'Climategate' scientist (Phil Jones) speaks out (exclusive interview with Nature)

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http://www.nature.com/news/2010/100215/full/news.2010.71.html

Published online 15 February 2010 | Nature | doi:10.1038/news.2010.71
http://www.nature.com/news/2010/100215/full/news.2010.71.html#cor1">Corrected online: 16 February 2010

News

'Climategate' scientist speaks out

Climatologist Phil Jones answers his critics in an exclusive interview with Nature.

Olive Heffernan

Phil Jones holds himself defensively, his arms crossed tightly in front of his chest as if shielding himself from attack. Little wonder: Jones has spent the past three months being vilified for his central role in what is now called 'climategate'.

Jones was director of the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia in Norwich, UK, when, last November, more than 1,000 e-mails and documents were illegally obtained from the university and posted on the Internet. Their contents quickly embroiled him in a controversy that has shaken the climate community and threatened his career. Jones has stood down from his post while several independent investigations look into the affair, including one headed by Muir Russell, former vice-chancellor of the University of Glasgow, UK, which will assess allegations that the e-mails contain evidence of poor scientific practice at the CRU.

Speaking exclusively to Nature, Jones is reluctant to discuss how the past few months have affected him personally, and says he cannot comment on allegations that http://www.nature.com/news/2009/090812/full/460787a.html">freedom of information requests for raw climate data were mishandled by the university. But he is eager to set the record straight on the science.

Central to the Russell investigation is the issue of whether he or his CRU colleagues ever published data that they knew were potentially flawed, in order to bolster the evidence for man-made global warming. The claim specifically relates to one of Jones's research papers¹ on whether the urban heat island effect — in which cities tend to be warmer than the surrounding countryside — could be responsible for the apparent rise in temperature readings from thermometers in the late twentieth century. Jones's study concluded that this local effect was negligible, and that the dominant effect was global climate change.

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[On the Road]

1. That is a Good Addition -- It Figures That 'Nature' is the Source

Many of the other articles tend to focus more on the controversy and provide little insight into the specifics which are at issue.

So now the focus is on whether tracking stations in northeastern China were located consistently over time and may have introduced a heat island element into the equation.

If the heat island effect is indeed a bigger part of the statistical trend than is currently accepted, that would revise the warming models.

The focus seems to be on a particular paper: Some of the tracking locations was lost, but Jones decided to include the data anyway, believing it was valid.

A further study, "Assessment of surface air warming in northeast China, with emphasis on the impacts of urbanization," Journal Theoretical and Applied Climatology, 2008, seems to support Jones' decision.

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But predictably, it is not going uncriticized. Here's a comment from the science article and a reply I made:

A follow-up study2 verified the original conclusions for the Chinese data for the period 1954-1983, showing that the precise location of weather stations was unimportant.*
Reference 2 shows that the urban heat island accounts for ~40% of total warming, as opposed to <10% in the Jones 1990 paper. "less than 10%" is not the same as "40%". How is it even possible that the follow up study verifies the original conclusions ?

One wonders if the study of Jones 1990 has been used precisely because it finds that the contribution of UHI to global warming is trivial. It is a much more difficult situation if ~40% of the global warming signal is simply an artefact of the Urban heat island effect.

Posted by: David Bell | 2010-02-16 12:28:27 PM

In response to David Bell's comment, I agree that if the heat island effect is 40% then global warming models need major reconsideration.

However, I don't see where the 40% is coming from. Per the abstract:

Abstract Based on homogenized land surface air temperature (SAT) data (derived from China Homogenized Historical Temperature (CHHT) 1.0), the warming trends over Northeast China are detected in this paper, and the impacts of urban heat islands (UHIs) evaluated. Results show that this region is undergoing rapid warming: the trends of annual mean minimum temperature (MMIT), mean temperature (MT), and mean maximum temperature (MMAT) are 0.40 C decade⁻¹, 0.32 C decade⁻¹, and 0.23 C decade⁻¹, respectively. Regional average temperature series built with these networks including and excluding “typical urban stations” are compared for the periods of 1954–2005. Although impacts of UHIs on the absolute annual and seasonal temperature are identified, UHI contributions to the long-term trends are less than 10% of the regional total warming during the period. The large warming trend during the period is due to a regime shift in around 1988, which accounted for about 51% of the regional warming.

http://www.springerlink.com/content/kr5w2616551w7810/

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I can also speak from experience that the warming in northeastern China is much more noticeable than most parts of the world. It would be astonishing if it were all a statistical anomaly.

Posted by: Jack Neefus | 2010-02-16 01:19:28 PM