even though that is a small number statistically, you claimed that the mere fact of an increasing number is enough validity to claim a disastrous increase in global temperature, yet choose to ignore the opposite data. Shows a disposition to believe a certain outcome. Kind of like a high school project. No project is permitted to disprove a hypothesis, all projects must prove hypotheses true. Not how science really works!
An open mind is a prerequsite for scientific study!

And this shows just how wrong journalists can get it when they try to translate scientific language into journalese without understanding. (I'm doing Mr. Petre the courtesy of assuming it was an honest mistake and not deliberate distortion.)

If you read the actual text of the interview (which is here http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/8511670.stm , and I am following normal fair-use practioce, as well as good netiquette, by giving a link rather than cut and paste the whole text) you will find that what he says is that the increase in temperature (which is clear in the figures) is not quite "statistically signignificant". Which is to say that even though it's right there in the data, as a conscientious scientist he has to allow that it might be pure coincidence that every successive reading is higher than the last. That is a completely different thing from saying there has been "no warming", which would obviously be nonsense with the rising figures there for all to see.

The problem seems to be that the media, which wouldn't give the job of football correspondent to someone who never learnt the rules, happily give the job of "science correspondent" to journos who flunked Science 101.

Again, this sounds most impressive if you don't have the actual facts available. If you bother to check:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environmen...t-weather-data
you will find that, after the hooraw suggesting that all the weather records in the world had been somehow deleted by one obscure British scientist, what's actually gone missing is the readings from a bunch of weather stations in northern China. (And if the Chinese don't have copies, they're not the bureaucratic state I take them for.)
Hold the front page! A journalist has just discovered what's in every elementary climatological textbook! World shaking admission!

It's this sort of invincible ignorance that makes the discussion so difficult. One has to educate people from scratch while they try to find a catch in everything one explains.
Because in the meantime the disaster is already happening:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environmen...cts-tajikistan

And while climate change deniers were having lots of fun about the blizzards in Washington, the Winter Olympics have been having to truck in snow so the ski slopes won't be grass.

The investigation is finished, it was finished years ago. It's the political fight that is never going to be finished so long as Big Oil has a million to spare for PR.