Head of East Anglia Climate Research Center admits no warming in last 15 years and that a dog ate his homework, errr research data

In a shocking departure from standard global warming dogma, Phil Jones shared some shockingly honest facts with the BBC on Saturday.

Phil Jones was the director of the East Anglia Climate Research Center (CRU) in England that was the site of the climategate scandal that broke last December.  In fact, many of the emails at the heart of the controversy were directly sent or received by Jones.  Shortly after the emails were leaked, Jones stepped down as the head of the CRU as an investigation of any wrong doing was conducted.

This weekend, in a conversation with the BBC, Jones admitted there are some questions about the facts that form the foundation of their claims of global warming, and he gave a flimsy excuse for why he failed to honor freedom of information requests.

The key revlelations were:

The dog ate my homework — Jones says that he has ‘misplaced’ the data and research used to make the ‘hockey stick’ graph that Gore and others used to scare the world into believing an armageddon was upon us.

What most of us already knew — that there has been no global warming since the mid ’90s, or as he says, no “statistically significant” warming.

He admitted that the Medieval Warming Period might have been warmer than today and that modern temperatures might not be unprecedented.

The UK’s Daily Mail has more on the revelations from Jone’s conversation with the BBC:

Colleagues say that the reason Professor Phil Jones has refused Freedom of Information requests is that he may have actually lost the relevant papers.

Professor Jones told the BBC yesterday 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’.

The data is crucial to the famous ‘hockey stick graph’ used by climate change advocates to support the theory.

Professor 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.

And he said that for the past 15 years there has been no ‘statistically significant’ warming.

…

And he said that the debate over whether the world could have been even warmer than now during the medieval period, when there is evidence of high temperatures in northern countries, was far from settled.

Sceptics believe there is strong evidence that the world was warmer between about 800 and 1300 AD than now because of evidence of high temperatures in northern countries.

But climate change advocates have dismissed this as false or only applying to the northern part of the world.

Professor Jones departed from this consensus when he 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 palaeoclimatic 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.

The “hockey stick” graph has already been shown to be mainly a creation of graph-scaling bias, but this gets to the heart of the entire argument.  During the MWP, farmers grew crops on Greenland for a couple of centuries.  Until now, AGW advocates insisted that the warming only took place in the northern hemisphere.  If that warming was indeed global, then it dwarfs anything seen in the 20th century, as these two charts from Climate Audit, via  Sonic Frog, demonstrate:

While it may seem like Jone’s revelation about the MWP is a minor one, it is important to note that it was a major theme in the leaked CRU emails.  There were numerous emails between Jones and other global-warming scientists discussing how important it was to not talk about the MWP.  They discussed using only temperature data after the MWP to avoid highlighting the extreme warming of the MWP.  When they did need to produce long term temperature data, they discussed picking and choosing which temperature proxy data to use so that they could tailor the data so that the MWP appeared ONLY as warm as modern temperatures, or even slightly cooler.

Rich Trzupek of Big Journalism explains how the Medieval Warm Period was buried:

Some proxy data indicates that the average planetary temperature was much higher than it is today, specifically during the Medieval Warm Period (approximately 1000 – 1400 A.D.). Indeed, the IPCC’s first report acknowledged that the Medieval Warm Period existed. (See the chart, taken from the first IPCC report). Since then, the IPCC, CRU, Al Gore and others have done their damnedest to “disappear” this event, chiefly by picking and choosing friendly proxy data that would make it go away.

If you want to see the emails for yourself, go to http://eastangliaemails.com/ and search on MWP or “Medieval Warming” and you will find plenty of emails where Phil Jones and others talk about how to keep the data and even the term Medieval Warming Period, out of the public’s view.

There are plenty of other revelations in the text of those emails.  While Jones yesterday said he may have ‘lost’ the data that was used to create the famous hockey stick graph, some of his emails tell a different story.  In this 2005 email between Phil Jones and Michael Mann (head of Penn State climate research department currently under investigation), Jones says that he will delete climate data before complying with the UK’s freedom of information law and releasing it:

Mike,

I presume congratulations are in order – so congrats etc !

Just sent loads of station data to Scott. Make sure he documents everything better this time ! And don’t leave stuff lying around on ftp sites – you never know who is trawling them. The two MMs have been after the CRU station data for years. If they ever hear there is a Freedom of Information Act now in the UK, I think I’ll delete the file rather than send to anyone. Does your similar act in the US force you to respond to enquiries within 20 days? – our does !

The UK works on precedents, so the first request will test it.

We also have a data protection act, which I will hide behind.

…

Phil

[emphasis added]

It will be interesting to see how much press coverage Jone’s admissions receive in the US.  Over the last two months, there have been verified reports of inaccuracies and failures to rely on data from peer-reviewed journals in the UN’s IPCC reports almost weekly, but they are barely being covered in the US press.