Climategate: What Did Phil Jones Actually Admit? Was He Correct?

Phil Jones is director of the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia (UEA), which has been at the center of the row over hacked emails. The BBC’s environment analyst Roger Harrabin put questions to Professor Jones yesterday, including several gathered from climate skeptics.

Here are some of the questions. Some of Phil’s replies were surprisingly candid. I will look at and comment on six of the 23 questions.

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?

Phil Jones admitted the warming trends in the cyclical climate change we have seen since 1860 have been similar in magnitude. He provided these values for those periods:

Period Length Trend Significance

1860-1880 21 years 0.163 Yes

1910-1940 31 years 0.150 Yes

1975-1998 24 years 0.166 Yes

Jones left out 1880 to 1910, and 1940 to 1976, which both had negative decadal trends.

Do you agree that from January 2002 to the present there has been statistically significant global cooling?

Here Jones noted that the trend from 2002 to 2009 is negative (-0.12C per decade), but not statistically significant. He had noted earlier in the interview:

Achieving statistical significance in scientific terms is much more likely for longer periods, and much less likely for shorter periods.

Do you agree that natural influences could have contributed significantly to the global warming observed from 1975-1998? READ MORE...