Q&A: Professor Phil Jones

...The BBC's environment analyst Roger Harrabin put questions to Professor Jones, including several gathered from climate sceptics. The questions were put to Professor Jones with the co-operation of UEA's press office.

A - Do you agree that according to the global temperature record used by the IPCC, the rates of global warming from 1860-1880, 1910-1940 and 1975-1998 were identical?

An initial point to make is that in the responses to these questions I've assumed that when you talk about the global temperature record, you mean the record that combines the estimates from land regions with those from the marine regions of the world. CRU produces the land component, with the Met Office Hadley Centre producing the marine component.

Temperature data for the period 1860-1880 are more uncertain, because of sparser coverage, than for later periods in the 20th Century. The 1860-1880 period is also only 21 years in length. As for the two periods 1910-40 and 1975-1998 the warming rates are not statistically significantly different (see numbers below).

I have also included the trend over the period 1975 to 2009, which has a very similar trend to the period 1975-1998.

So, in answer to the question, the warming rates for all 4 periods are similar and not statistically significantly different from each other.

B - Do you agree that from 1995 to the present there has been no statistically-significant global warming?

Yes, but only just. I also calculated the trend for the period 1995 to 2009. This trend (0.12C per decade) is positive, but not significant at the 95% significance level. The positive trend is quite close to the significance level. Achieving statistical significance in scientific terms is much more likely for longer periods, and much less likely for shorter periods.

Thanks for the outstanding articles, but I don't see any conflict between them and my suggestion that Jones is still trying to "spin" his way out of this - The American Thinker used that very word, and in the same context as I, down at the bottom of the article.

Though Jones admitted to what is obviously fraud, I have not read a statement by him that says: "I, Phil Jones committed fraud"

Considering the implications of what he did admit to, he has obviously committed fraud on a global scale, hurting innumerable people in the process, but what does that really mean?

So far, it means that the Obama administration has every indication of further perpetuating the very same fraud until he is stopped. He came very close to admitting to it in the last couple days. In one of his latest on the half hour news hours, he made a statement that "even though not everyone believes in Climate Change, to succeed in creating jobs, we have to be leaders in clean energy" or some such drivel.

Whatever the dizzying wording, the inference was clear - he's touting this AGW crap as a way to achieve economic prosperity - and for the government and Friends of Obama, it will be a bonanza.

Unless he is stopped, he's not going to let Cap'n Tax sail down the drain.

“This “divergence” is well known in the tree-ring literature and “trick” did not refer to any intention to deceive - but rather “a convenient way of achieving something”, in this case joining the earlier valid part of the tree-ring record with the recent, more reliable instrumental record.”

Omitting the latter part of the tree ring record is clearly an intent to deceive the public. The divergence is a well known problem that discredits the accuracy of the tree ring validation.

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