Climategate
U-turn as scientist at centre of row admits: There has been
no global warming since 1995
(Mail Online 14th
February 2010 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.
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.
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