Climategate's Phil Jones Confesses to Climate Fraud

Yes, interesting in that "American Thinker" is well known as being unbiased and Marc Sheppard is a dispassionate scientist of pedigree and authority...(not!)


There is no conspiracy.

 

Yes, if you don't like the message, attack the messenger. Did you take the time to actually read the link? It was based on an interview by a BBC reporter of Phil Jones, the head of the Climate Research Unit (CRU) that has been in the middle of this dustup from the start. In the interview he ADMITS that the science isn't "settled" and was trapped by his own lips in logical errors with the his science.

Those who deny a climate conspiracy at this point in history are demonstrating that the whole man-made global warming hypothesis is faith-based. In other words, AGW is a religion, who's believers worship at the Alter of the Sacred Gases and want everyone else to be believers too. Sort of like Imam Gore's Jihad against the selfish Infidels who just want to be left alone.

 

But facts are facts... don't kill the messenger.

Assuming we can get a hold of the raw, un-doctored data, we should using real scientists.

 

I read it. It's twaddle. It's written for people who can't notice glaring logical inconsistencies and who have no interest in getting an objective look at the issues. It's just propaganda.

For example, read the discussion of the Medieval Warm Period.

One the one hand, they say that reconstructions of historical temperatures (aka, the Hockeystick) have all been debunked, none of their temperature measurement could possibly be correct, etc, etc.

On the other hand, stated as fact: "The MWP – which was several degrees warmer than today ..."

Either these folks have no clue how the original Medieval Warm Period temperature estimates were derived, or they have no clue, period. Because if historical reconstructions are all crap, then doubly so for the (highly geographically limited, piecemeal-evidence) reconstruction that showed a Medieval Warm Period.

And then, of course, there's the inevitable perseveration over a tree-ring series that became unusable after 1960 -- ignoring the fact that these reconstructions rest on a vastly broader basis than tree-ring series (though tree ring series are particularly useful due to their length and resolution).

So cut me a break.

1) If Mann's "hockey stick" and the numerous replications of that had all been "debunked", as stated as fact in this article, then this guy needs to tell the US National Academy of Sciences, which, at the request of the Congress, largely vindicated Mann's conclusions in lengthy 2006 report on the topic.

Surface Temperature Reconstructions for the Last 2,000 Years

He should also inform the premier US general science journal Nature, because if Mann's work has been "debunked" and is a fraud as stated, then Nature made a grave error in continuing to publish similar historical climate reconstructions by Mann, as they did just a few months ago, here:

Access : Atlantic hurricanes and climate over the past 1,500 years : Nature

When I see those two organizations retract their publications, I'll believe it's been debunked. And when I see this "American Thinker" article even bother to mention the National Academy of Sciences report, to mention he ongoing stream of Mann's peer-reviewed publications in prestigious journals, or even to acknowledge that the Mann-style temperature reconstructions rest on an array of series that is much broader than just tree rings, then I'll believe that it's something more than just propaganda.

2) If historical temperature reconstructions are all wrong and unreliable, based on their reliance of a broad spectrum of systematically gathered information, then ... don't assert that the globe was warmer during the Medieval Warm Period than it is now.

In short, the article is poorly-reasoned twaddle for people who simply want to believe things. It's not for people who think logically or want make a reasoned judgment based on all available evidence.

 

With all due respect, I don't think you're understanding what's going on here. Mann's Hockey Stick was proven false even before ClimateGate. Mann couldn't provide the raw data used in his modeling, he couldn't provide the FORTRAN code used to produce the graph, and the graph totally ignored reality. McIntyre finally succeeded in obtaining the code, where he demonstrated that regardless of the source data, the program produced the Hockey Stick shape. This is all substantiated in Climategate.

The MWP stands on it's own, the only question regards a lack of southern hemisphere data. If the present is as hot as it's ever been, why is there archiological evidence in Greenland of civilization and agriculture?

I disagree. Mann used suspect data from a remarkably limited dataset.

Ancient history. Garbage in, garbage out.

Didn't the chief editor of Nature recently recuse himself from a panel examining CRU's behavior as revealed by ClimateGate? He admitted that he's biased.

So called "big Science" has had a conflict of interest. They accepted suspect data as real and came up with the answers that their funding sources wanted. This is another thing that ClimateGate showed.

The issue is that the raw proxy data was manipulated, not to mention the more recent instrumental record that has been "massaged" by CRU and others. MWP appears if real data are analyzed. You can't divine "Truth" from "Lies".

Right. So you believe so-called scientists who claim "the science is settled" and who won't tolerate an open and free peer review process? You believe that truth is learned from "consensus"? Don't you realize that real science requires an active skeptical community trying to prove the current theory wrong? It is obvious to me that you're arguing from faith. Just relax, open your mind, and admit that the skeptics can't be all wrong.

