Jones on the Medieval Warm Period

It's interesting to compare Phil Jones' various prognostications on the reality or otherwise of the Medieval Warm Period.

Jones et al 1998:

..we can only concur with Hughes and Diaz (1994) that there is little evidence for the
‘Medieval Warm Period’, although it is variably quoted as occurring between 900 and 1200...From the few reconstructions used prior to 1500 there is little evidence for the ‘Medieval Warm Period’.

Jones and Mann 2003:

To the extent that a ‘Medieval’ interval of moderately warmer conditions can be defined from about AD 800–1400, any hemispheric warmth during that interval is dwarfed in magnitude by late 20th century
warmth.

Jones & Mann 2004:

Our assessment affirms the conclusion that late 20th century warmth is unprecedented at hemispheric and, likely, global scales.

BBC interview 2010:

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.

One striking feature of the recent statements are that the disappearance of the scare quotes from the medieval warm period. But the overall tone has changed too. This looks like a pretty clear change of emphasis to me, but I'm sure that there are those who will argue that his latest statement is, in Hockey Team jargon, "consistent with" his earlier positions.

Harrabin on the Jones interview

Hat tip to the reader who pointed out this Today Programme discussion with Roger Harrabin, in which he describes his email interview with Phil Jones. No startling new revelations, but there is apparently more to come soon.

And also, did Harrabin's voice crack at one point, or did I imagine that?

Phil Jones in the Sundays

There's sure to be some analysis of Phil Jones' comments to Roger Harrabin in the Sunday papers, and I'll post links up as I get them. Thanks to Steve2 in the comments for the first of these:

MAIL ON SUNDAY: Untold billions of pounds have been spent on turning the world green and also on financing the dubious trade in carbon credits...You might have thought that all this was based upon well-founded, highly competent research and that those involved had good reason for their blazing, hot-eyed certainty and their fierce intolerance of dissent. But, thanks to the row over leaked emails from the Climatic Research Unit, we now learn that this body’s director, Phil Jones, works in a disorganised fashion amid chaos and mess.

Not Phil Jones, but very funny all the same.

Jonathan Leake is going to turn himself into even more of a hate figure for the green fraternity, reporting today on an interesting paper by Terry Mills that suggests that recent warming is just as likely to be a statistical artefact as a real change in the climate.

Gordon Brown is launching a new climate panel and denounces us all as "deniers" in the process. I guess he didn't get the memo either.

Ouch

Hans von Storch's comment, the first one in this thread about Phil Jones interview with Roger Harrabin, makes me wince rather.

Same as always - can we rely on Harrabin' report that the various quotes of Phil Jones are correct? I [once had dealings with Harrabin], and he had a somewhat liberal attitude in this respect, I remember. Any chance to verify independently the quotes?

Update: I've tweaked the language in the bracket slightly - see the comments for details.

What a night..

Well that was exciting wasn't it? I rolled in from the local hostelry at 11pm to find a message waiting for me from BBC News and the most extraordinary pair of articles about Phil Jones on the BBC website.

The BBC were pushing this story, which seems to have been some colleagues telling tales about the state of Jones' office, the spin being that Jones' untidiness is the reason he can't lay his hand on his data. This doesn't really ring true to me. In the emails, Jones was telling his Hockey Team colleagues that he was going to refuse to release the data, not that he couldn't lay his hands on it. If he really couldn't lay his hands on it, you would have expected him to start trying to collate the data anew, wouldn't you? And anyway, what was it that he sent to Peter Webster at Georgia Tech? I'm profoundly uncomfortable about this story.

Far more interesting is this Q&A between Harrabin and Jones, in which Jones announces that the existence of the Medieval Warm Period is still a matter for debate, a step that for most people would be enough to win them the "denier" label. He says only that "there's evidence that most of the warming since the 1950s is due to human activity". Most of us thought that the science was "settled".

The whole thing is a must-read, but it's also worth standing back and marvelling at Professor Jones' ability to express uncertainty in a manner that will be readily comprehensible to the layman. This is something that we have been told many times is very difficult to do. Perhaps we are getting somewhere now.

Phil Jones speaks

The BBC has the scoop, with an interview of Phil Jones just published on their website.

Professor Phil Jones, former director of the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia (UEA), said his results "stand up to scrutiny".

Highlights include a claim that his urban heat island paper has been corroborated by more recent work. Afficionados of Hockey Team rhetoric will recognise a standard line of argument used within the team, namely of claiming that the problems "don't matter".

Jones' claims also do nothing to defend Jones' co-author Wei Chyung Wang from Keenan's accusations of fraud, which rely on Wang's conclusions being impossible to arrive at with the data available.

Update on Feb 2, 2010 by Bishop Hill

There's a press release from UEA here.

Update on Feb 2, 2010 by Bishop Hill

Channel Four carries several interviews with Jones and his replacement as CRU director, Peter Liss.

