Phil Jones had to conceal his raw data, because the enterprise he was involved in was inherently unscientific

A. Zarkov writes:

Appearing before the British Parliament’s Science and Technology Committee, disgraced climate scientist Phil Jones squirms as he’s questioned by Lord Lawson of Blaby (Nigel Lawson, Chancellor of the Exchequor during the 1980s). Watch him sweat here. When questioned why he refused to give his data and codes to a requester, he said, “…because we had a lot of work and resources invested in it.” I take this weird answer as an admission that his work was flawed and he didn’t want anyone to find out. When asked again why refused to furnish the raw station data, Jones could said he was only willing to provide the “finished product.” Let me take a moment to explain what the “finished product” means..

Temperature measurement stations are scattered throughout the world in a highly non-uniform way. The Northern Hemisphere contains the bulk of the stations with the U.S. and Europe having the best coverage. To calculate a global temperature average (one number) scientists must extrapolate from this irregularly spaced data onto some kind of uniform global grid. The “finished product” is the data on this grid. The global average then gets calculated off this grid. I worked on this problem myself about 15 years ago with a global temperature set. It’s a challenging task to do it right. I’m not sure what’s currently done, but I shudder to think. Nevertheless it’s crucial to check the gridding work and Jones refused to let that happen. The global averages could be wrong. We won’t know until someone redoes everything from scratch. But Jones says he lost the raw data, or at least some of it.

From the Metro we learn the following from the Jones testimony,

“But he [Jones] pointed out the same information [raw data] was publicly available in the U.S. He also said the scientific journals which had published his papers had never asked to see it.”

We are supposed to change the economy of the industrialized world including a massive transfer of wealth from the First World to the Third World on the basis of unverified calculations. So much for the “peer review” we hear so much about. Of course I already know that peer review is not the same as an audit or a replication of a scientific result.

I wonder if Jones can feel shame.

- end of initial entry -

Terry Oldberg writes

A far more damning indictment of climatology than the one brought to light by A. Zarkov in the referenced article is that the climate models identified by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change as the basis for its raising an alarm about man-made global warming are not falsifiable. It follows that these models lie outside science under (philosopher of science) Karl Popper’s criterion for separation of scientific from non-scientific models. Because these models are built by people with scientific credentials, naive policy makers and journalists take the models to be scientific models but they are pseudo-scientific in nature.

Terry Oldberg
Engineer-Scientist

Posted by Lawrence Auster at March 04, 2010 07:42 PM | Send