It's back to climategate and Phil Jones once again...........
The UK's Guardian has supposedly uncovered evidence that a series of measurements from Chinese weather stations were seriously flawed (from a 1990 study) and that documents relating to them could not be produced.
These claims by the Guardian are based on their investigation of thousands of emails and documents that were illegally hacked from the University of East Anglia's climatic research unit a couple months ago. The result of this incident was "climategate".
The temperature data from the Chinese weather stations measured the warming there over the past half century and appeared in a 1990 paper in the prestigious journal Nature, which was cited by the IPCC's latest report in 2007, according to the Guardian.
Direct excerpts from the Guardian (authored by Fred Pearce).......
It also further calls into question the integrity of the scientist at the centre of the scandal over hacked climate emails, the director of the University of East Anglia's Climatic Research Unit (CRU), Dr Phil Jones. The emails suggest that he helped to cover up flaws in temperature data from China that underpinned his research on the strength of recent global warming.
Jones and his Chinese-American colleague Wei-Chyung Wang, of the University at Albany in New York, are being accused of scientific fraud by an independent British researcher over the contents of a research paper back in 1990.
That paper, which was published in the prestigious journal Nature, claimed to answer an important question in climate change science: how much of the warming seen in recent decades is due to the local effects of spreading cities, rather than global warming?
The pair, with four fellow researchers, concluded that the urban influence was negligible. Some of their most compelling evidence came from a study of temperature data from eastern China, a region urbanizing fast even then.
The paper became a key reference source for the conclusions of succeeding reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change - including a chapter in the 2007 one co-authored by Jones. It said that globally "the urbanization influence... is, at most, an order of magnitude less than the warming seen on a century timescale". In other words, it is tiny.
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According to the Guardian, many climate change skeptics did not believe the above claim and when Jones turned down their requests about the details about the location of the 84 Chinese weather stations used in the study they concluded that he (Jones) was covering up an error.
Jones finally released the data in 2007. Then a British amateur climate analyst, Doug Keenan accused Jones and Wang of fraud. Keenan indicated that the data showed that 49 of the Chinese meteorological stations had no histories of their location or other details. These mysterious stations included 40 of the 42 rural stations. Of the rest, 18 had certainly been moved during the study period, perhaps invalidating their data, according to the Guardian.
Keenan published his charges in Energy & Environment, a peer-reviewed journal edited by a Hull University geographer, Dr Sonja Boehmer-Christiansen. The Keenan paper was largely ignored at the time, but Guardian investigations of the hacked emails now reveal that there was concern among Jones's colleagues about Wang's missing data - and the apparent efforts by Jones and Wang over several years to cover this up.
Also directly from the Guardian story........
Wang's defence to the university inquiry says that he had got the Chinese temperature data from a Chinese colleague, although she is not an author on the 1990 Nature paper.
Wang's defense explains that the colleague had lost her notes on many station locations during a series of office moves. Nonetheless, "based on her recollections", she could provide information on 41 of the 49 stations.
In all, that meant that no fewer than 51 of the 84 stations had been moved during the 30-year study period, 25 had not moved, and eight she could not recollect.
Wang, however, maintained to the university that the 1990 paper's claim that "few, if any" stations had moved was true. The inquiry apparently agreed.
The story has a startling postscript. In 2008, Jones prepared a paper for the Journal of Geophysical Research re-examining temperatures in eastern China. It found that, far from being negligible, the urban heat phenomenon was responsible for 40% of the warming seen in eastern China between 1951 and 2004.
This does not flatly contradict Jones's 1990 paper. The timeframe for the new analysis is different. But it raises serious new questions about one of the most widely referenced papers on global warming, and about the IPCC's reliance on its conclusions.
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Through all this however, the Guardian states that this dramatic revision of the estimated impact of urbanization on temperatures in China does not change the global picture of temperature trends. Even Keenan admits that his allegations do not change the global picture.
Also, A review of recent studies published online in December by David Parker of the Met Office concludes that, even allowing for Jones's new data, "global near-surface temperature trends have not been greatly affected by urban warming trends."
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Here is the link to the entire Guardian story by Fred Pearce. Certainly worth the read.
