Phil Jones

Climategate Whitewash

by Iain Murray on March 31, 2010 · 11 comments

in Energy, Environment, Global Warming, Politics as Usual, Sanctimony

The UK’s House of Commons Science and Technology Committee has issued its report into the so-called Climategate scandal.  As might be expected, it’s pretty much a whitewash, except as detailed below.  Only one MP dissented from its conclusions.  There seem to me to be some serious errors and omissions in the reports, but I’m not the only one.  For instance, Fred Pearce of New Scientist and The Guardian has some pretty serious things to say in his story, Hacked climate email inquiry cleared Jones but serious questions remain:

in their rush to judgment before parliament is dissolved for the general election, Phil Willis and his team avoided examining more complex charges, including those raised by the Guardian in its investigations in February.

Even so, they sometimes get confused. The MPs accept Jones’s claim that CRU’s habit of keeping secret much of its data, methodology and computer codes was “standard practice” among climate scientists. Yet they also note that Nasa scientists doing similar work are much more open. Not so standard, then.

And whatever standard practice may be, surely as one of climate science’s senior figures, Jones should take some responsibility for its misdemeanours? Jones has worked for the CRU for more than 20 years and been its director for six. The MPs found there a “culture of withholding information” in which “information may have been deleted to avoid disclosure.” It found this “unacceptable”. Doesn’t its director take responsibility?

The MPs kept their criticism for the university. Its “failure to grasp fully the potential damage [from] non-disclosure of FOIA requests was regrettable”.

Also possibly illegal, it might have added.

While Pearce is good on this point – essentially that Phil Jones fostered a culture of anti-scientific secrecy and collusion as head of the CRU – he is less good on the meaning of the “trick” by which jones aspired to “hide the decline” in one particular temperature series.  Bishop Hill is right on the money here:

Mike’s Nature Trick (66) – The committee’s
conclusions are eyewatering:

66. Critics of CRU have suggested that Professor Jones’s use of the
words “hide the decline” is evidence that he was part of a conspiracy to
hide evidence that did not fit his view that recent global warming is
predominantly caused by human activity. That he has published
papers—including a paper in Nature—dealing with this aspect of the
science clearly refutes this allegation. In our view, it was shorthand
for the practice of discarding data known to be erroneous. We expect
that this is a matter the Scientific Appraisal Panel will address.

I’m struggling to say something polite about this.  By way of an
illustration, can you imagine the reaction if a scientist reported in
the safety literature that there was a critical flaw in the design of a
nuclear power station, but told policymakers that everything was fine?
Do the committee really think it’s fine to hide important information
from policymakers so long as you report it in the literature?
Astonishing.

Indeed.  Did anything good come out of the report?  Well, as Roger Pielke Jr points out, a broad reading of the report reveals an indictment of the state of climate science:

Reputation does not, however, rest solely on the quality of work as it
should. It also depends on perception. It is self-evident that the
disclosure of the CRU e-mails has damaged the reputation of UK climate
science and, as views on global warming have become polarised, any
deviation from the highest scientific standards will be pounced on. As
we explained in chapter 2, the practices and methods of climate science
are a key issue. If the practices of CRU are found to be in line with
the rest of climate science, the question would arise whether climate
science methods of operation need to change. In this event we would
recommend that the scientific community should consider changing those
practices to ensure greater transparency. . .

. . . A great
responsibility rests on the shoulders of climate science: to provide the
planet’s decision makers with the knowledge they need to secure our
future. The challenge that this poses is extensive and some of these
decisions risk our standard of living. When the prices to pay are so
large, the knowledge on which these kinds of decisions are taken had
better be right. The science must be irreproachable.

And, as Climategate and the multiple subsequent revelations about the shoddiness of the IPCC’s science have shown, the science is in no way irreproachable as it stands.  Yet in the end, Prof. Frank Furedi is right about what the Committee meant in this segment:

In other words, the CRU’s real failing was to dent the authority of the
climate-change morality tale, with its idea that, with the end of the
world fast approaching, there is an urgent need to monitor people’s
behaviour and lower their horizons. A cynic might conclude that when
moral entrepreneurs say that the ‘prices to pay are so large’, their
investigations into public controversies will inevitably have a
perfunctory character, since there is allegedly a higher, more pressing
truth to be defended.