 

My point so terribly missed by many of you is that American Thinker is an OPINION editorial and the writer is expressing his (rather one-sided) OPINION. It is not a scientific report. So yes, the messenger is giving us his opinion of the story. I can link to eco-bloggers on here as well with a big headline...one sided stories are not good journalism.

This is also hilarious to me that for years skeptics didn't believe what Phil Jones had to say. Now, you're using his selected words as the "truth". Well, if you insist, here is another quote from your glorified BBC interview:

How confident are you that warming has taken place and that humans are mainly responsible?
PJ: 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.

There is no conspiracy.

 

I have read most all of the Climate gate e-mails and data. I found Prof. Jones answers most disingenious in this Q and A. I do firmly believe that most of the research is done by addicted "Scientific Welfare Junkies" who have nuzzled up to the federal tit and are sucking our monetary resources dry to prove bogus scientific suppositions to gullible people. Are they accountable to anyone? Well if you look at the millions that Prof. T. Mann is sucking down as recently as our latest simulus package the answer is a resouonding "no".
That said, the environment is our responsiblity to protect and keep clean through individual responsibility and effort. The govt, however, does not need to dictate to us how this will be done nor does it need to create another bureacratic monster to keep us poor and clean based upon a "scientific process" of lies.

 

These climate change moon-bats remind me of the joke where upon a man gets caught by his wife with another woman, his response is: " Are you going to believe me, or your lying damn eyes!"

Yet another leak in the boat:

Climategate U-turn: Astonishment as scientist at centre of global warming email row admits data not well organised | Mail Online

These guys are trying re-distribute the wealth under the phony guise of "Cap and Trade".

 

That would depend on having an educated public making good choices which we don't have.

Welcome to PC. In your first three posts you have successfully jumped into global warming, politics and the brake recall issue. What's next?

 

IT is amazing to me how fast the AGW momvement has unraveled. I am not sure some of the politicos have fully come to grips with what has happened to their cap-and-trade scheme. It is side-splitting funny how the weather is evidence of AGW when it helps Al Gore and CO, but the Joe-six pack is scolded when the weather refutes the AGW case.
The largest scandal in the history of science.

 

With all due respect, you might at least get the sequence of events correct. McIntire's criticism of the "hockey stick" was the reason the National Academy of Sciences report was commissioned. McIntyre's papers on the hockey stick were published in 2003 (in Energy and Environment, not really a science journal) and 2005 (Geophysical Research Letters), and were cited in the 2006 National Academy of Sciences report.

How did I know that? Because I actually bothered to look at that report. Took me a whole two minutes to Google it and check. Here's the listing from the references from that report:

McIntyre, S., and R. McKitrick. 2003. Corrections to the Mann et al. (1998) proxy data base and Northern Hemispheric average temperature series. Energy & Environment 14(6):751-771.
McIntyre, S., and R. McKitrick. 2005a. Hockey sticks, principal components and spurious significance. Geophysical Research Letters 32:L03710.
McIntyre, S., and R. McKitrick. 2005b. Reply to comment by Huybers on “Hockey sticks, principal components, and spurious significance.” Geophysical Research Letters 32:L20713.

So the sequence of events is that McIntire (whose career was spent in the mining industry) and McKitrick (who is an economist, not a statistician) published their claims that the hockey stick was wrong, and then the National Academy of Sciences looked at the issue and offered their conclusion.

The well-reasoned conclusion of the National Academy of Sciences report is worth repeating, I think, because it shows what the limits of the then-available data appeared to be:

"

• It can be said with a high level of confidence that global mean surface temperature was higher during the last few decades of the 20th century than during any comparable period during the preceding four centuries. This statement is justified by the consistency of the evidence from a wide variety of geographically diverse proxies.
• Less confidence can be placed in large-scale surface temperature reconstructions for the period from A.D. 900 to 1600. Presently available proxy evidence indicates that temperatures at many, but not all, individual locations were higher during the past 25 years than during any period of comparable length since A.D. 900. The uncertainties associated with reconstructing hemispheric mean or global mean temperatures from these data increase substantially backward in time through this period and are not yet fully quantified.
• Very little confidence can be assigned to statements concerning the hemispheric mean or global mean surface temperature prior to about A.D. 900 because of sparse data coverage and because the uncertainties associated with proxy data and the methods used to analyze and combine them are larger than during more recent time periods.

"


Perseverating on Mann et. al just misses the big picture. In 1998, Mann's original claim was startling. But te world of real science has moved on, and at this point there are more than a dozen independent climate reconstructions, using diverse data sources, all of which appear to show the same "hockey stick" shape. The claim that the hockey stick was "debunked" is clearly a fringe view at odds with a broad body of evidence.

