Oh -- one more startling omission by Jones.
The debate? That we keep being told "is over"?
He says it's not over at all.
[Question:] When scientists say "the debate on climate change is over", what exactly do they mean - and what don't they mean?[Jones:]It would be supposition on my behalf to know whether all scientists who say the debate is over are saying that for the same reason. I don't believe the vast majority of climate scientists think this. This is not my view. There is still much that needs to be undertaken to reduce uncertainties, not just for the future, but for the instrumental (and especially the palaeoclimatic) past as well.
Not only does he say he doesn't agree that "the debate is over," but that the vast majority of scientists (his words) don't think the debate is over, either.
So why do Al Gore and Barack Obama keep saying it is? Their boy -- boy! -- is himself saying that the debate is not over.
Ooops: I forgot a key admission. Phil Jones justifies his "hide the decline" tactics by admitting he includes tree ring proxies which are congruent with his theory and tossing out proxy series which undermine it.
More: Where is the American Media? Note that the BBC is doing actual journalism while the American media continues embargoing the story.
And note even the left-wing Guardian UK is writing balanced pieces here -- in this piece, they note that the "hockey stick" was thought badly flawed and cherry-picked even by the CRU.
And this continues to be incredibly important, because even as AGW comes apart under the very first scrutiny ever given to the "theory", the White House is planning on using inherent -- and invented -- executive powers to force a carbon-controlling regime on us that would never in a thousand years pass Congress.
And Oh Yeah: The Evidence That the Earth Has Warmed At All is In Serious Doubt: As related already by DrewM. A new peer-reviewed paper shows that temperature increases are greatly and consistently overstated, because the readings aren't properly adjusted down for factors like urbanization.
And let me re-quote this withering passage:
In an interview with The Times Robert Watson said that all the errors exposed so far in the report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) resulted in overstatements of the severity of the problem. Professor Watson, currently chief scientific adviser to the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, said that if the errors had just been innocent mistakes, as has been claimed by the current chairman, Rajendra Pachauri, some would probably have understated the impact of climate change....Professor Watson, who served as chairman of the IPCC from 1997-2002, said: “The mistakes all appear to have gone in the direction of making it seem like climate change is more serious by overstating the impact. That is worrying. The IPCC needs to look at this trend in the errors and ask why it happened.”
"That is worrying." This guy just accused the IPCC of manipulating data -- he discards the "innocent mistakes" explanation as implausible, because if the mistakes were innocent, we should see them going either way. In fact, they all go the exact same way.
John Christy, professor of atmospheric science at the University of Alabama in Huntsville, was a lead author of the 2001 IPCC report but pretty soon the Gaia worshipers will be saying he was a mildly retarded guy they just kept around out of pity to run errands (like Benny from LA Law).
Christy has published research papers looking at these effects in three different regions: east Africa, and the American states of California and Alabama.“The story is the same for each one,” he said. “The popular data sets show a lot of warming but the apparent temperature rise was actually caused by local factors affecting the weather stations, such as land development.”
The IPCC faces similar criticisms from Ross McKitrick, professor of economics at the University of Guelph, Canada, who was invited by the panel to review its last report.
The experience turned him into a strong critic and he has since published a research paper questioning its methods.
“We concluded, with overwhelming statistical significance, that the IPCC’s climate data are contaminated with surface effects from industrialisation and data quality problems. These add up to a large warming bias,” he said.
And now even the true believers are admitting the IPCC is damaged goods and may have to go under the bus.
In an interview with The Times Robert Watson said that all the errors exposed so far in the report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) resulted in overstatements of the severity of the problem.Professor Watson, currently chief scientific adviser to the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, said that if the errors had just been innocent mistakes, as has been claimed by the current chairman, Rajendra Pachauri, some would probably have understated the impact of climate change.
...Professor Watson, who served as chairman of the IPCC from 1997-2002, said: “The mistakes all appear to have gone in the direction of making it seem like climate change is more serious by overstating the impact. That is worrying. The IPCC needs to look at this trend in the errors and ask why it happened.”
...Professor Watson has held discussions with Al Gore, the former US Vice-President, about creating a new climate research group to supplement the work of the IPCC and to help restore the credibility of climate science.
You'd think we folks like this on board with the whole 'asking questions is ok' thing we'd hear less of the 'denier' and 'anti-science' crap but I doubt it.
Still, it's astonishing how rapidly and far the position of the believers has gone from "of course it's man made and will kill us, the only question is how do we stop it" to "no seriously, we're not lying crooks, let's talk about how we can convince you".
There's still a long way to go to bring sanity to this debate but the momentum is clearly on the side of the true supporters of science (the people who want to see the data and be able to argue it).