Which is exactly what happened here.

“Climate change of pace,” (the confessions of Phil Jones), my Forbes Online piece

by Michael Fumento on February 18, 2010

in Odds & Ends

There have been a lot of well-kept secrets among the global warmists – which is primarily why the so-called “Climategate” stolen e-mails proved such a scandal. They showed that, in addition to squelching dissenters, the warmists were admitting things to each other that they were denying to the public. They felt, as a Jack Nicholson character put it, “You can’t handle the truth!”

But now the truth is coming out. One fact is that there has been no statistically significant warming for quite awhile. The other is that temperatures in the Middle Ages, at the very least in the northern hemisphere, were considerably warmer than they are now. (See inset.)

Conceding both these points in a BBC interview was Professor Phil Jones. He was director of the University of East Anglia Climatic Research Unit, where the hacked Internet server released thousands of e-mails and other documents. Read about his shockingly honest admissions – and the ramification of them – in my new Forbes Online piece.

LibertyWeek 71: The Politics of Booze

by Richard Morrison on November 30, 2009

in CEI Projects, Podcast

Your hosts Richard Morrison and Jeremy Lott welcome guests Gregory Conko and Garrett Peck to Episode 71 of the LibertyWeek podcast. We start with an update on the latest in the Climate-Gate scandal and the impact of nanny state policies in New York City, then move on to Monsanto’s antitrust worries and finish with an interview with Garrett Peck, the author of The Prohibition Hangover: Alcohol in America from Demon Rum to Cult Cabernet (buy your copy here).

Climategate — the Real War on Science?

by Marlo Lewis on November 25, 2009 · 6 comments

in Environment, Global Warming

The huge pile of emails purloined or leaked from the Climate Research Unit (CRU) last week does indeed “give every appearance of testifying to concerted and coordinated efforts by leading climatologists to fit the data to their conclusions while attempting to silence and discredit their critics,” as the Wall Street Journal stated yesterday. However, the main issue brought to light by these emails is even more serious.

In a column posted yesterday on Anthony Watts’s blog, amateur scientist Willis Eschenbach documents the many ruses and excuses CRU director Phil Jones and his allies employed over several years to deny outsiders access to the CRU gang’s temperature data and computer codes.

Skeptics have been accused of waging a “war on science“ because they frequently question the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC’s) interpretation of the rapidly expanding field of climate change research.

 But science is not a set of dogmas certified by government-funded bodies. Rather, as Mr. Eschenbach points out, science is fundamentally an ”adversarial process” whereby competing scientists attempt to reproduce — that is, invalidate — each other’s results. This process absolutely depends on each combatant allowing the others to examine his data and methods. Tactics designed to hide data and methods are anti-science even if — nay, especially if – those resorting to such tricks are big-name scientists.   

“Science,” writes Eschenbach, “works by one person making a claim, and backing it up with data and methods they used to make the claim. Other scientists then attack the claim by (among other things) trying to replicate the first scientist’s work. If they can’t replicate it, it doesn’t stand.”

This means, says Eschenbach, that researchers who hide their data and computer codes to prevent others from replicating/invalidating their results “attack . . . the heart of science.” Such behavior is unethical and, as Eschenbach notes, likely illegal as well.

If you read only one commentary on Climategate, read this one. It is an eye-opener.

Real Climate Spin

by Marlo Lewis on November 24, 2009 · 2 comments

in Features, Global Warming, Zeitgeist

Real Climate.Org is chief defender of ”consensus” climatology on the Internet. One of its enduring missions has been to defend the dubious, indeed discredited “Hockey Stick” reconstruction of Northern hemisphere temperature history. The Hockey Stick was the basis for the IPCC’s claim in its 2001 report that the 1990s were the warmest decade and 1998 the warmest year of the past millennium.

That Real Climate (RC) should feel special solicitude for the Hockey Stick is no accident, comrade. Two of the five principals at RC — Michael Mann and Raymond Bradley — were among the three researchers (Mann, Bradley, and Malcolm Hughes) who authored the Hockey Stick.

All of the RC principals (Gavin Schmidt, Caspar Ammann, Rasmus Benestad, Mann, and Bradley) are frequent senders and recipients of the thousands of emails and other documents, now posted on many Web sites, that were hacked or leaked last week from the University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit (CRU).

