Phil Jones, the professor behind the “Climategate” affair, has admitted some of his decades-old weather data was not well enough organised.
He said this contributed to his refusal to share raw data with critics – a decision he says he regretted.
His colleagues said that keeping a paper trail was not one of Professor Jones’ strong points. Professor Jones told BBC News: “There is some truth in that”.
The thing is, if the data was not well-organised enough to show to critics, how could it be well-organised enough to be fed into a program and produce graphs?
In a BBC interview, Jones admits there were rates of global warming from 1860-1880, 1910-1940 and 1975-1998 that were essentially identical and that from 1995 to the present there has been no statistically-significant global warming. It has been cooling since 2002, although that is not long enough to be statistically significant.
Of the now infamous email where Jones referred to a “trick”, he says it was:
“a convenient way of achieving something”, in this case joining the earlier valid part of the tree-ring record with the recent, more reliable instrumental record.
Lord Monckton points out, though, that the computer program used to process the raw data has the comment:
“These will be artificially adjusted to look closer to the real temperatures.”
Liberally sprinkled through it – a bit of a giveaway. This goes to show that you should not put comments in your computer programs other than: “this code was hard to write; it’s *supposed* to be hard to understand”.
Poor Professor Jones says that his life has been awful since the emails were exposed. Based on this interview, I don’t think it is about to get much better; I found his protestations of innocence quite unconvincing.
Even if the climate is not heating up, the scandal over climategate is: Nature editor Philip Campbell was forced out of an independent panel after saying there was nothing to suggest a cover up by scientists at the University of East Anglia.
In contrast, here in Canada climate experts who question global warming are still vilified and ostracised; we are so politically correct.
