Update: Marc Shepard at American Thinker pounces on Jones.

In a BBC Q&A and corresponding interview released Friday, the discredited Climategate conspirator revealed a number of surprising insights into his true climate beliefs, the most shocking of which was that 20^th-century global warming may not have been unprecedented.  As the entire anthropogenic global warming (AGW) theory is predicated on correlation with rising CO2 levels, this first-such confession from an IPCC senior scientist is nothing short ofearth-shattering

BTW, these updates are running latest at the top, earliest at the bottom.

Update: Andrew Bolt has the best summary of Phil Jones’ retreat and undermining of the ‘settled’ science of man-made global warming:

Update: The crumbling of man-made global warming is accelerating today:

The United Nations climate panel faces a new challenge with scientists casting doubt on its claim that global temperatures are rising inexorably because of human pollution.

…

Terry Mills, professor of applied statistics and econometrics at Loughborough University, looked at the same data as the IPCC. He found that the warming trend it reported over the past 30 years or so was just as likely to be due to random fluctuations as to the impacts of greenhouse gases. Mills’s findings are to be published in Climatic Change, an environmental journal.

And there is more breathless reporting here:

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.

I see an avalanche of bad news coming for the alarmists. – end update

The climategate leak of emails, date and code from the UK’s Climactic Research Unit (CRU) last fall continues to ripple destruction through the man-made global warming ‘settled’ science. One of the most interesting exchanges captured in the emails from the late 1990’s, leading up to the IPCC report in 2000 (AR3?), was the battle between Keith Briffa of CRU and Michael Mann, the hockey stick maker.  I used this exchange as possible evidence that Keith Briffa may have been the person at CRU whose conscience got the best of him and exposed the climategate data to the world.

Here is Briffa reminding everyone that Mann’s fudged data is not conclusive and that CRU’s data clearly indicates there were past periods of similar or even higher warmth than the present day:

‘I know there is pressure to present a nice tidy story as regards “apparent unprecedented warming in a thousand years or more”.’ …  ‘In reality the situation is not quite so simple – I believe that the recent warmth was probably matched about 1,000 years ago.’

There are a lot more exchanges in the emails that illustrate how Mann’s ‘trick’ of overlaying raw data on top of tree ring estimates was not science but fantasy, and that CRU had study results that confirmed the previous warm periods, the best know of which is the Medieval Warm Period (MWP):

Even allowing for the reduction in the number of represented sites before 1400 (ECS Fig. 2d), and the reduction in overall sample size (ECS Fig. 2b), there is still some evidence for significantly above average growth during two intervals that can be plausibly assigned to the MWP.

…

In any case, the replication in the MWP of the ECS chronology is at least as good as in other published tree-ring estimates of large-scale temperatures (e.g., NH extra-tropical) covering the past 1000+ years.

I remind people of this context of the so called ‘settled’ science because the tarnished ex-head of the CRU has come out and made an admission which completely destroys the foundation of man-made global warming theories:

But he [Dr. Phil Jones] agreed that two periods in recent times had experienced similar warming. And he agreed that the debate had not been settled over whether the Medieval Warm Period was warmer than the current period.

These statements are likely to be welcomed by people sceptical of man-made climate change who have felt insulted to be labelled by government ministers as flat-earthers and deniers.

My, my – unsettled science. Whodathunkit! And Jones admits this is a global warm period, not isolated to only some regions (like today’s warming, which is not really global and has not been detected in North America).

There is a companion piece at BBC that covers the exact Q&A for the articles (H/T Bishop Hill). It is an illustration in cherry picking question in order to deny the counter evidence. The BBC makes sure to only ask about warming periods at first, dodging all the intervening cool periods.

Then they ask Jones about the recent cooling over the last 12 years, and Jones claims HIS arbitrary line of ‘significance’ (over 12 years) means the cooling exists, but is not significant. It’s a really lame dodge.

The fact is we are learning that the period 1990-2009 is not much warmer than 1925-1950. If the BBC had asked the question “is the current period from 1990-2009 significantly warmer than the period 1925-1950?” Jones would have had to answer with ‘no’. Because it is not any warmer now than back then (statistically speaking).

In fact, NASA GISS is on record noting that the ten warmest years are spread throughout the last century and are all statistically tied for warmest year. Because of the margin of error in global indexes, there is no way to determine which of the following years are warmer than the others. For the earlier period these are the warmest years in the top ten: 1921, 1931, 1934, 1938, 1939 – 5 all told. For the latter it is: 1990, 1998, 1999, 2006 – which is 4. And then there is the outlier 1953. These all have a temperature index that are statistically the same – and it proves there is not ‘significant’ reason warming, which blows the AGW theory right out of the water. As I said before, someone call the EPA and Al Gore, their reputations are collapsing.

This is why fools like Chris Mathews who go on TV claiming 2006 was the warmest year on record are simply demonstrating their poor math skills and general ignorance. NASA GISS is adamant that none of these years can be deemed warmer than the others, even if the computed index is a tenth of a degree or so higher than the others (actually, the margin of error limit is nearly .5°C).

So what have we learned since climategate? We have learned that the current warm period is not only stalled but has been cooling. We have learned that statistically it is no warmer now than a 70 years ago, before the huge increase in human CO2 production. And thanks to Dr Phil Jones finally being honest about the science, we know there is no scientific proof today is any warmer than the two previous warm periods (Medieval and Roman) that have been established science for a couple hundred years now.

And they call us skeptics deniers!

Tags: Climategate, CRU, Global Warming, Hockey Stick, Michael Mann, NASA GISS, Phil Jones