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.
via Climategate U-turn: Astonishment as scientist at centre of global warming email row admits data not well organised | Mail Online.
Look, I know that this doesn’t disprove global warming. But to think that we were on the verge of passing a cap-and-trade bill that would risk our whole economy based on alleged scientific certainties that turn out to be so questionable is breath-taking. The scientific method requires that evidence be replicable and that experiments be subject to checking. And yet so much of the data that is said to make the case for global warming is in the hands of an absent-minded professor–who can focus well-enough on trying to silence dissenters to his findings–who can’t even find his data!
Yes, there is a difference between weather and climate, and record snowstorms do not necessarily disprove global warming. But as Dana Milibank–a liberal and a believer in global warming–points out, advocates of global warming have been putting forward exactly that same kind of anecdotal evidence (the lack of snow at the Winter Olympics, the increase in the number of tornadoes, changes in animal behavior, much of what was in the Al Gore movie) to persuade people that man-made global warming is real and to scare people into accepting Draconian remedies.
UPDATE: Here is a Washington Post news article detailing even MORE sloppiness–including typographical errors that threw off dating and unsubstantiated claims from environmentalist groups passed off as data–that is discrediting climate research.
HT: DonS
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