Posted on 02/13/2010 6:46:44 PM PST by neverdem
Astonishment as scientist at centre of global warming email row admits vital data was not well organised
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...
--snip--
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...
(Excerpt) Read more at dailymail.co.uk ...
We have class action law suits all the time....seems like a clever lawyer could do well with this scandal.
This type of bullsh*t could only appear if the possiblity of criminal prosecution for massive fraud is under consideration.
“Liars have to have good memories.”
Not everyone can be a Rhodes scholar liar, like Bill Clinton.
I think it’s best just to leave them in their deluded state and make sure they don’t impose their delusions upon the rest of society. If I could have them committed to a rubber room so much the better.
It's important that critics get things right, so as not to give the alarmists an easy out.
He was not writing in those emails about "hiding the decline" in actual measured temperatures. He was referring to a period (in the 1990's, IIRC) when measured temperatures were increasing.
The "decline" which had to be "hidden" was in the "proxy data" (from cores of long lived pine trees, again IIRC) which Jones and other alarmists favored as means of determining temperatures before measurements were available.
The "proxy" data indicated that temperatures were dropping at a time when they were actually rising. IOW, during the period when the "proxy" data could actually be compared with directly measured data, the proxy data DIDN'T FIT the measured data. Therefore the decline in the PROXY DATA had to be hidden least it become clear that the proxy data they were using (showing lower temperatures before the industrial revolution, and which also conveniently smoothed out, and all but eliminated, both the Medieval Warm Period and the Little Ice Age) were untrustworthy.
I suspect that meteorologists might be more likely to be global warming skeptics. Professionally they are required to deal with harder, more objective data, especially from satellites. Nor are they able to focus myopically on localized warming, as in the arctic region. They have to look at the whole picture. And they know (and have to know, in order to be successful predictors of weather) that the massive heat sinks represented by the Pacific and Atlantic oceans are FAR more globally significant than the arctic, and the data shows those oceans cooling, not warming.
>>I don’t know what to tell people who think that this record cold and snowfall is due to global warming....I really ought to formulate some response to that, but haven’t been able to figure out what to tell them without outright insulting them. How do you answer such stupidity and gullibility?<<
Maybe ask them to assume that in lieu of Global Warming, we assume instead that we are in a long-term period of Global Cooling. Would they then believe that the record snows and cold would be evidence that Global Cooling was NOT happening? After all, if record snow and cold are evidence of Global Warming, then they must also constitute evidence AGAINST Global Cooling.
If they stick with their assertion that they constitute Global Warming, they’ll look pretty ridiculous, but I guess they do anyway. And maybe that’s the best reaction of all: hysterical belittling laughter at the very suggestion. Some things are just stupid and need to be called stupid. The alternative is to contort ourselves into knots trying to use logic on impervious minds.
Thanks. I accept all you wrote. I should have been a bit more careful.
Response: Daily Mangle
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