Let he who is without climate sin ...

Barry Jones accuses climate sceptics of using ad hominem attacks yet embarks on the most remarkable such tactics himself.  Out-hyping all who came before him, not only does he associate sceptics with those who deny the holocaust, AIDS and the link between smoking and lung cancer, but for good measure adds fluoridation and evolution.

Given that the East Anglia data is now mired in controversy, it is a rich irony that Barry Jones uses its erectile picture of recent climate trends.

In fact, the recent history presents a far less convincing case for a human impact when examined using the satellite data which has become available since 1978.

East Anglia's Climate Research Unit (CRU) was headed by P.D. Jones who is at the centre of "climategate" emails and has been forced to step down.  The emails reveal:

• the orchestrated vilification of "sceptic" scientists and the claim that their work can only be relevant if subjected to "peer review" publication in major scientific journals;
• deliberate attempts to exclude any such work being published (including organising the dismissal of editors who allowed such publication);  and
• insights into how data had been manipulated to "prove" a warming effect to coincide with industrialisation, while preventing the raw data from being made available to those outside the inner circle.

While the ethics of the scientists concerned are indefensible, what is now coming under scrutiny is the accuracy of their data.  The unravelling of climategate and the refusal of the scientists concerned to allow independent scrutiny of their data first became apparent with the famous Mann "hockey stick", the poster chart of the 2002 IPCC report.  McIntyre and McKitrick demonstrated this was a fictitious depiction of the climate trends over the past millennium -- they showed the apparent anomalously rising temperature during the 20th Century was the outcome of the Mann model itself and that the same result emerged even when random data was fed into the model.

The secretive nature in which the CRU data was held first became apparent almost four years ago when an Australian scientist, Warwick Hughes, could not understand what the adjustments were that CRU had made to arrive at their conclusions that warming in the 20th century was 0.6º +/-0.2º.  The response of P.D. Jones was, "Why should I make the data available to you, when your aim is to try and find something wrong with it."  Of course, this is inimical to the whole notion of scientific discovery whereby findings are subject to constant review.

Warwick Hughes himself has a record of temperature reviewing going back to 1991.  He was critical of the original P.D. Jones choice of sites for Australia as being likely to be contaminated by local heat island effects.  P.D. Jones used 13 long term sites all of which were official BOM sites and five of which were capital cities.  Hughes noted that the official data for the state capitals showed an upward trend, while data for 25 remote stations he identified as not having had an urbanization overlay showed no trend.

A later paper Hughes wrote with Robert Balling and Sherwood Idso was published in the December 1992 in Geophysical Research Letters (GRL).  It examined temperature trends in Australia in the eight decades to 1991 using 43 stations with continuous records.  It showed a net cooling in the years to 1978 and a warming in the years 1979-90.  These findings were originally contested by the BOM and three researchers led by Dr Neville Nicholls, (who became a lead author of the IPCC 2007 review) sought to have GRL publish a "Comment" attacking the data adjustments that had been made;  eventually the BOM acknowledged that their attempted rebuttal had only marginal merit and GRL declined to publish it.

The "climategate" emails puncture any myths about the integrity of the Australian data.  In one of them (18 July 2007) the CRU analyst writes, "Confidence in the fidelity of the Australian station (sic) in the database drastically reduced.  Likelihood of invalid merging of Australian stations high."  His frustration was summarised in the statement, "getting seriously fed up with the state of the Australian data."  So many new stations have been introduced, so many false references ... so many changes that aren't documented."

In the mid 1980s, Barry Jones became the first Australian MP to answer a question in Parliament about global warming.  Actually the question was on global cooling but Barry Jones responded that this was so 1980 and that the new scientific paradigm was global warming.  Nobody at that time predicted that the issue would develop so that it dominates political debate and overturns Opposition leaders and perhaps also Governments.

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