Embattled UK climate scientist steps down
The embattled director of the University of East Anglia's Climate Research Unit (CRU), Dr. Phil Jones, announced that he will be temporarily standing aside as director. An independent review of his conduct in light of the emails illegally hacked from his computers last month is in progress. In a press release, Professor Jones said: "What is most important is that CRU continues its world leading research with as little interruption and diversion as possible. After a good deal of consideration I have decided that the best way to achieve this is by stepping aside from the Director's role during the course of the independent review and am grateful to the University for agreeing to this. The Review process will have my full support".
The University and the police are investigating the break-in, and it is currently unknown if this was the act of an insider or an external break-in. I think it is highly unlikely this was the work of an insider in a whistle-blower type of action, since a computer at realclimate.org was hacked into the same week (via a computer in Turkey), and the criminal attempted to upload the emails stolen from CRU to the realclimate.org server. This is not the sort of action a whistleblower would do. Dr. Gavin Schmidt of realclimate.org said in a comment yesterday that the CRU break-in appeared to have been done from the outside, into a backup mail server. It is unlikely the hacker acted alone, since hackers aren't typically intimately familiar with the details of the climate change science debate. The emails and code stolen were selectively culled by someone who appeared to have considerable expertise in climate science.
What did Dr. Jones do wrong?
So, what did Dr. Jones do wrong? For starters, he should have confronted the allegations raised by his critics immediately and talked candidly to the press about some of the specific accusations being made. For example, one of the emails contained the statement that he would like to "redefine what the peer-reviewed literature is" to exclude two questionable papers from the IPCC report. Well, that's not something a good scientist should seriously advocate, and is an impossibility, in any case. No one can redefine the peer-reviewed literature, since the rules for this are well-established an not subject to change. When I read the comment in the context it was made, it reads as a joke. There is no discussion in the hacked emails about how to go about redefining the peer-reviewed literature. In the end, the two papers Jones was referring to with this comment, McKitrick and Michaels (2004) and Kalnay and Cai (2003), ended up being cited and discussed in Chapter 2 of the IPCC AR4 report. Those intent on discrediting the science of human-caused global warming are spinning the comment differently, creating a controversy about something that is impossible to do, and was not being seriously suggested. Jones should have immediately spoken up to quash the hype on this comment.
The "trick" to "hide the decline"
Another area of concern is over a graph Dr. Jones helped construct in 1999 showing the "hockey stick" of Earth's surface temperature going back 1,000 years. This graph combined instrumental measurements made since the 1800s with older paleoclimate data (including data from tree rings) to show a continuous 1,000 year record of Earth's temperatures. The paleoclimate data after 1960 show a bogus decline in Earth's temperatures that does not agree with what modern thermometers have been measuring, due to a well-known variation in tree ring thickness as a function of time, referred to as "the decline". Thus, Jones elected to toss out the bogus paleoclimate data (using a "trick" to "hide the decline") rather than present it in the graph. The graph was not properly labeled to show this was done, so viewers of the graph would have had needed to be familiar with a 1998 paper published in Nature or the 1999 paper referenced in the caption on the graph, which explained this well-known data issue. The graph that Jones used his "trick" on was put into a 1999 report called the "WMO Statement on the Status of the Global Climate". The report was given to policy makers, but was never published in a peer-reviewed scientific journal. No reputable climate scientist believes that the paleoclimate data since 1960 is of higher quality than the instrumental record (this is discussed in detail in Chapter 6 of the 2007 IPCC report). In order to make the "hokey stick" graph less confusing, removing "the decline" from the tree ring data is a reasonable thing to do--provided one labels the graph properly. The graph was not properly labeled. Does Jones' "trick" and failure to properly label the graph constitute data falsification, or was it merely sloppy science? The hacked emails contain no suggestions that the "trick" was done to intentionally fool people, and the "trick" never appeared in the peer-reviewed scientific literature, including the IPCC reports. In Dr. Jones' words, "This is well-known and is called the "decline" or "divergence". The use of the term "hiding the decline" was in an email written in haste. CRU has not sought to hide the decline. Indeed, CRU has published a number of articles that both illustrate, and discuss the implications of, this recent tree-ring decline, including the article that is listed in the legend of the WMO Statement figure".
Figure 1. The WMO 1999 "hockey stick" figure (top) with climate reconstructions and instrumental temperatures merged, and a version (bottom) with the climate reconstructions (coloured) and instrumental temperatures (annual & summer in black) shown separately. Note "the decline" in the temperature obtained from tree ring data (green curve) in the bottom curve. Image credit: University of East Anglia.
