The British
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.
Professor Phil
Jones told the BBC on February 13 that 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'.
Jones's data is
crucial to the famous `hockey stick graph' showing a supposed spike in
global temperatures that has often been used by climate change
advocates to support the theory.
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.
He also 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. 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 (IPCC)
to press governments to cut carbon dioxide emissions. The panel is
headed by Rajendra Pachauri of The Energy Research Institute in New
Delhi.
Following the
leak of the emails, Jones has been accused of `scientific fraud' for
allegedly deliberately suppressing information and refusing to share
vital data with critics.
More scientists
have come out expressing doubts about the IPCC's claims that there was
"unequivocal" evidence that global warming was taking place and that
this was a product of man-made carbon emissions.
"The temperature
records cannot be relied on as indicators of global change," said John
Christy, professor of atmospheric science at the University of Alabama
in Huntsville, a former lead author on the Intergovernmental Panel on
Climate Change , told the Times of London on Monday.
Christy and
other scientists have focussed on the thousands of weather stations
across the globe used to collect temperature data for the past 150
years.
They believe
these stations have been measuring increasingly higher temperatures
because of urbanisation, changes in land use and, in many cases, being
moved to different locations.
Christy has
published papers looking at these effects in east Africa, California
and Alabama.
"The story is the same for each one," he told The Times.
"The popular
data sets show a lot of warming but the apparent temperature rise was
actually caused by local factors affecting the weather stations, such
as land development."
Similar
criticisms have been made by Professor Ross McKitrick, of the
University of Guelph, Canada.
He was invited
by the IPCC panel to review its last report and, as a consequence,
became a strong critic of the panel and its methods.
In a later study
of the panel's methods, he 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."
