Judge and jury at his own trial

The problems for Phil Jones and UEA/CRU just won’t go away. It has now been revealed that the eleven academic papers supposedly independently chosen for the Oxburgh enquiry were in fact reviewed and approved by Phil Jones himself. Bishop Hill reports:

When the original emails were released I reported on an inquiry made to Lord Oxburgh by Oliver Morton of the Economist about how Oxburgh’s Eleven papers were chosen. When he replied, Oxburgh said in essence that he didn’t know.

What I received was a list from the university which I understand was chosen by the Royal Society The contact with the RS was I believe through [name redacted] but I don’t know who he consulted. [Name redacted], when I asked him, agreed that the original sample was fair.

Well, now we know who the redactions were. The contact through with the Royal Society was through Martin Rees – we knew that already. The other redaction, the other person consulted about whether the sample of papers was reasonable, was…Phil Jones.

Now, whichever way you look at it, this is a funny question to put to the accused if one’s objective is a fair trial. I mean, what could Jones say? “You’ve picked all my bad papers”? And of course Jones must have known that the sample was not representative. (source)

And Anthony Watts again summarises the lunacy of this:

The investigations thus far are much like having a trial with judge, jury, reporters, spectators, and defendant, but no plaintiff. The plaintiff is locked outside the courtroom sitting in the hall hollering and hoping the jury hears some of what he has to say. And, to add insult to injury, when you let the accused endorse which pieces of evidence might be a “fair sample”, is it any wonder the verdicts keep coming up “not guilty”? (source)

Once again, we see climate alarmists fudging results to achieve a pre-conceived outcome. This is not the way that science, or independent investigations of scientific integrity, should be carried out.

But I’m not complaining – while this goes on, the warmists’ credibility is slowly but surely seeping away.

UPDATE: Even warming-crazed “Non Scientist” magazine calls out the enquiries:

Russell’s team left other stones unturned. They decided against detailed analysis of all the emails in the public domain. They examined just three instances of possible abuse of peer review, and just two cases when CRU researchers may have abused their roles as authors of IPCC reports. There were others. They have not studied hundreds of thousands more unpublished emails from the CRU. Surely openness would require their release.

All this, plus the failure to investigate whether emails were deleted to prevent their release under freedom of information laws, makes it harder to accept Russell’s conclusion that the “rigour and honesty” of the scientists concerned “are not in doubt”.

Some will argue it is time to leave climategate behind. But it is difficult to justify the conclusion of Edward Acton, University of East Anglia vice-chancellor, that the CRU has been “completely exonerated”. Openness in sharing data, even with your critics, is a legal requirement.

But what happened to intellectual candour – especially in conceding the shortcomings of these inquiries and discussing the way that science is done. Without candour, public trust in climate science cannot be restored, nor should it be. (source)

Ouch, that must hurt.

Video of Prof. Phil Jones’ entire appearance at the UK Science and Technology Select Committee on 1 March 2010 (courtesy of live stream from Parliament TV, but converted and uploaded to YouTube by ACM). There are five parts, each of about 9 or 10 minutes. Jones is accompanied by the Vice Chancellor of the University of East Anglia, Prof. Edward Acton. Part 1 is here, links to the others follow:

Part 2

Part 3

Part 4

Part 5

They don’t exactly give PJ a tough ride, do they? To quote the former UK Labour Chancellor Denis Healey, it was like being savaged by a dead sheep…

Thanks to reader Pete for the original Parliament link (here) which is highly Mac unfriendly, the rats.

In the poo again

This report comes from the Sydney Morning Herald, amazingly, but it includes its standard disclaimer on this kind of story:

“The allegations do not undermine the large body of evidence for human-made global warming.”

No, of course they don’t. Nothing ever does in Fairfax-land, does it? But still, the story is another nail in the IPCC’s credibility:

A BRITISH climate scientist at the centre of the hacked emails controversy has been accused of trying to hide flaws in Chinese weather data used in a scientific paper on the effect of cities on global warming.

The 1990 paper, which also included temperature records from Australia, was cited in the 2007 report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change as evidence that urbanisation only made a small contribution to rising temperatures.

The Guardian investigated more than 2000 emails hacked [leaked – Ed] last year from the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit, many of them sent by Professor Jones, its director.

It reported that Professor Jones had withheld information about the 50 years of Chinese data when faced with freedom-of-information requests by climate sceptics.

They wanted to know the location of 84 Chinese weather stations used by Professor Jones and his colleague, Wei-Chyung Wang, of the University of Albany, to argue that rising temperatures in China were due to climate change, not expanding cities. When Professor Jones released the information, no location was given for the stations that were supposed to be in the countryside.

An investigation by Professor Wang’s university cleared him of any wrongdoing, but the emails reveal Professor Jones’s colleagues in the unit were concerned by his reliance on the Chinese data.

The controversy could lead to a review of the influential paper, published in Nature, which had four other authors, including Dr Michael Coughlan, head of the National Climate Centre at the Australian Bureau of Meteorology.

You have to ask, if the case for global warming is so strong and the science is so settled, why is such conduct necessary? It’s a simple question.

Read it here.

Overstated case?

Breaking news from AP (h/t Climate Depot):

LONDON — Britain’s University of East Anglia says the director of its prestigious Climatic Research Unit is stepping down pending an investigation into allegations that he overstated the case for man-made climate change.

The university says Phil Jones will relinquish his position until the completion of an independent review into allegations that he worked to alter the way in which global temperature data was presented.

The allegations were made after more than a decade of correspondence between leading British and U.S. scientists were posted to the Web following the security breach last month.

The e-mails were seized upon by some skeptics of man-made climate change as proof that scientists are manipulating the data about its extent.

Phil Jones, Director CRU

Update on this story. Phil Jones of CRU has confirmed that the material is genuine:

The director of Britain’s leading Climate Research Unit, Phil Jones, has told Investigate magazine’s TGIF Edition tonight that his organization has been hacked, and the data flying all over the internet appears to be genuine.

In an exclusive interview, Jones told TGIF, “It was a hacker. We were aware of this about three or four days ago that someone had hacked into our system and taken and copied loads of data files and emails.”

“Have you alerted police”

“Not yet. We were not aware of what had been taken.”

Jones says he was first tipped off to the security breach by colleagues at the website RealClimate.

“Real Climate were given information, but took it down off their site and told me they would send it across to me. They didn’t do that. I only found out it had been released five minutes ago.”

TGIF asked Jones about the controversial email discussing “hiding the decline”, and Jones explained what he was trying to say….

Read it here.