Global warming contrarians are spinning the "trick" as reason to discredit the "hockey stick", claiming that the data was falsified to hide the fact that tree rings were telling the real story. Since the hockey stick was falsified, some claim, the entire science behind human-caused global warming needs to be questioned. This is plain ludicrous. The graph was never published in a scientific journal. Several updated versions of the "hockey stick" graph have been published in the ten years since the disputed graph was produced, and the "hockey stick" can be reproduced in essentially the same form excluding the controversial tree rings, using other paleoclimate data such as boreholes (See Mann et al., 2008, Figure 2). Furthermore, the peer-reviewed science supporting human-caused global warming is not based solely upon the "hockey stick" and the CRU data used for the last 150 years of the hockey stick graph. There are three separate data sets of global temperatures maintained by NASA, the CRU, and NOAA's National Climatic Data Center, that all show essentially the same global warming. We also have evidence from nature herself in the form of plants and animals expanding their ranges poleward, the record loss of Arctic sea ice in 2007 and record loss of multi-year Arctic sea ice this year, the shrinking of mountain glaciers, reductions in the length of freeze season in many Northern Hemisphere lakes and rivers, the shifting of spring blooms earlier in most regions of the world, and on and on and on. Again, Jones should have spoken up immediately to kill the ridiculous hype being pushed by global warming contrarians about the importance of a 10-year old graph that is now scientifically irrelevant, and was never published.
Figure 2. The "hockey stick" of global temperature anomalies since 300 A.D., as published in a 2008 paper in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences by Mann et al.. Even if one excludes tree rings (blue curve), the hockey stick looks the same.
Resistance to releasing data to other researchers
The hacked emails also show that Dr. Jones resisted releasing his data to contrarians and urged others to delete emails regarding Freedom Of Information (FOI) related requests. Many countries protect their weather data under an international agreement called World Meteorological Organization Resolution 40, which prohibits the data from being made public (this is why wunderground can't give out the UKMET model forecasts on our web site, for example). About 5% of the CRU data fell in that category, making release illegal. However, deleting emails related to FOI requests is inadvisable and implies one has something to hide. The investigation should certainly pursue the issue of whether Dr. Jones properly handled the requests to turn over his data to outside researchers. Ideally, weather data documenting Earth's climate history should be free to everyone on the planet (I am not a big fan of WMO Resolution 40). However, another aspect to this issue is the time it takes for the scientists involved to prepare the data for release. Large, complicated data sets require extensive documentation and access to related computer codes in order to process them, and making the data available to every amateur investigator interested in the data puts an unfair burden on the scientists who maintain the data sets. In particular, an amateur climate science investigator named Stephen McIntyre, who runs the web site Climate Audit, has created such an issue. McIntyre, a retired mining executive and an investor, is not a professional scientist, but has been successful identifying several technical errors made in the published literature. He has also generated a huge amount of misleading and incorrect information over the years, and has done a tremendous amount of damage to the understanding of climate science. McIntyre is intent on discrediting the science of human-caused global warming--presumably for ideological reasons, since he has no obvious ties to the fossil fuel industry--and has generated a large number of Freedom of Information requests to further his cause. One of the hacked emails, from Dr. Ben Santer, complained that McIntyre's FOI requests were intrusive and unreasonable with no scientific justification or explanation given, and appeared to be a calculated strategy to divert Santer's attention and focus away from research. It's worth reading Santer's reaction to the hacked email affair to learn more. Given such tactics by McIntyre, Dr. Jones' resistance to FOI requests from McIntyre is understandable, but appears to have been poorly handled.
The science of human-caused global warming remains unaffected
None of the hacked emails reveal any conspiracy to publish falsified or "fudged" material in the peer-reviewed scientific literature. The science of human-caused global warming will require no revision as a result of this affair. Baseless accusations of fraud, data manipulation, and conspiracy against climate change scientists stemming from the hacked emails are being massively hyped by the Manufactured Doubt industry in an effort to discredit climate scientists, since no flaw with the science can be found. Most of the public is in no position to distinguish good science from bad, so if you can create doubt, uncertainty, and confusion, you can win--or at least buy time, lots of it. The hacked email affair is all about politics, not science. Dr. Jones is an excellent scientist, but unfortunately was over-matched as a politician. It was hardly a fair fight--one scientist against the political might of the mightiest PR campaign against science ever waged, armed with some selectively culled stolen emails taken out of context.
Other posts in this series
The Manufactured Doubt industry and the hacked email controversy
Is more CO2 beneficial for Earth's ecosystems?
Next post
I'm working on a post called, "Don't shoot the messenger", and plan to run this Sunday or Monday.
Our Climate Change expert, Dr. Ricky Rood, will be in Copenhagen for Monday's start to the crucial COP15 climate change treaty negotiations. Be sure to tune into his blog for updates on the talks. Wunderground has provided financial support for several University of Michigan students to attend the talks, and I may be featuring portions of their blogs over the coming weeks.
