Jones may submit a correction to his 1990 paper – Keenan responds
16 02 2010
Excerpt from the Nature article here
wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com
This weather station in Shenzhen used to be rural 30+ years ago, it also used to be a couple of kilometers away from this location.
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.
In the paper, the authors used data from weather stations around the world; those in China “were selected on the basis of station history: we chose those with few, if any, changes in instrumentation, location or observation times”, they wrote.
But in 2007, amateur climate-data analyst Doug Keenan alleged that this claim was false, citing evidence that many of the stations in eastern China had been moved throughout the period of study. Because the raw data had been obtained from a Chinese contact of one of Jones’s co-authors, Wei-Chyung Wang of the University at Albany in New York, and details of their location had subsequently been lost, there was no way of verifying or refuting Keenan’s claim.
Jones says that approaching Wang for the Chinese data seemed sensible at the time. “I thought it was the right way to get the data. I was specifically trying to get more rural station data that wasn’t routinely available in real time from [meteorological] services,” says Jones, who asserts that standards for data collection have changed considerably in the past twenty years. He now acknowledges that “the stations probably did move”, and that the subsequent loss of the details of the locations was sloppy. “It’s not acceptable,” says Jones. “[It's] not best practice.” CRU denies any involvement in losing these records.
Jones says that he did not know that the weather stations’ locations were questionable when they were included in the paper, but as the study’s lead author he acknowledges his responsibility for ensuring the quality of the data. So will he submit a correction to Nature? “I will give that some thought. It’s worthy of consideration,” he says.
The full Nature article is here
======================================
Doug Keenan writes in a comment to the nature article:
This news report discusses my work on the Chinese weather-station data, but provides no references for that work. The main reference is this: Keenan, D. J. Energy & Environment, 18, 985-995 (2007). It is freely available on the web.
The news report also misrepresents my allegations.
My principal allegation is that some of the data on station histories never existed. Specifically, Jones et al. (1990) claim to have sourced their data from a report that was published by the U.S. Department of Energy and the Chinese Academy of Sciences. Yet for 49 of the 84 meteorological stations that Jones et al. relied upon, the DOE/CAS Report states “station histories are not currently available” and “details regarding instrumentation, collection methods, changes in station location or observing times … are not known”. Those statements imply that the quoted claim from Jones et al. is impossible: “stations were selected on the basis of station history: we chose those with few, if any, changes in instrumentation, location or observation times”. My paper presents more details; some updates are available via informath.org .
I have also alleged that, by 2001, Jones knew there were severe problems with the Chinese research and yet he continued using that research–including allowing it to be relied on by the IPCC 2007 Assessment Report. Evidence is in Section 2.4 of my 2007 paper. Jones was one of the reviewers for my paper (the reviewer tally was 2-1 for acceptance, with Jones being the 1). Although Jones had many comments, he did not attempt to dispute this allegation.
Additional support for the latter allegation is given in my submission to the UK House of Commons Science and Technology Committee. A copy of my submission is available via informath.org . The submission additionally alleges that Jones acted unscrupulously when he was reviewing my paper.
The news report further claims that “e-mails and documents were illegally obtained from the university”. In fact, it is not known whether the leak of the e-mails and documents was illegal: the leak might be covered under whistle-blower legislation.
Lastly, with regard to Jones’ question “Why don’t they do their own reconstructions?”, the answer is that the data has not been released. In particular, regarding the Medieval Warm Period, what is arguably the most valuable tree-ring data extant remains unavailable. Details on that are at informath.org .
wattsupwiththat.com
The key priests in the Church of Climate Scientology knew all along skullduggery was going on. Its not surprising that propaganda organs like Unrealclimate and ClimateProgess would try to protect the fraudsters:
.... In a 1996 email to a large number of scientists in the CRU circle, Tom Wigley, a top climatologist working at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Colorado, cautioned: “I support the continued collection of such data, but I am disturbed by how some people in the paleo community try to oversell their product.” Mann and his colleagues made use of some of the CRU data, but some of the CRU scientists weren’t comfortable with the way Mann represented it and also seemed to find Mann more than a bit insufferable.
CRU scientist Keith Briffa ... emailed Edward Cook of Columbia University: “I am sick to death of Mann stating his reconstruction represents the tropical area just because it contains a few (poorly temperature representative) tropical series,” adding that he was tired of “the increasing trend of self-opinionated verbiage [Mann] has produced over the last few years .??.??. and (better say no more).”
Cook replied: “I agree with you. We both know the probable flaws in Mike’s recon[struction], particularly as it relates to the tropical stuff. ...”
In yet another revealing email, Cook told Briffa: “Of course [Bradley] and other members of the MBH [Mann, Bradley, Hughes] camp have a fundamental dislike for the very concept of the MWP, so I tend to view their evaluations as starting out from a somewhat biased perspective...”
Even as the IPCC was picking up Mann’s hockey stick with enthusiasm, Briffa sent Mann a note of caution about “the possibility of expressing an impression of more consensus than might actually exist. I suppose the earlier talk implying that we should not ‘muddy the waters’ by including contradictory evidence worried me. IPCC is supposed to represent consensus but also areas of uncertainty in the evidence.” Briffa had previously dissented from the hockey stick reconstruction in a 1999 email to Mann and Phil Jones: “I believe that the recent warmth was probably matched about 1000 years ago.”
