Global Warming Scientist Backpeddles
by Big Dog on Feb 15, 2010 at 13:25 Political
Professor Phil Jones is at the center of the climategate scandal in which private emails were released casting doubt on the whole global warming debate. Al Gore refuses to honestly debate the issue and tells us that the science is settled. It would appear, once again, that it is not so settled after all:
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. [emphasis mine] Daily Mail
Well, that unsettles it. Jones admits that it might have been warmer in medieval times and that there has been no statistically significant warming in the last 15 years.
This slap has to hurt the global warming crowd and its blind adherence to a cult that is now more unsettled than ever.
Remember, this guy is one of the big boys in the movement. After he was caught with his pants down (not in a Bill Clinton way) he fessed up to the fact that the science is not so settled after all.
This entire hoax continues to unravel.
And if the governments of the world ever start paying scientists to prove there is NO global warming, that will be the new pursuit, and they will tell us it is settled.
Maybe Al Gore should give that Nobel Peace Prize back…
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Tags: admission, al gore, global warming, hoax, phil jones, unsettled science
[quote]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.[/quote]
DAR
A couple points:
1) Are these the same guys who did an interview with some climatologists and then lied about what they said (as evidenced by the climatologists denying the material the next day)?
2) Did you notice your main plank, emphasized in bold by you, in the article, is NOT in quotation marks? I wonder why that is?
The uncertainty (“error bars”) of the hockey stick always allowed that the Medieval Warming Period may have been as hot or nearly as today but this is tempered by the fact that…
a) the MWP was a regional/hemispheric phenomenon, not global
b) this has been examined extensively and the preponderance of evidence, as shown by multiple independent peer reviewed studies, is that we are hotter today.
No I do some checking…
Oh, big surprise, your article is FULL of CRAP. See the careful well referenced roast here:
Daily Mangle.
D.
—————-
Excerpt:
“Yesterday, the Daily Mail of the UK published a predictably inaccurate article entitled “Climategate U-turn as scientist at centre of row admits: There has been no global warming since 1995″.
The title itself is a distortion of what Jones actually said in an interview with the BBC. What Jones actually said is that, while the globe has nominally warmed since 1995, it is difficult to establish the statistical significance of that warming given the short nature of the time interval (1995-present) involved. The warming trend consequently doesn’t quite achieve statistical significance. But it is extremely difficult to establish a statistically significant trend over a time interval as short as 15 years–a point we have made countless times at RealClimate. It is also worth noting that the CRU record indicates slightly less warming than other global temperature estimates such as the GISS record.
The article also incorrectly equates…”
etc.
The reason the main plank in your article was not in quotation marks is because he didn’t say it.
What Jones actually said in that interview:
***
The key quote from the Jones interview is:
E – How confident are you that warming has taken place and that humans are mainly responsible?
I’m 100% confident that the climate has warmed. As to the second question, I would go along with IPCC Chapter 9 – there’s evidence that most of the warming since the 1950s is due to human activity.
DAR
So Jones is 100% certain the climate has warmed and he thinks humans have caused most of it since the 1950’s. How will climate change science recover from this blow?!
D.
—————–
Commenter observes:
“What more needs to be said, except that a huge disservice has been done by the media in covering this and other climate-related stories.”
Link.
He said it has warmed in the last 50 years, the medieval period might have been warmer and that there has been no significant warming in the last 15 years. 15 not 50.
Keep trying though, hoax. Falling apart.
Bigd: He said it has warmed in the last 50 years,>>
DAR
Yes he did.
Bigd: the medieval period might have been warmer>>
DAR
Unlikely but still not comparable because we only have data showing the MWP was regional. Our warming is global.
Bigd: and that there has been no significant warming in the last 15 years.>>
DAR
That is most certainly NOT what he said, as I already cited above.
Fifteen years is simply not long enough to establish a significant statistical trend, as he correctly stated.
Go here to educate yourself about this fact:
http://tamino.wordpress.com/2009/12/15/how-long/
Excerpt:
“Time and time again, denialists try to suggest that the last 10 years, or 9 years, or 8 years, or 7 years, or 6 years, or three and a half days of temperature data establish that the earth is cooling, in contradiction to mainstream climate science. Time and time again, they’re refuted — shown to be either utterly foolish or downright dishonest or both. Logic seems to have no effect on them.
The simple fact is that short time spans don’t give enough data to establish what the trend is, they just exhibit the behavior of the noise. Of course that raises an interesting question: how long a time span do we need to establish a trend in global temperature data? It’s sometimes stated that the required time is 30 years, because that’s the time span used most often to distinguish climate from weather. Although that’s a useful guide, it’s not strictly correct. The time required to establish a trend in data depends on many things, including how big the trend is (the size of the signal) and how big, and what type, the noise is. Let’s look at GISS data for global temperature and test how much data we need to establish the most recent trend.” -ibid
DAR
I also recommend this really cool interactive temperature chart tool. You set the time period and the chart automatically adjusts:
“The slider at the bottom starts at 30 years — the standard period for climate stats. Choose between data series with the button at the top. Blue lines show negative trends, red ones positive trends, calculated for each successive 30 year period. In the GISTEMP series you can see some falling trends in the 1880s and 90s, and again from the 1940s to 70s. The rest of the time, temperatures are rising. No sign of cooling in the 21st century.”
http://hot-topic.co.nz/keep-out-of-the-kitchen/
D.
