Phil Jones, the disgraced ex- director of the East Anglia Climatic Research Unit comes clean in a BBC interview. The BBC’s environmental analyst, Roger Harrabin, asked him,
“Do you agree that according to the global temperature record used by the IPCC, the rates of global warming from 1860-1880, 1910-1940 and 1975-1998 were identical?”
In my opinion, Jones’s answers plunge a stake through the heart of the global warming vampire. But we still need to work to fill its mouth with garlic and cut off the head. Here is Jones’s first answer.
“Temperature data for the period 1860-1880 are more uncertain, because of sparser coverage, than for later periods in the 20th Century. The 1860-1880 period is also only 21 years in length. As for the two periods 1910-40 and 1975-1998 the warming rates are not statistically significantly different (see numbers below).
“I have also included the trend over the period 1975 to 2009, which has a very similar trend to the period 1975-1998
“So, in answer to the question, the warming rates for all 4 periods are similar and not statistically significantly different from each other.”
How can the warming rate for all four warming periods be identical if the primary driver is atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) concentration? Obviously the rate of increase of CO2 is different for all those periods, and we don’t see it in the temperature record. A remarkable set of other influences would have to compensate for the increasing rate of CO2 input to produce an overall constant upward trend in temperature. That’s just not credible. Then Harrabin asked Jones,
“Do you agree that from 1995 to the present there has been no statistically-significant global warming?”
and he replied,
“Yes, but only just. I also calculated the trend for the period 1995 to 2009. This trend (0.12C per decade) is positive, but not significant at the 95% significance level. The positive trend is quite close to the significance level. Achieving statistical significance in scientific terms is much more likely for longer periods, and much less likely for shorter periods.”
Here Jones tells us that he can’t reliably detect any trend from 1995 to 2009. In other words, that 0.12C per decade could simply be a random fluctuation. That’s pretty strange because from 1910 to 1940 he did reliably find a trend for a period only four years shorter than 1995 to 2009. But surely the world dumped a lot more CO2 into the atmospheric from 1995-2009 than 1910-1940. Why is it so hard to detect the trend now? He tries to escape the problem by saying “Yes, but only just,” meaning he just missed. If only the increase had been a little more, he could have declared victory. He’s really struggling here. Yet later on in the interview he remains a true believer because he tell us,
“I’m 100% confident that the climate has warmed. As to the second question, I would go along with IPCC Chapter 9—there’s evidence that most of the warming since the 1950s is due to human activity.”
One would think he would say something like “95% confident,” because he uses the “95% significance level,” but note he does not say he’s 100% certain that humans caused the increase, instead he passes the buck to the IPCC. I’m sure we would have had none of this, but for climategate; a true miracle.