The Wall Street Journal today published a selection of the leaked emails and an editorial concluding that the emails ”give every appearance of testifying to concerted and coordinated efforts by leading climatologists to fit the data to their conclusions while attempting to silence and discredit their critics.”

Even eco-radical George Monbiot says he is “dismayed and deeply shaken” by the emails, because, “There appears to be evidence here of attempts to prevent scientific data from being released, and even to destroy material that was subject to a freedom of information request.”

So far, the only email on which RC has seen fit to comment is one from CRU director Phil Jones dated Nov. 16, 1999, 13:31. It’s gotten a lot of buzz on the Internet, because it appears to advocate the use of a “trick” to “hide” a “decline” in global temperatures.

In a post titled “The CRU Hack” (November 20), RC writes:

No doubt, instances of cherry-picked and poorly-worded “gotcha” phrases will be pulled out of context. One example is worth mentioning quickly. Phil Jones in discussing the presentation of temperature reconstructions stated that “I’ve just completed Mike’s Nature trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years (ie from 1981 onwards) and from 1961 for Keith’s to hide the decline.” The paper in question is the Mann, Bradley and Hughes (1998) Nature paper on the original multiproxy temperature reconstruction, and the ‘trick’ is just to plot the instrumental records along with reconstruction so that the context of the recent warming is clear. Scientists often use the term “trick” to refer to a “a good way to deal with a problem”, rather than something that is “secret”, and so there is nothing problematic in this at all. As for the ‘decline’, it is well known that Keith Briffa’s maximum latewood tree ring density proxy diverges from the temperature records after 1960 (this is more commonly known as the “divergence problem”–see e.g. the recent discussion in this paper) and has been discussed in the literature since Briffa et al in Nature in 1998 (Nature, 391, 678-682). Those authors have always recommend not using the post 1960 part of their reconstruction, and so while ‘hiding’ is probably a poor choice of words (since it is ‘hidden’ in plain sight), not using the data in the plot is completely appropriate, as is further research to understand why this happens.

So a “trick” is just scientific shorthand for a “good way to deal with a problem,” not something “secret.” But RC ducks the real issue. Is the ”trick” Phil Jones learned from Hockey Stick author Michael Mann a form of trickery? Does it create a false impression, as an illusionist does on stage, right out in the open, in front of an audience?

The trick, according to RC, is to splice onto the end of a temperature reconstruction, built on proxy data going back several centuries, the data from instrumental records starting in 1960 and 1981.

Now this is quite a trick, because it involves comparing apples (proxy data) to oranges (instrumental data) and pretending that the composite forms a continuous record.

As the Center for the Study of Carbon Dioxide and Climate Change observed years ago, researchers attempting to construct long-term (centuries to millennia) temperature records should ”finish the dance” with the (proxy) data they started with.

Grafting instrumental data onto proxy data to produce a seemingly continuous record is trickery, because instrumental data, unlike proxy data, are massively influenced by land-use changes and site-specific quality control issues.

Urban heat islands and irrigated agriculture can inject false warming biases into instrumental data that are absent from proxy data taken from remote forests or sediment cores at the bottom of lakes, for example. Improper placement of temperature sensing equipment near local heat sources (e.g. air conditioning vents, asphalt parking lots, waste water treatment plants) also generates significant false warming signals, as retired meteorologist Anthony Watts documents in gory detail.

So RC’s “nothing to see here” argument based on the alleged insider meaning of “trick” raises rather than allays suspicion that CRU is attempting to fit data to a predetermined conclusion.

Note also that RC says nothing about Phil Jones’s advice to backdate correspondence (Sept. 12, 2007, 11:30 a.m.), to delete emails related to the 2007 IPCC report (May 29, 2008, 11:04), and to evade FOIA requests, if necessary by deleting files (Feb. 2, 2005, 9:41 a.m.). RC also says nothing about Mann’s call to delegitimize the Journal of Climate for publishing papers critical of his work (March 11, 2003, 8:14).

The Wall Street Journal editorial’s concluding comment is spot on:  ”In the department of inconvenient truths, this one surely deserves a closer look by the media, the U.S. Congress and other investigative bodies.”