I don’t know, those quotes from the BBC were pretty accurate. No significant change in 15 years. That is what the guy said.
Now that one of your wown is bending you have to attack.
It is all coming apart. Hoax.
It is always inaccurate when it does not agree and then it is inaccurate if it refutes. Lies…
Bigd: “No significant change in 15 years. That is what the guy said.”>>
DAR
No, it, isn’t. Pay attention. Here is the question and his answer:
***
B – Do you agree that from 1995 to the present there has been no statistically-significant global warming?
ANSWER:
“Yes, but only just. I also calculated the trend for the period 1995 to 2009. This trend (0.12C per decade) is positive, but not significant at the 95% significance level. The positive trend is quite close to the significance level. Achieving statistical significance in scientific terms is much more likely for longer periods, and much less likely for shorter periods.”
BBC.
DAR
“Statistical significance,” not “significance.” There is a difference.
There is nothing here for you but do try to continue to milk it for what you can. THe science supporting climate change is hardly going to be knocked down because a scientist here and there answers a question that allows dishonest journals and bloggers to remove the context, drop out words of clarification and distort his answer.
It’s really quite pathetic.
Yep, no roast. He said what he did in the interview.
[…] post: Big Dogs House » Blog Archive » Global Warming Scientist Backpeddles No […]
UPDATE: Professor Phil Jones has now responded on the matter and says that the interpretation I referenced above, is indeed the correct interpretation of his comments.
So we have it straight from the horses mouth. It makes sense that the good professor would be the most qualified person to understand the meaning of *his own* comments.
D.
—————-
“Update 2/16/10. Phil Jones has confirmed to us that our interpretations of his comments in the BBC interview are indeed the correct ones, and that he agrees with the statements in our piece above. He and his CRU colleagues have also put up an response to some of the false allegations in a previous piece in the UK Guardian. We’ll report further such developments as they happen.”
–ibid
D, You are full of it, just like mz. Jones- I mean, he must wear a skirt if he is as mixed up as he seems- he must not know how to dress himself.
He certainly knows nothing about climate- El Nino and La Nina contribute more to the relative heating and cooling of our weather cycles than ANYTHING man can do-
Co2 is NOT a poison gas, as some would have you believe, the trees and plants just LOVE the stuff, and give us oxygen in return- that is, IF we don’t cut all the trees down, but you see, this is where scientists have it all wrong.
While humans doubtlessly influence our environment, sometimes negatively, these pseudo- scientists and outright hacks (think Al Gore here) have a vested interest in the outcome of this debate.
I can’t help but think of “The Music Man”- where a con man proclaims “there’s trouble in River City”- all to get people to buy into a useless and unneeded scam.
Sound familiar? It should- that is all Owebama is about.
BLK: “He [Dr. Phil Jones] certainly knows nothing about climate…”>>
DAR
That’s nice. A long day, seven pianos and Blake gives me a nice cherry to top it off.
Let’s see if your claim is true. Here’s his bio:
***
Biography
I am the Director of the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) and a Professor in the School of Environmental Sciences at the University of East Anglia in Norwich. I am principally known for the time series of hemispheric and global surface temperatures, which I update on a monthly basis. I have numerous research papers over the last 25 years. I have been a fellow of the Royal Meteorological Society since 1992 and was on the Editorial Committee of the International Journal of Climatology until 1995. I am currently on the editorial board of Climatic Change. I am an elected member of Academia Europaea since 1998.
I was jointly awarded the Hugh Robert Mill Medal in 1995 by the Royal Meteorological Society for work on UK Rainfall Variability, and in 1997 the Outstanding Scientific Paper Award by the Environmental Research Laboratories / NOAA for being a coauthor on the paper “A search for Human Influences on the Thermal Structure of the Atmosphere,” by Ben Santer et al. in Nature, 382, 39-46 (1996). More recently I was awarded the first Hans Oesschger Medal from the European Geophysical Society (now the European Geosciences Union) in 2002 and the International Journal of Climatology prize of the Royal Meteoological Society for papers published in the last five years, also in 2002. I am recognised as one of the top 0.5% of highly-cited researchers in the Geosciences field by the ISI (the institute in the US that maintains the Web of Science, where publications and citations are monitored. I was made (2006) a fellow of the American Meteorological Society and was a awarded a Reviewer’s Award by the American Geophysical Union (AGU) the same year. In 2009 I have also been made a fellow by the AGU.” Link.
DAR
While I think it matters quite a bit that people who are experts in the field of climatology think Mr. Jones knows something about climate, I don’t think matters at all that you think he doesn’t.
D.
——————-
For a full list of his publications, just since the year 2000 (which are so technical you typically wouldn’t comprehend the abstract) see the PDF HERE.
It’s fourteen pages long. I counted the items. It references 144 papers/articles etc he has published in ten years.
That’s 14.4 per year, more than one per month, and the quality is stellar as per his awards.
I was going to add that you, are an idiot, but that would be rude, so I won’t.
But you understood it?
Bigd: But you understood it?
DAR
Yes.
And if I don’t understand something, I read it again and then do research until I do understand it.
And before I say things, I think about whether they are true. That’s why I don’t say things like: “He [Dr. Phil Jones] certainly knows nothing about climate…”
Hey, got five minutes to learn something about climate change?
This one is on solar induced warming.
A very well done series.