Jeff Masters
Reader Comments
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NATIONAL WEATHER SERVICE HOUSTON/GALVESTON TX
503 AM CST FRI DEC 4 2009
...MODERATE TO HEAVY SNOW TO DEVELOP OVER THE REGION TODAY...
.DISCUSSION...
COLD HIGH PRESSURE CONTINUES TO SETTLE INTO THE AREA WITH
TEMPERATURES IN THE 40S AT THIS TIME AND THESE WILL BE THE HIGHEST
TEMPS OF THE DAY...BY LATE MORNING THE INLAND AREAS WILL BE IN THE
30S. LIGHT RAIN SHOULD DEVELOP OVER PARTS OF THE AREA THIS MORNING
BUT THE FAR WESTERN PORTIONS OF BRAZOS AND BURLESON MAY SKIP THIS
PHASE OF PRECIP. AS THE VIGOROUS UPPER TROUGH DIGS DOWN INTO
CENTRAL TEXAS THE AFTERNOON THE PROFILES ACROSS SETX SUPPORT RAINS
ENDING AND SWITCHING OVER TO ALL SNOW BY AROUND 1 PM FOR AREAS
WEST OF HIGHWAY 59. AFTER FOCUSING ON THE 00Z RUNS HAVE EXPANDED
THE WINTER STORM WARNING NORTH TO INCLUDE HOUSTON AND MADISON
COUNTIES. SOME THINGS OF CONCERN IS THE POSSIBILITY OF HEAVY BANDS
OF SNOW SETTING UP THIS AFTERNOON FROM SW TO NE THROUGH MAINLY THE
CENTRAL ZONES. HAVE RAISED THE SNOW AMOUNTS TO WIDESPREAD 1-2" AND
ISOLATED 3 TO 4" BUT IF THE BANDS PERSIST THE COUNTIES IN THE
WARNING EAST OF 45 COULD SEE GREATER AMOUNTS. THE WARM GROUND WILL
CERTAINLY HELP TO MELT SNOW THAT FALLS EARLY THIS AFTERNOON BUT
THE STRONG CAA AND MELTING WILL LIKELY LEAD TO BRIDGES AND
ELEVATED ROADS ICING UP LATE THIS AFTERNOON AND EVENING...PERHAPS
BY MID AFTERNOON ACROSS THE NORTH. BREEZY TO WINDY CONDITIONS ON
TAP AND COMBINED WITH THE COLD AFTERNOON TEMPERATURES THE WIND
CHILL INDEX READINGS OF 20-25 DEGREES WILL RULE FROM NOON THROUGH
9-10 AM SATURDAY SO DRESS WARMLY. THE SNOW SHOULD BE COMING TO AN
END BY 6 TO 9 PM AS THE SYSTEM EXITS EAST. THE SNOW COVER AND
CLEARING SKIES WILL LEAD TO A VERY COLD NIGHT WITH TEMPERATURES
ALONG AND NORTH OF 59 IN THE 21-25 DEGREE RANGE BY MORNING.
TEMPERATURES ON SATURDAY WILL CREEP UP SLOWLY IN THE MORNING WITH
MOST OF HEATING GOING INTO MELTING THE SNOW...DURING THE AFTERNOON
TEMPERATURES COULD REACH THE 40S...BUT CONFIDENCE ON SPECIFIC
TEMPS IS NOT VERY HIGH FOR SATURDAY.
Ike we are 4 days outta Season™ yet we're already dis'cussin' snow. Not just a dusting, but obvious accumulations.
Houston's talking anywhere from an inch on up into the ridiculous. Heck, an inch would shut my city (jacksonville) down.
My de-icer is a debit card. Yikes.
this is the south. Haven't you heard it cant snow down here? >:o ... if it does I'll just have to go naked cuz i'll be dreamin anyway..... seriously though, looks like I could see a couple inches if the 850 0C line does what it's sposed to. I live almost even (just south of) with citronelle towards the east.
70 degrees here in South Florida, just got back from my morning jog
+1
That looks very similar to "spaghetti junction" in Atlanta
SWFL - SRQ - SWFL
Surf is good again this morning - but I see rain and T-storms are in store - I should be out there now, but there are men and critters to be fed..... haven't done a lick for the holidays...... maybe the rain is a good thing....never want to be inside if the sun is shining.
Suppose to work horses this afternoon -- I see the day off from work : )
Yes, RAIN is a good thing
Least they're not 1000lb horses!!! I'll have that b/4 or Polo practice tomorrow : )
Here comes the pulse of energy around the lOw moving into Western Texas....whooopiiieee......snow! New Orleans might just get some also if they are lucky.
Cold Sunday Morning for the South......hehehehe
Nice Mountain Snow line.....yeppie
Don't get to comfortable....here comes another and another and another...
I think it does well at showing possiblities but, ya your correct its not good for winter intensity storms......I like the NAM for that
Down on Bayou Grande this morn.