If you want to read a decent point/counterpoint on this, you can't do better than reading the analysis on realclimate:

RealClimate: Myth vs. Fact Regarding the "Hockey Stick"

It's a little out of date at this point, but they do seem to get their facts in order.

Just to keep the wiggle room down, recall that the original argument was that McIntyre had "debunked" the hockey stick, and McIntyre has not published any more peer-reviewed articles on this topic since 2005, based on McIntyre's own website. The website does list is 2006 presentation to the National Academy of Sciences, but, at least based on McIntyre's website, he has made no more publications on this topic.

http://climateaudit.org/multiproxy-pdfs/

So, if he somehow "debunked" it after the National Academy of Sciences report, where his views were given all due consideration, then ... he's kept very quiet about it.

 

The hockey stick is accurate? As long as Real climate says so, we all know how objective they are.

You can stick a fork in the AGW movement, it is DEAD. It is the butt of countless jokes in the mainstream world. The only thing preventing its conmplete death in the political world is the amount of investment certain politicos, governments and corporations have in the movement.

 

Typical. Ignore the National Academy of Sciences findings, and slam realclimate. That's telling 'em.

You have it completely backwards on the political aspects of this.

Telling Americans that there are limits on any resource consumption is as close as you can get to political suicide. Pandering to the notion of the wide-open frontier with no limits on anything and no worries about waste disposal -- that's how to get votes. No politician is going to get votes, on net, for saying that we need to curtail fossil fuel consumption.

I believe that's why the cap-and-trade bills in the House and Senate completely exempted cars and houses from the caps. Gasoline use isn't under the carbon cap, nor is the use of fuels used directly to heat homes. (Electric heat would be affected because the burning of coal in large power plants would fall under the cap.)

That's also why the provisions for offsets are so large. Fact of the matter is, under the proposed legislation, we wouldn't have to do jack about our own emissions for about the next generation or so, as long as we could convincingly claim that we'd paid somebody somewhere to reduce theirs. Can you say "loophole"?

If you actually bother to read the proposed legislation, you'll see an approach that was fairly circumspect: Establish a market for C02 emissions from large, fixed sources, then let the markets decide how best to deal with the cap. Provide an easy out for the next generation using offsets rather than reductions in emissions. Don't screw around trying to get cars and houses under the cap. Cars are going to be handled largely by the existing CAFE increases already on the books (continuing to ignore the dual-fuel loophole in the CAFA rules.) Houses, though tax incentives for insulation and efficiency.

You don't even get to yank industry's chain about changing the cap. The path of the cap is set in law.

Tough for me to read that as a nefarious power grab. Looks more to me like a bunch of politicians trying to do the right thing, but scared of losing votes and campaign contributions if they do it.

 

Yes, my paragraph didn't scan well. I knew that McIntyre's work predated Climategate by many years. The Hockey Stick has been discredited by the Skeptics, but treated as Gospel by the Believers for years.

And why is their main career field important? After all, the head of the UN's IPCC used to work for a railroad.

This is just plain wrong. The Hockey Stick and its variants are all based on Mann's work and repeat the reliance on flawed data and processing biases.

I'm sorry, but this is laughable! RealClimate is the propaganda arm of Mann and company! Is this "Science through Consensus"? Find enough web sites to agree with you and you can proclaim your lies gospel!

Shouldn't you be happy about the very real possibility that we aren't doomed to a roasting death? That the oceans won't turn into carbolic acid pools? That humans won't have to commit seppuku to save the Polar Bears? That your children CAN live full and free productive lifetimes? Why are you struggling so hard to empoverish your children? Don't extraordinary claims of calamity require extraordinary proof? The good news is the "proof" is hogwash! Rejoice! Or, do you really want our future to be enslavement? If so, feel free to do that to yourself, but leave the rest of us alone, thanks.

 

"Why are you struggling so hard to empoverish your children? "

Once again, Please, in all earnestness, explain how/why a cogent energy policy that has the potential side benefits going forward of, reducing energy cost, reduces our need for foreign oil, thereby increasing our sense of national security (that would also reduce CO2 emissions) is gong to impoverish your (or anyone else's) children?

Nearly all evidence of environmental regulations of the last generation have proved to have positive economic benefits many times, if not hundreds of times greater than their costs

I turn the question around, why are you so resistant to embracing these changes?

 

There lies the real problem. Control. controls on consumption controls on reproduction, controls on lifestyle, contorls on what you drive, controls on where and how you live, controls on how you vacation controls on what you eat. control.

The same bunch that thought the soviet union would be for the betterment of mankind. I guess it works out great as long as you are a member of the politburo, then you can have and do whatever you want and keep the masses in shackles.