Ex-climate change honcho says there’s been no global warming since 1995

In an interview with the BBC, fallen climate change expert Philip Jones, former director of the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia, the main source of temperature data for the global warming establishment, makes statements that are the equivalent of a member of the Soviet Poliburo declaring that Marxism-Leninism is wrong. A. Zarkov commented on the interview at VFR earlier on Sunday. Now Ed Price writes about it in tomorrow’s Daily Express. To summarize the main points brought out by Price:

• In the BBC interview, Jones agrees with the interviewer’s statement that “from 1995 to the present there has been no statistically significant global warming.”

• Researchers (Price unfortunately doesn’t tell us which researchers) say that temperatures recorded at various weather stations around the world, supplying the raw data on which climate change history and projections that are the very foundation of the Global Warming Orthodoxy are based, are “often caused by local factors rather than global change.” (Update, Monday morning: maybe Price didn’t mention the source of his information because it was a competing newspaper, the Sunday Times of London. See next entry.)

• Jones says he has had trouble “keeping track” of the raw data on which the temperature history and projections have been based. (I’m again reminded of a line from a short-lived sitcom in the 1980s, Mary, starring Mary Tyler Moore. A ditsy female supporting character says, “I’m so scattered and confused all the time—and that’s not good when you’re a city planner.”)

• Jones for the first time concedes the possibility that the Medieval Warm Period undercuts the notion of unprecedented global warming in our time. While he says that there are few climate records for the tropics and the southern hemisphere during medieval times, and thus no way of showing definitely (at least at present) that the Medieval Warm Period affected not just Europe and North America but the whole world, he nevertheless says: “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.”

Up to this point, warmists have always either dismissed or outright concealed, as in the famous hockey stick graph, the very existence of the Medieval Warm Period (see devastating article linked here). Jones’s bland admission of the possible reality of the Medieval Warm Period throws the anthropogenic global warming orthodoxy into the trash bin of history. Remember, the central assertion of AGW has been, not that AGW may be true, but that it is the established truth (the “warming of the climate system is unequivocal,” declared the IPCC’s famous 2007 report), and therefore humanity, or rather Western humanity, has NO CHOICE but to reduce carbon emissions immediately and drastically or face imminent global catastrophe (while at the same time it also must transfer its wealth to Third World kleptocrats, I love that part of it). But if the Medieval Warm Period was global, a possibility Jones acknowledges, then (1) the world has had warmer temperatures than at present within the last thousand years, without a catastrophe; and (2) modern industrial carbon dioxide emissions are not the cause of atmospheric warming. However, even without Jones’s concession regarding the Medieval Warm Period, his statement that there has been no significant global warming since 1995 is the nail in the coffin for AGW.

So, what does Al Gore do for the rest of his life? Become the global warming equivalent of one of those Japanese soldiers who hid out in the jungle of a south Pacific island for 20 years refusing to admit that the war was over?

Here’s the Price article:

THE GREAT CLIMATE CHANGE RETREAT
A key scientist has conceded that there has been no “statistically significant” rise since 1995
Monday February 15,2010
By Ed Price

THERE has been no global warming for 15 years, a key scientist admitted yesterday in a major U-turn.

Professor Phil Jones, who is at the centre of the “Climategate” affair, conceded that there has been no “statistically significant” rise in temperatures since 1995.

The admission comes as new research casts serious doubt on temperature records collected around the world and used to support the global warming theory.

Researchers said yesterday that warming recorded by weather stations was often caused by local factors rather than global change.

The revelations will be seized upon by sceptics as fresh evidence that the science of global warming is flawed and climate change is not man-made.

The Daily Express has led the way in exposing flaws in the arguments supporting global warming.

Last month we revealed how the UN’s International Panel on Climate Change was forced to admit its key claim that Himalayan glaciers would melt by 2035 was “speculation” lifted from a 1999 magazine article. The influential IPCC then admitted it had got the key claim wrong and announced a review.

The Daily Express has also published a dossier listing 100 reasons why global warming was part of a natural cycle and not man-made.

Yesterday it emerged that Professor Jones, whose raw data is crucial to the theory of climate change, had admitted he has trouble “keeping track” of the information.

Colleagues have expressed concern that the reason he has refused Freedom of Information requests for the data is that he has lost some of the crucial papers.

Professor Jones also conceded for the first time that the world may have been warmer in medieval times than now. Sceptics have long argued the world was warmer between 800 and 1300AD because of high temperatures in northern countries.

Climate change advocates have always said these temperatures cannot be compared to present day global warming figures because they only apply to one specific zone.

But Professor Jones 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 climatic 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.” Professor Jones first came under scrutiny when he stepped down as director of the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit in which leaked emails were said to show scientists were manipulating data.

Researchers were accused of deliberately removing a “blip” in findings between 1920 and 1940, which showed an increase in the Earth’s temperature.

John Christy, professor of atmospheric science at the University of Alabama and a former lead author on the IPCC, said: “The apparent temperature rise was actually caused by local factors affecting the weather stations, such as land development.”

Ross McKitrick, of the University of Guelph, Canada, who was invited to review the IPCC’s last report said: “We concluded, with overwhelming statistical significance, that the IPCC’s climate data are contaminated with surface effects from industrialisation and data quality problems. These add up to a large warming bias.”

- end of initial entry -

LA writes:

See article in the Mail which also goes over Jones’s statements and takes them apart.

John Hagan writes:

These past few months have been momentous. The exposure of the global warming fraud by an unknown person, and then the election of one individual in Massachusetts who has perhaps derailed the government take over of health care, immigration reform, and the cap & trade fiasco which was the mechanism set up to transfer billions of dollars of our tax money to the third world, has stopped in its tracks the utter dismantling of the functional West! This whole scenario reads like science fiction!

These is an unsung hero out there somewhere who leaked all this climate information to the world. I hope he steps forward someday when it’s safe for his career to do so. I don’t think most of us realize just how profound these past several months have been in salvaging all that we hold dear.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at February 15, 2010 01:39 AM | Send