By Jonathan
Petre
Last updated at 2:39 AM on 14th February 2010
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
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.
But he denied he had
cheated over the data or unfairly influenced the scientific process, and said
he still believed recent temperature rises were predominantly man-made.
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 (1933 being the record of hotest tempertures in the modern era) 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 (For example:
Greenland during that time was all farmland used by the vikings, but in more
recent history Greenland has become a frozen wasteland) 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. (So lets get this straight only
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 (Medievel Warming
Period) is most clearly expressed in parts of North
America, the North Atlantic and Europe and parts of
‘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 would 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
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.
Add to that, that the earth has not
been warming since 1995. Add to that, that the earth has been cooling in the
last few years, and the bottom has just been knocked out of the whole global
warming scam by no less than the #1 scientist that has been in charge of the
whole enchalada since it’s inception. – Regardless of
what the religionists of Global Warming Inc cry Global Warming is now
officially dead as the king has just abdicated the entire Global Warming throne.