Bishop Hill This should be fun
Jun 19, 2007 Climate: Surface A freelance researcher called Doug Keenan has accused prominent climate scientist, Professor Phil Jones of the University of East Anglia, of fabricating part of a key paper on the Urban Heat Island effect. This is one of the most important papers underpinning the claims of manmade global warming.
In the paper, Jones claimed that he sampled the temperature records from weather stations selected for having uninterrupted histories - that is to say they hadn't been moved or had their instrumentation changed and so on. This is vital for the credibility of the paper.
Keenan has discovered that for many of the stations Jones used, there are actually no records of whether there were any changes or not and says that the claims made in the paper are therefore fabrications.
Stand back and watch the fireworks.
(Via Climate Audit)
Reader Comments (17)
LOL. Sure it is.
Given that even most denialists have given up pretending that it isn't getting warmer and instead have concentrated on denying that man contributes to the cause, that claim seems pretty dubious.
I don't think anyone seriously disputes that warming has happened anymore (although it used to be a denialist staple to do so), which leaves the extent and relative importance of the causes to discuss.
So, no, it's not 'one of the most important papers underpinning the claims of manmade global warming', it's a paper which is one part of the evidence for global warming, manmade or otherwise.
Which would mean that warming was not really occurring.
That is the point I was making - pretty much nobody is still making the claim that there is not warming. That trench has long since been abandoned.
Given that Jones et al 1990 was the paper from which everyone concluded that UHI was small, then presumably the whole debate over whether warming is occurring is open again?
"Given that Jones et al 1990 was the paper from which everyone concluded that UHI was small,"
Even if that were so the conclusion remains correct. UHI has been studied and its influence on the temperature record has been searched for. It isn't there. Those who still claim it should be there or it might be there are like Japanese soldiers who haven't heard that WW2 is over.
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php?p=43
http://illconsidered.blogspot.com/2006/02/warming-due-to-urban-heat-island.html
http://www.agu.org/pubs/crossref/2005/2005EO420001.shtml
and to these
http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2007ThApC.tmp...10H
and to these
http://www.pnas.org/cgi/reprint/101/26/9540.pdf
Just because something's not in the IPCC report, doesn't mean it's not there at all - this is the point of Roger Pielke's recent posting.(see my later posting)
"According to these scientists, it is there."
Nope. Nobody denies there is such thing as UHI (of course they might if it was thought to support AGW), it is just that it isn't having any significant influence on the temperature trend. None of the papers you cite claim otherwise.
It has been pretty comprehensively demonstrated that UHI (which tends to occur at night and in calm conditions) is not adding to the global warming signal. This has been done by treating minimum daily temperatures (usually at night) for windy and calm conditions separately. The rate of warming was found to be the same. Thus UHI cannot explain the warming we see.
You're referring to Parker et al?
"This analysis demonstrates that urban warming has not introduced significant biases into estimates of recent global warming. The reality and magnitude of global-scale warming is supported by the near-equality of temperature trends on windy nights with trends based on all data."
Parker, D.E. 2004, Large-scale warming is not urban, Nature 432, 290
and this:
"Contrary to generally accepted wisdom, no statistically significant impact of urbanization could be found in annual temperatures."
Peterson, T.C. 2003, Assessment of Urban Versus Rural In Situ Surface Temperatures in the Contiguous United States: No Difference Found, Journal of Climate 16, 2941
The comments thread is very long (over 300 postings to date) but if you have time it's worth following through to the end. I think it's fair to say that both sides agree that there are some questions that need answering before this could be construed as convincing. They are putting together a message for Parker - the draft is at comment 302.
http://www.climateaudit.org/?p=1718
Peterson puts UHI at around 0.05 degrees per century. Compare this to the first of the papers I have referenced above, which puts it at 0.06 degrees per year. The Hinkel study of Barrow, Alaska (population 4000, IIRC) measured UHI directly at up to 4 degrees centigrade depending on wind etc. It's much easier to equate Gonzalez et al 2005 with Hinkel than it is Peterson.
"Peterson puts UHI at around 0.05 degrees per century. Compare this to the first of the papers I have referenced above, which puts it at 0.06 degrees per year."
Apples and oranges. One is a global figure over a century and the other is a local figure over 30 years.
Plus, I don't know what paper you are looking at, but this doesn't look like a literature review to me.
http://ams.allenpress.com/perlserv/?request=get-abstract&doi=10.1175%2F1520-0442%282003%29016%3C2941%3AAOUVRI%3E2.0.CO%3B2
If it is then it would seem to contradict the other papers we have discussed (ie Hinkel) as well as everyday experience. I'm sure I can't be understanding it correctly.
http://ipcc-wg1.ucar.edu/wg1/Report/AR4WG1_Pub_Ch03.pdf