Mar 07 2010
Phil Jones & Vice-Chancellor Acton Caught Fibbing to Parliament
I was going to write a post on a disturbing discrepancy in testimony by Phil Jones and Vice Chancellor Acton of the scandal beaten Climactic Research Unit (CRU) at the center of the Climategate emails and files. During their questioning they claimed Sweden, Canada and Poland would not allow them to make public their national data.
The Swedes wrote into Parliament to clarify (see here at Climate Audit) that they have no issues with data being public at all. The blog Bishop Hill beat me to the punch, but here is the key point of contention between Jones and the Swedes. This is excerpt is from Jones in his request to Sweden:
We stress that the data we hold has arisen from multiple sources, and has been recovered over the last 30 years. Subsequent quality control and homogenisation of these data have been carried out. It is therefore highly likely that the version we hold and are requesting permission to distribute will differ from your own current holdings.
The Swedes quite rightly were against Jones making his processed data available under the guise it was raw Swedish data. There have been numerous posts by skeptics looking at raw data from that region of Europe noting how the raw data does not line up with CRU and IPCC graphs (see here for one example). What is stunning about this letter (original here) is how Jones clearly is trying to put the Swedish label on his data. As Bishop Hill notes there is no restriction on CRU publishing data it has massaged, it just cannot call it raw Swedish data:
t seems clear to me that Jones does not actually require permission from SMHI to release the adjusted data. This, by his own admission, is different to what SMHI holds and there can therefore be no issues of intellectual property.
…
Having being asked for permission to release, SMHI felt they were being asked to endorse Jones’ adjusted figures. Quite properly, they refused. It is clear that they had no objection to Jones releasing his adjusted data provided he made it clear that it was just that:Â adjusted.
How many other countries caught this apparent subterfuge? Is this the smoking gun that proves the AGW zealots did ‘adjust’ the data to make it appear there was significant warming in the last 50 years?
And if Sweden was one of a handful of countries to detect the con, how many are now cross checking CRU and about to blow this mess wide open?
Addendum: Let me be clear on what I think this could mean. As I noted on Bishop Hill this could be the beginning of a huge data manipulation scandal for IPCC and AGW theory. If CRU has sent out this form letter to all nations providing it data, and they missed the lawyerly CYA language about CRU putting that nation’s moniker on CRU adjusted data, the entire house of cards comes crashing down.
Right about now a lot of people are looking at what the Swedes caught onto and are checking for themselves. If Jones was dumb and arrogant enough to try and pull this con off (and all indications are he is), then a list of nations will be pulling the alarm bells next week on CRU, and therefore IPCC, NCDC, GISS, EPA, etc.
The only reason I can see for Jones to keep the national moniker on the CRU adjusted data is because those ‘adjustments’ are key to AGW surviving. Otherwise why run the risk? This could be the incident that blows the entire scientific fraud wide open. The next few weeks will tell if I am right.
Here is another blog which first posted the letters and discusses the issues
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/03/05/swedes-call-out-jones-on-data-availability/
Please read this comment of 3/5/10 by Willis Eschenbach (21:49:29) which is a great summary and supplies context to the whole affair.
Willis Eschenbach is the person who filed the FOI request for the raw data in question.
The issue of the “adjustments” is one I have been harping on for at least the past 3 and possibly 4 years. It is only through these adjustments that AGW observations match the hypothesis. Remove these adjustments and return the readings from the removed stations, and AGW becomes much less of a problem.
And if you have a look at Tony Brown’s guest posting at Jeff Id’s blog, you find that maybe they have been manipulating the CO2 concentration numbers to match.
Oh, and AJ, reading that article on CO2 concentrations is pretty important because it shows, if you read it carefully, that the accepted number of 280ppm CO2 in the pre-industrial age is pretty much a number extracted from an orifice.
In the UK, for example, the amount of CO2 allowed in the workplace was regulated very tightly. At that time heat and power was provided by coal fires and lighting by gas lamp. Mines also had strict controls on CO2 content. Both the CO2 content of the ambient atmospheric air and that inside the workplace were measured often to ensure that employers met health requirements.
Atmospheric CO2 readings from the 19th century do not differ significantly from today’s readings and in many cases were higher.
So what is the “adjustment” process that is applied to the current Mauna Loa CO2 data? That is the next question to be asked. Is there even a CO2 “problem” to begin with?
We might discover that neither CO2 nor temperatures are higher than they have been in the past couple of hundred years.
Living in Sweden I have a long time observed that knowledgeable
scientists here know of these discrepancies and they can´t understand the differences between the raw data and the – by IPCC – adjusted data. This is important. We now need similar material from many countries and that may in itself clearly show that AGW is just a construction. We now cannot trust a n y data from IPCC.
The next task is to find out just h o w they have managed to build the temperature increase (choice and number of stations; adjustments down regarding old data and up regarding newer data; and how exactly did they formulate the code etc etc) and I think that – owing to the work done at this blog and others – we are slowly getting an understanding of how they have manipulated the data.
These are interesting times, and there are now some indications that IPCC may have crossed the line between dishonest propaganda (forget about science!) and criminal activities.
Did anyone here see the video a few days ago of Lord Moncton on British TV stating planly and openly that he was “Coming after” Al Gore?
Basically called him a coward. The guy may be able to back up his implied threats. I am not sure what a member of the House of Lords can do; it will be interesting to watch.