And the left will still make wild-eyed claims....

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http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1250872/Climategate-U-turn-Astonishment
-scientist-centre-global-warming-email-row-admits-data-organised.html

Climategate U-turn as scientist at centre of row admits: There has been no
global warming since 1995

By Jonathan Petre
Last updated at 5:12 PM on 14th February 2010

The 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.

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.

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.

Professor Jones has been in the spotlight since he stepped down as director of
the University of East Anglias 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
Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change to press governments to cut
carbon dioxide emissions.

Following the leak of the emails, Professor Jones has been accused of
scientific fraud for allegedly deliberately suppressing information and
refusing to share vital data with critics.

Discussing the interview, the BBCs environmental analyst Roger Harrabin said he
had spoken to colleagues of Professor Jones who had told him that his strengths
included integrity and doggedness but not record-keeping and office tidying.

Mr Harrabin, who conducted the interview for the BBCs website, said the
professor had been collating tens of thousands of pieces of data from around
the world to produce a coherent record of temperature change.

That material has been used to produce the hockey stick graph which is
relatively flat for centuries before rising steeply in recent decades.

According to Mr Harrabin, colleagues of Professor Jones said his office is
piled high with paper, fragments from over the years, tens of thousands of
pieces of paper, and they suspect what happened was he took in the raw data to
a central database and then let the pieces of paper go because he never
realised that 20 years later he would be held to account over them.

Asked by Mr Harrabin about these issues, Professor Jones admitted the lack of
organisation in the system had contributed to his reluctance to share data with
critics, which he regretted.


But he denied he had cheated over the data or unfairly influenced the
scientific process, and said he still believed recent temperature rises were
predominantly man-made.

Asked about whether he lost track of data, Professor Jones said: There is some
truth in that. We do have a trail of where the weather stations have come from
but its probably not as good as it should be.

Theres a continual updating of the dataset. Keeping track of everything is
difficult. Some countries will do lots of checking on their data then issue
improved data, so it can be very difficult. We have improved but we have to
improve more.

He also agreed that there had been two periods which experienced similar
warming, from 1910 to 1940 and from 1975 to 1998, but said these could be
explained by natural phenomena whereas more recent warming could not.

He further admitted that in the last 15 years there had been no statistically
significant warming, although he argued this was a blip rather than the
long-term trend.

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. On the other hand, if the MWP was global, but was less warm than
today, then the current warmth would be unprecedented.

Sceptics said this was the first time a senior scientist working with the IPCC
had admitted to the possibility that the Medieval Warming Period could have
been global, and therefore the world could have been hotter then than now.

Professor Jones criticised those who complained he had not shared his data with
them, saying they could always collate their own from publicly available
material in the US. And he said the climate had not cooled until recently  and
then barely at all. The trend is a warming trend.

Mr Harrabin told Radio 4s Today programme that, despite the controversies,
there still appeared to be no fundamental flaws in the majority scientific view
that climate change was largely man-made.

But Dr Benny Pieser, director of the sceptical Global Warming Policy
Foundation, said Professor Joness excuses for his failure to share data were
hollow as he had shared it with colleagues and mates.

He said that until all the data was released, sceptics could not test it to see
if it supported the conclusions claimed by climate change advocates.

He added that the professors concessions over medieval warming were significant
because they were his first public admission that the science was not settled.

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