Gonna be a cold rain Doug
That bites.
But I can dream!
How is it that you ALWAYS beat me to posts like that? Do you have some mind-reading device I don't know about? ;)
A 3 degree total drop from 42.5 when I got to work at 5:30 this morning. So, in the first hour and 15 minutes of work today, it dropped .7, but in the last hour and a half, it has dropped 2.3, and it hasn't even really started raining yet, just a little bit of a drizzle here and there. It will be interesting to see how quick it drops once it really starts raining/sleeting/snowing.
My second winter in Houston and the second straight year with snow. Looking forward to the possibility of snow, just not looking forward to having to drive in it. People around here don't know how to drive in the rain, much less sleet/snow.
Know a met in Houston, get weather report emails
Significant accumulations are likely producing an unprecedented winter storm event for coastal TX.
Winter Storm Warning has been expanded to include all SE TX counties.
Discussion:
Factors are well on their way to producing a historic snow event for SE TX and metro Houston today. Radar is rapidly filling in as mid and low level moisten and saturate to the surface while surface and 850mb cold air advection of arctic air mass is in progress. Light rain in being reported at our SW county stations and Port Aransas is reporting a mixture at this time…although I am not sure this ASOS site is getting it correct since Port Lavaca or no other sites are reporting SN or SN/RA mix. Strong lift is incoming across SC TX and this will be the trigger to get things going. Models pegging away at meso scale banding features setting up across our central zones this afternoon dumping heavy snowfall rates. In fact dynamics and lift may be strong enough to produce the extremely rare thundersnow across our central and coastal tier zones given convective look of radar images out of CRP. With all said will go with 100% snow for all US 59 corridor counties and then 80% either side of those counties as confidence is now at that level.
Temperatures:
Will crater temperatures during the day today and bottom them out in the low to mid 20’s Saturday morning. This will be a hard and killing freeze with many areas at or below freezing for 10-12 hours. Snow cover will only allow minor warming on Saturday and will cut highs only into the upper 30’s. Areas of heavy snow accumulation may remain snow covered into Sunday morning and area bridges and overpasses will be slow to recover.
Accumulations:
NW Counties (Walker, Polk, San Jacinto, Brazos, Grimes, Washington, Burleson, Madison):
Accumulations of 1-2” this afternoon. Expect a mainly light to at times moderate snow event in this area.
Montgomery, Waller, Austin, Liberty, Harris, Fort Bend, Wharton, Colorado:
This is where the greatest snow will likely fall with moderate to at times heavy snow banding favored along US 59. Expect everything to go over the snow by noon and then begin to accumulate by early to mid afternoon. Rates may approach 1” under the meso scale banding reducing visibilities down to 1/8 or ¼ of a mile. Widespread accumulations of 2-4” is likely with isolated totals of 6” possible under meso scale bands. Significant impacts to travel are likely both on the ground and in the air.
Coastal tier counties (Victoria/Calhoun –Chambers):
Light rain developing with begin to mix and then change to all snow by early to mid afternoon. May see meso scale banding develop in these counties also. Will go with 1-2” SW counties up to 1-3” Brazoria County and possibly higher over Galveston/Chambers counties.
Impacts:
This will be a high impact event both for surface and air travel.
Snowfall rates this afternoon will greatly hinder air travel as aircraft will require vigorous de-icing operations. Reduced visibilities and extremely low ceiling will stack up taxi-way delays and may require aircraft to return to gates for multiple rounds of de-icing as snow accumulates on the control surfaces. Not sure IAH or HOU will be able to keep the runways clear given the possible heavy snow bands being generated.
With air temperatures falling to freezing early this afternoon…initial snowfall will melt and then begin to freeze as a glaze of ice on area bridges and overpasses. As snow continues…it will accumulate on top of this sheet of ice producing very hazardous to near impossible travel conditions. Heavy snow bands will produce rates high enough to cover surface streets producing near impossible travel especially on any inclined ramps. Will be needing heavy sanding operations, but the size and intensity of the event is going to quickly overwhelm available resources…best bet is to be where you are going to be 1-2 hours after the snow begins at your destination location.
So YOU are the reason its snowing here....
Do you have any family that can move down here? ;)
And honestly... most people here don't know how to drive when the weather is perfect. Them driving in ice/snow scares me.
Mornin' all!
I see we maybe getting some of that much needed rain. Unless the evil rain-dissolving gremlin strikes again.
Oh, I've been trying to get my brother and his wife and kids to move here. Right now I only see them at Christmas. I moved here from Lexington, KY. My brother lives in Beckley, WV, so if he were to move here and bring snow with him, it would be a lot more than this.
BTW, it is now snowing pretty good here in the Galleria area. Pretty good size flakes too.
gonna be a fun day here in the coastal bend.
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