Criminal charges could go ahead?

Christopher Booker has a second article in the Sunday Telegraph today in which he examines the ICO's claim that his hands are tied in the matter of criminal prosecutions at UEA because of the six months' time bar prescribed by the Magistrates Act. This story has generated considerable outrage in recent days, and some have suggested that more serious charges could be brought under different statutes altogether.

Booker makes two very interesting observations. First up he reckons that the six month for charges heard in magistrates' courts runs from when the offence was discovered rather than when it was committed. This is an opinion that has been aired elsewhere, and opinion seems to be divided on whether it is correct or not.

Intriguingly though, Booker also notes that charges of conspiring to defy the law could be brought under the Criminal Law Act 1977, where no time bar applies. Perhaps we haven't heard the last of this after all.

A climategate snippet on urban heat islands

While reading the Climategate emails, I chanced upon a message to Phil Jones from a Chinese researcher, Yan ZhongWei inquiring if the great man would like to be a co-author on a forthcoming paper.

Hi, Phil,

Attached please find a draft paper about site-changes and urbanization at Beijing. It may be regarded as an extension of our early work (Yan et al 2001 AAS) and therefore I would be happy to ask you to join as a co-author.

Regarding your recent paper about UHI effect in China (no doubt upon a large-scale warming in the region), I hope the Beijing case may serve as a helpful rather than a contradictory (as it may appear so) reference.

The urbanization-bias at BJ was considerable but could hardly be quantified. I suspect it was somehow overestimated by a recent work (Ren et al 2007). Please feel free to comment and revise.

I'll check and complete the reference list, while you may also add in new references

Cheers

Zhongwei

Well if the paper appeared contradictory, showing a substantial UHI, then I wanted to know about it. This appears to be it. Here's the abstract:

During 1977-1981 the Beijing (BJ) meteorological station was at a suburban location. In 1981 it was moved to a more urban location, but in 1997 it was subsequently moved back to the same suburban location. The daily BJ temperature series, together with those from 18 nearby stations, form a unique database for studying how site-change and possible urbanisation influences affect climate changes at a local scale. The site-change-induced biases were quantified, between 0.43 and 0.95°C, based on comparisons between multi-year-mean seasonal temperature anomalies at BJ and the mean of those from a cluster of nearby stations. The annual mean urban-suburban difference was 0.81°C around 1981 and 0.69°C around 1997, indicating a growing urbanisation effect in the suburban compared to the downtown area. The linear warming trend in the adjusted (for site moves only) BJ temperature series during 1977-2006 was 0.78 °C/decade. Comparing with several rural and less-urban sites, we suggest that the BJ records include an urbanisation-related warming bias between 0.20 and 0.54°C/decade, likely about 0.30°C/decade, for the recent few decades. The climatic warming at BJ between 1977 and 2006 is likely, therefore, to be about 0.48°C/decade. Caveats for using these estimates were discussed.

Searching for Phil Jones

This was rather amusing until environmentalists started to get violent.

In which I go beyond the pale

The Yale Climate Forum has a post up about Climategate - standard "move along now nothing to see here" fare. Perhaps attracted by the Yale name, I decided to make a small contribution to the debate there, picking up on some remarks by the piece's author Zeke Hausfather. Here's what he said about "hiding the decline":

This may be somewhat dubious in that it gives the impression that proxy reconstructions match the observed temperature record better than they otherwise would.

My comment was that "somewhat dubious" is a remarkable way to describe what Jones did. I pointed out that if he had done this as part of a share issue he would be looking at a long jail term. This is factually correct, and was posted pretty much in the terms I've given here.

Unfortunately though, The Yale Climate Forum viewed the posting of a true statement in mild terms as being completely beyond the pale and they decided to delete my comment.

I complain regularly that the climate debate often lapses into those on the other side of the argument claiming that words have different meanings to normal when they use them. The word "Forum" is clearly used in a profoundly different sense at Yale.

Science-free journal

Fred Pearce has a shocking report in New Scientist. Two of the claims he makes are simply not true.

This is turning into a bad week for NS, what with the world and his wife now referring to the once august publication as "non-scientist".

Pearce is attempting to explain away the failure of the CRU to release its raw data - "move along, nothing to see here". The reason the data has been withheld, he says, is quite simple:

It is tied up in confidentiality agreements with the governments that provided it. The Met Office and the UK government say they are now seeking permission to publish it.

This is not true. When CRU was questioned about these alleged agreements there were found only to be a couple which prevented commercial reuse and that was it.  The CRU page where this was shown has now been taken down, but that's what it was. The Climate Audit thread at the time is here. Even then, we know that the data was being merrily passed on to other favoured researchers, i.e. Peter Webster at Georgia Tech.

Pearce looks as though he is acting as a willing accomplice to a programme of disinformation.