LibertyWeek 70: Climate-Gate Bursts Forth

by Richard Morrison on November 23, 2009

in CEI Projects, Podcast

Richard Morrison and Jeremy Lott welcome special guests Greg Conko and Iain Murray to the program for Episode 70 of the LibertyWeek podcast. We start with the big Senate showdown on healthcare legislation and a shocking expose of climate science skullduggery. We then move on a double dose of Midwestern scandal and the curious cult-like organizing practices of major labor unions.

No data, no science

by Marlo Lewis on September 24, 2009 · 3 comments

in Global Warming, Legal

In “The Dog Ate Global Warming,” published yesterday in National Review Online, Cato Institute scholar and climatologist Patrick J. Michaels delivers a body blow to the “science is settled” dogma.

There are three core issues in climate change science: detection (Is it warming, and if so by how much); attribution (What’s causing the warming we observe?); and, sensitivity (How much warming will a given increase in greenhouse gas concentrations produce?). As I argue in a previous post, all of these issues remain unsettled, and more so today than at any time in the past decade.  

Although climate sensitivity is the most important issue (because if climate sensitivity is low, then there is no “planetary emergency,” hence no need for “urgent action”), detection is in a sense primary, because without reliable temperature data it is impossible to resolve the other two issues.

The claim that the latter half of the 20th century was warmer than any comparable period during the past 1300 years is largely based on surface temperature records subject to several well-known warming biases. Urbanization generates artificial “heat islands.” Agriculture and irrigation in places like California’s Central Valley also produce local warming effects. Retired meteorologist Anthony Watts has documented that nearly nine out of every 10 U.S. weather stations fail to meet the U.S. Weather Service’s minimum requirement that temperature sensing equipment be placed at least 30 meters (about 100 feet) away from artificial heat sources such as air conditioner exhaust vents, waste water treatment plants, and parking lot pavements.

Michaels now exposes the shocking fact that the data allegedly underpinning the most influential surface temperature record are missing and apparently have been destroyed. The record is known as Jones-Wigley for its authors, Phil Jones of the University of East Anglia Climate Research Unit (CRU) and Tom Wigley of the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR). The IPCC relied exclusively on this record until its 2001 report.

For years, Jones and Wigley declined to share the raw data from which they constructed their record. Recently, however, Jones told University of Colorado Professor Roger Pielke, Jr. that they could not share their data with him, because the data no longer exist:

Data storage availability in the 1980s meant that we were not able to keep multiple sources for some sites, only the station series after adjustment for homogeneity issues. We, therefore, do not hold the original raw data but only the value-added (quality-controlled and homogenized) data.

 Michaels says the “data storage availability” excuse is “balderdash,” since “All the original data could easily fit on the 9-inch tape drives common in the mid-1980s.”

The bigger point, of course, is that if other scientists cannot examine the raw data, they cannot assess the accuracy and objectivity of the “value-adding” adjustments Jones and Wigley made to produce their global temperature record.

In addition to providing another reason to reject the “science is settled” dogma, disappearance of the Jones-Wigley data is of direct relevance to EPA’s pending endangerment finding. The Jones-Wigley temperature record is part of the evidence on which EPA bases its judgment that “air pollution” from greenhouse gas emissions “endangers public health and welfare.”

Use of the Jones-Wigley temperature record in a rulemaking clearly flouts federal data quality standards. Under OMB guidelines implementing the Federal Data Quality Act, data quality consists of four elements: objectivity, utility to users, integrity of information, and reproducibility in the case of “influential scientific or statistical information.”

Now, if the original Jones-Wigely data have been destroyed, then it is impossible to assure “integrity of information.” For all we know, Jones and Wigley goofed in their calculations or choice of methodologies, or even manipulated the data to produce a pre-determined result. By the same token, it is impossible to “reproduce” the Jones-Wigley temperature record, because there are no data to reproduce it from. Yet, as a factual basis of both the IPCC reports and the EPA endangerment finding, Jones-Wigley indisputably qualifies as “influential scientific or statistical information.”

Michaels’s terse conclusion speaks volumes: “No data, no science.” For decades, Jones-Wigley has been a mainstay of the alleged ”scientific consensus” supporting Kyoto-style energy rationing. Warmists have a lot of explaining to do.