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!

Quote Originally Posted by leo9 View Post
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.