Meanwhile Pearce also has this to say about Doug Keenan's work on the Wang papers on urban heat islands in China:

Keenan won his FOI request and said it showed the data was flawed, because some of the stations had been moved by the Chinese scientists who ran them. He said Jones's reluctance to share the data was evidence of fraud.

Keenan said nothing of the sort. This is what he actually said:

The two papers relied on data from 84 weather stations in China that were required to have very few significant moves. Of the stations, 42 were classified as rural and 42 as urban. For 40 of the rural stations, no histories exist (hence moves cannot be determined); the other 2 stations had substantial moves. For 9 of the urban stations, no histories exist; most of the other 33 had substantial moves.

In other words Keenan was saying that the researchers had made false representations of their data.

Scientists say "trust us"

The Met Office's hastily assembled list of scientists speaking out in favour of the alleged consensus has been something of a damp squib. I mean, lots of people with a vested interest in the continuation of the global warming crisis think that the global warming crisis is real and important?

Big deal.

Here's an interesting thing though - people who didn't sign it:

• Phil Jones
• Keith Briffa
• Bob Watson
• Andrew Watson
• Mike Hulme
• Tim Osborn

Some people might say that it's remarkable that some of the most prominent climatologists in the country failed to sign a statement of confidence in climatology.

Or perhaps they know something that the rest of us merely suspect.

Then again, maybe they were busy on other things.

Phil Jones to stand down

AP is reporting that Jones will stand down, at least temporarily, pending an investigation that he overstated climate change.

Fair to say then that UEA is not interested whether he breached the Freedom of Information Act and the Data Protection Act and whether he sought to oust journal editors from their positions then? Mind you, given that the Vice Chancellor of UEA seems to have been implicated in the breach of FoI laws you can imagine why the authorities might want to limit the terms of reference of the investigation.

Update on Dec 1, 2009 by Bishop Hill

It looks like the bit about the terms of reference being related to "overstating climate change" was AP's spin rather than what UEA actually said, which was that the terms of reference will be decided shortly.

The Hadley Agenda

The scientists at the Met Office's Hadley Centre, have discovered an error in the way they calculate the global temperature. Up until now, the smoothed data for a given year has been based upon those months' data which is available - so the 2007 trend, as reported in February 2007, was based on data for January and February of that year. At the time, this gave an sharply rising temperature trend, which was rather convenient for the IPCC Working Group I which was meeting at the time, enabling all and sundry to conclude that we were all doomed.

Roll forward to 2008 and the data for January and February 2008 show temperatures falling at an equally startling rate.

And guess what? Suddenly the disinterested scientists at Hadley have discovered that their methodology is all wrong! They're going to change things to eliminate the bias. Well, bully for them!

Isn't it amazing that this indavertent error has gone unnoticed for all these years? Isn't it more amazing still how it only got noticed when temperatures were falling? Someone with a more suspicious mind than me might think these guys had an agenda!

It's amusing also to note that Professor Phil Jones, the head of the Hadley Centre (update: CRU) is a man with an extraordinary reluctance to release his data and code to outsiders, even refusing to acquiesce to requests under the Freedom of Information Act. We can reach our own conclusions as to why he might do this, but for the moment it's salutory to note that, had he adopted a position of openness, this embarrassing error, which surely calls into question his competence to occupy the position of trust he does, might never have happened.

(Updated to fix Jones' affiliation)

What's going on here then?

One of the most important scientific documents in the global warming debate is Jones et al 1990 on the Urban Heat Island (UHI) effect. This was long claimed by sceptics to be a major factor in the apparent rise in global temperatures - essentially they were saying that as urbanisation took place, many formerly rural weather stations ended up surrounded by buildings. These gave off heat and raised the local temperature. In other words it looked like global warming, but wasn't.

Jones' letter to Nature in 1990 was widely claimed to have killed this argument off by presenting three temperature time series from rural weather stations.  By comparing these to another wider set of data, it was possible to show that the wider series had no significant UHI effect.

The story has suddenly come to the fore again because the UHI effect has attracted the interest of Steve McIntyre, a  prominent sceptic and something of a thorn in the side of the mainstream. He has been asking the author, Phil Jones for his raw data - specifically he wants to identify which weather stations were used his work - presumably he means to test if they were genuinely rural or not.

And thus far, Jones has refused to release the information, despite a formal request under the Environmental Information Regulations.

Now to anyone who knows anything about science, this is pretty exciting stuff. It's pretty much a given that you release your data on request so that others can test it. Nature, which published the orginal letter, makes prompt availability of data a condition of publication. So the refusal is likely to be viewed in a pretty dim light by the scientific community, or at least I hope it is.

There are other lines of enquiry for McIntyre to pursue in order to get the data, but in the meantime let's just notice the startling fact of a "real" scientist refusing to release his data to someone who is alleged to be a fake and the equivalent of a creationist.