Even Malcolm Hughes, one of the original hockey stick coauthors, privately expressed reservations about overreliance on their invention, writing to Cook, Mann and others in 2002:
All of our attempts, so far, to estimate hemisphere-scale temperatures for the period around 1000 years ago are based on far fewer data than any of us would like. None of the datasets used so far has anything like the geographical distribution that experience with recent centuries indicates we need, and no one has yet found a convincing way of validating the lower-frequency components of them against independent data....
Mann didn’t react well to these hesitations from his colleagues. Even Ray Bradley, a coauthor of the hockey stick article, felt compelled to send a message to Briffa after one of Mann’s self-serving emails with the single line: “Excuse me while I puke.” ...
....Wigley rebuked Climategate’s Michael “Hockey Stick” Mann for sending a deceptive graph with a “fluke” result to back up Wigley’s contention that the recent cooling was still consistent with overall warming. He also claimed the IPCC and warmist scientists had made too many “dishonest presentations”.
> On Oct 14, 2009, at 5:57 PM, Tom Wigley wrote:
> > Mike,
> >
> > The Figure you sent is very deceptive. As an example, historical runs with PCM look as though they match observations—but the match is a fluke. PCM has no indirect aerosol forcing and a low climate sensitivity—compensating errors. In my (perhaps too harsh) view, there have been a number of dishonest presentations of model results by individual authors and by IPCC. ...
.....Mathematician Doug KEENAN and others obtained the original Wang data and used it to track down the Chinese weather stations. They found that 49 of the 84 stations used actually had no records of station location, eight had inconsistent histories, 18 had been moved a considerable distance, and only seven were known not to have been relocated. One station had five different locations in 30 years as far as 41 km apart.
Wang seemed to have lied. His data was essentially worthless, and Jones’ (and the IPCC’s) claim that the Urban Heat Island effect was trivial now seemed unsupported by solid evidence.
Neither Jones nor Wang replied to Keenan’s request for an explanation and retraction. When Benny Peiser’s sceptic-friendly journal Energy and Environment said it would detail the evidence, Climategate scientist Kevin Trenberth, an IPCC lead author, tried deliberately to mislead it with the warmists typical smears, later confiding in a leaked email:
(1177158252.txt):
So my feeble suggestion is to indeed cast aspersions on their motives and throw in some counter rhetoric. Labeling them as lazy with nothng better to do seems like a good thing to do. ....
Now to Wigley’s emails. He had been the director of CRU at the time, and knew the charges against Wang were actually true, and that the failure to answer and address them was wrong. He hints to Jones that Jones could have known the data was wrong, too, and participated in a coverup. He accuses the university of “asking for trouble” with its seeming coverup, too..
Tom Wigley to Phil Jones:
(1188557698.txt)
Phil,
Seems to me that KEENAN has a valid point. The statements in the papers that he quotes seem to be incorrect statements, and that someone (WCW [Wang] at the very least) must have known at the time that they were incorrect. ....
....Now my views. (1) I have always thought W-C W was a rather sloppy scientist. I therefore would not be surprised if he screwed up here. But ITEM X is in both the W-C W and Jones et al. papers — so where does it come from first? Were you taking W-C W on trust?
(2) It also seems to me that the University at Albany has screwed up. To accept a complaint from KEENAN and not refer directly to the complaint and the complainant in its report really is asking for trouble. .....
.....
I realise that KEENAN is just a trouble maker and out to waste time, so I apologize for continuing to waste your time on this, Phil. However, I *am* concerned because all this happened under my watch as Director of CRU and, although this is unlikely, the buck eventually should stop with me.”
When did Tom Wigley finally choke on all that deceit? And if he didn’t, why the hell not? ....
Message 26156487
Phil Jones tried to hush my paper. SUNY Albany won't discuss the investigation my paper initiated. And QUB ignored my three FOI requests for their data.
December 1, 2009 - by Douglas J. KEENAN
Some of the emails leaked in Climategate discuss my work. Following is a comment on that, and on something more important.
In 2007, I published a peer-reviewed paper alleging that some important research relied upon by the IPCC (for the treatment of urbanization effects) was fraudulent. The emails show that Tom Wigley — one of the most oft-cited climatologists and an extreme warming advocate — thought my paper was valid. They also show that Phil Jones, the head of the Climatic Research Unit, tried to convince the journal editor not to publish my paper.
After my paper was published, the State University of New York — where the research discussed in my paper was conducted — carried out an investigation. During the investigation, I was not interviewed — contrary to the university’s policies, federal regulations, and natural justice. I was allowed to comment on the report of the investigation, before the report’s release.
But I was not allowed to see the report. Truly Kafkaesque.
.....
Below Jones is conspiring to suppress revelation of fraud by a co-author. Since Wigley can tell its fraud, surely Jones can too.
From: Tom Wigley <wigley@xxxxxxxxx.xxx>
To: Phil Jones <p.jones@xxxxxxxxx.xxx>
Subject: Re: Fwd: review of E&E paper on alleged Wang fraud
Date: Fri, 31 Aug 2007 06:54:58 -0600
<x-flowed>
Phil,
Seems to me that KEENAN has a valid point. The statements in the papers that he quotes seem to be incorrect statements, and that someone (WCW at the very least) must have known at the time that they were incorrect.
.....
Message 26141944
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