Climategate U-turn as
scientist at centre of row admits: There has been no global warming
since 1995
By Jonathan Petre
Last updated at 5:12 PM on
14th February 2010
* Data for vital
'hockey stick graph' has gone missing
* There has been no
global warming since 1995
* Warming periods
have happened before - but NOT due to man-made changes
Professor Phil Jones
Data: Professor Phil Jones
admitted his record keeping is 'not as good as it should be'
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.
* MAIL ON SUNDAY
COMMENT: The professor's amazing climate change retreat
Following the leak of the
emails, Professor Jones has been accused of ‘scientific
fraud’ for allegedly deliberately suppressing information and
refusing to share vital data with critics.
Discussing the interview,
the BBC’s environmental analyst Roger Harrabin said he had
spoken to colleagues of Professor Jones who had told him that his
strengths included integrity and doggedness but not record-keeping
and office tidying.
Mr Harrabin, who conducted
the interview for the BBC’s website, said the professor had been
collating tens of thousands of pieces of data from around the world
to produce a coherent record of temperature change.
That material has been
used to produce the ‘hockey stick graph’ which is
relatively flat for centuries before rising steeply in recent decades.
According to Mr Harrabin,
colleagues of Professor Jones said ‘his office is piled high
with paper, fragments from over the years, tens of thousands of
pieces of paper, and they suspect what happened was he took in the
raw data to a central database and then let the pieces of paper go
because he never realised that 20 years later he would be held to
account over them’.
Asked by Mr Harrabin about
these issues, Professor Jones admitted the lack of organisation in
the system had contributed to his reluctance to share data with
critics, which he regretted.
But he denied he had
cheated over the data or unfairly influenced the scientific process,
and said he still believed recent temperature rises were
predominantly man-made.
Asked about whether he
lost track of data, Professor Jones said: ‘There is some truth
in that. We do have a trail of where the weather stations have come
from but it’s probably not as good as it should be.
‘There’s a
continual updating of the dataset. Keeping track of everything is
difficult. Some countries will do lots of checking on their data then
issue improved data, so it can be very difficult. We have improved
but we have to improve more.’
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.
And he said that the
debate over whether the world could have been even warmer than now
during the medieval period, when there is evidence of high
temperatures in northern countries, was far from settled.
Sceptics believe there is
strong evidence that the world was warmer between about 800 and 1300
AD than now because of evidence of high temperatures in northern countries.
But climate change
advocates have dismissed this as false or only applying to the
northern part of the world.
Professor Jones departed
from this consensus when he said: ‘There is much debate over
whether the Medieval Warm Period was global in extent or not. The MWP
is most clearly expressed in parts of North America, the North
Atlantic and Europe and parts of Asia.
‘For it to be global
in extent, the MWP would need to be seen clearly in more records from
the tropical regions and the Southern hemisphere. There are very few
palaeoclimatic records for these latter two regions.
‘Of course, if the
MWP was shown to be global in extent and as warm or warmer than
today, then obviously the late 20th Century warmth would not be
unprecedented. On the other hand, if the MWP was global, but was less
warm than today, then the current warmth would be unprecedented.’
Sceptics said this was the
first time a senior scientist working with the IPCC had admitted to
the possibility that the Medieval Warming Period could have been
global, and therefore the world could have been hotter then than now.
Professor Jones criticised
those who complained he had not shared his data with them, saying
they could always collate their own from publicly available material
in the US. And he said the climate had not cooled ‘until
recently – and then barely at all. The trend is a warming trend’.
Mr Harrabin told Radio
4’s Today programme that, despite the controversies, there still
appeared to be no fundamental flaws in the majority scientific view
that climate change was largely man-made.
But Dr Benny Pieser,
director of the sceptical Global Warming Policy Foundation, said
Professor Jones’s ‘excuses’ for his failure to share
data were hollow as he had shared it with colleagues and ‘mates’.
He said that until all the
data was released, sceptics could not test it to see if it supported
the conclusions claimed by climate change advocates.
He added that the
professor’s concessions over medieval warming were
‘significant’ because they were his first public admission
that the science was not settled.
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