I won’t try to summarize The Guardian’s story on Dr. Phil Jones’s seemingly ill-judged reaction to the discovery that some of the data supplied by a coauthor in a widely-cited 1990 paper was less solid than one would hope. The Guardian’s case against Jones isn’t exactly open-and-shut; there’s plenty of gray there.
The actual scientific implications of any one paper being discredited (as distinct from the implications for the authors) are of course not particularly great. The paper relates to the magnitude of the “urban heat island effect” – that is, the effect on temperature measurements of weather stations becoming surrounded by cities. The original paper found that this effect was negligible; other research, including one by Jones himself, suggests that it can explain a substantial fraction of the warming seen in some terrestrial temperature records. However, there are multiple other studies showing temperatures rising globally, including satellite data which examines the whole earth.
The fact that a fraction of the results published in peer-reviewed science journals are wrong is well-known. That’s why for important questions the science isn’t established until multiple independent confirmations are available. For the fundamentals of climate change science these independent confirmations are available in virtually whatever quantity you want.
As a working researcher (whose research is sort-of science) one of the most interesting things that comes out of this story is the level of trust scientists need to place in each other when they coauthor a paper. After this episode, perhaps the odd professor will ask a few more questions when they put their name and polish on experiments conducted by their PhD students and postdocs – and the PhD students and postdocs of colleagues half-way round the world.
The only real things that’s changed now is the media’s willingness to see the fraud and fiddling that was always part of the great global warming scam. To finally see the fraud and fiddling that bloggers have written about for years.
But now there’s a great change. There is now a race on to uncover the next big IPCC scandal, and I doubt the great climate change scare can survive.
chrisl, I’m sure the good folk here would be fascinated with your well-reasoned objections to the IPCC reports. (Play your cards well, and you could be in line for a Nobel Prize!)
There’s nothing they like better than grinding, interminable stoushes with idiots.
If the evidence is so compelling why the need to sex it up?
I’m a bit confused actually by the Guardian’s piece as to what Phil Jones did and didn’t do, and what the consequences were. It seems like he published a paper in good faith, and then discovered some data was missing… or the opposite? The guardian seemed a bit sloppy with the supposed facts of the case.
This endless smearing and nitpicking is really depressing. Watching these gloating pigs on the right dragging peoples’ careers through the mud over small infractions years ago is really dispiriting.
Some subset of individuals, for personal motives, sex up their work history all the time in all professions, trades and industries. The mere fact of misrepresenting one’s work as more important than it actually was doesn’t tell us very much about whether the pretender is a victim of their own confabulation or a deliberate fraudster or somewhere in the spectrum in between.
Sometimes people get something wrong and are then too embarrassed to admit to it, because they feel it makes them look bad, so they try to pretend that the error didn’t happen.
It also says very little about the larger enterprises of which they are a part that some subset of practitioners are pretenders. What’s more important is that the profession/trade/industry had rigorously scrupulous protocols for audits/reviews (and grievances). The scientific method is a model of scrupulous review by one’s peers – the first filter before publication, then subsequent analysis and attempts to replicate results in order to generate more detailed observations. Claims based on studies that cannot be replicated rapidly fall into well-deserved oblivion, and unless the original results can be traced to inadvertent error, the reputations of the scientists involved in non-replicable studies take a blow (Pons & Fleischmann, anyone?).
Leaping to the conclusion that it’s all part of a huge fraudulent conspiracy seems very much to be counting one’s chickens before they are hatched.
sg “I’m a bit confused actually by the Guardian’s piece as to what Phil Jones did and didn’t do”
Professor Jones and a colleague, Professor Wei-Chyung Wang of the State University of New York at Albany suggested in an influential 1990 paper in the journal Nature that the urban heat island effect was minimal – and cited as supporting evidence a long series of temperature measurements from Chinese weather stations, half in the countryside and half in cities, supplied by Professor Wei-Chyung. The Nature paper was used as evidence in the most recent report of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
However, it has been reported that when climate sceptics asked for the precise locations of the 84 stations, Professor Jones at first declined to release the details. And when eventually he did release them, it was found that for the ones supposed to be in the countryside, there was no location given.
Yeah, at least that is better than using the WWF, Greenpeace and phone calls as evidence
chrisl, the article doesn’t make it clear whether he knew when he published the paper that the data was wrong, or subsequently. There are sentences in the article which suggest that he didn’t know initially that the chinese data was wrong.