Phil Jones Now Says Warming is Significant

I expect any significance is due to the cherry picking of start and stop dates,methods used to crunch the numbers, and so on. From WUWT:

Climate warming since 1995 is now statistically significant, according to Phil Jones, the UK scientist targeted in the “ClimateGate” affair.

Last year, he told BBC News that post-1995 warming was not significant – a statement still seen on blogs critical of the idea of man-made climate change.

the rest: Phil Jones does an about face on “statistically significant” warming

To be fair, when Prof. Jones last commented on the subject he did say that the temp rise was just barely not significant. The warm 2010 bumped it up just enough to become significant. If 2011 is cold enough to bump it back down again, will he make another remark on the subject?

I expect he was the subject of a few choice remarks by people from the warm side of things, due to his making that previous statement. If things do down again then he might decide to just clam up. Probably a wise decision for a man in his position.

Links to the O’Rly? remarks by the commenters on the WUWT post:

• Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, and Social Science – takes issue with the meaning of the analysis
• Statistical Significance since 1995? Not with HadCrut! Lucia, at the Blackboard, says, “I don’t know what Phil Jones did nor do I know what data he used or what method he used. But if I claimed statistical significance for tests I do without accounting for serial autocorrelation or using a one sided test, people would scream bloody murder or patiently explain that I am daft.”
• Bishop Hill remarks: Jones: post 1995 warming “significant”
• Does a Global Temperature even exist?
• The Air Vent comments: Experts or little white lies?

 

Dr. Jones Confirms “How Science is Done”

In a previous post – Climategate, NASA, and so on… – I made a few remarks on why Climategate is no big thing and that all the scientific practices (shoddy data handling, using only convenient data, insuring correct pal-review of papers, etc.) were simply SOP.

Apparently another belief that some of us had about “proper science” has been shot down. Dr. Phil Jones makes it very clear that sharing data (so that it can be fact-checked) is not standard practice in science:

Prof Jones today said it was not ’standard practice’ in climate science to release data and methodology for scientific findings so that other scientists could check and challenge the research.

See WUWT for the article: Phil Jones on the hot seat – not sharing data is “standard practice”

Since Big Climate is setting the standard here let’s remember this the next time Big Pharma tries to hide the data on a drug study. It’s SOP and quite Ok. The same, of course, goes for Big Tobacco. Big Green funds a study that claims some harmless chemical will kill the Earth? No prob, they don’t have to support the claim with anything like actual data. Heaven forbid some evil cynic should check their (or Pharma’s) work.

I feel down here. I used to think that proper scientific procedure involved a certain amount of openness so that work could be duplicated, fact checked, critiqued, etc. Especially publicly funded research.

Update: Heh. Some WUWT comments

• …Which demonstrates that any correlation between ‘climate science’ and real science is purely coincidental.
• (commenter) did my undergrad in geology some years ago. There, it was standard practice to hide your data – but ONLY until you’d published your research, because you didn’t want to get “scooped”. Small wonder that so many geologists think AGW is a load of crap.

And then there’s the THE BIG-SCIENCE POKER GAME which provides a certain amount of justification for keeping data close to the chest.

JoNova has a few remarks about acedemia and their “standards” for science:  Science associations give science a bad name

Another update:

It seems that they can’t write software, either. Now, since the conclusions of these climate “scientists” are the primary drivers behind bazillions of $$ in taxes, fees, and whatever doesn’t it seem reasonable that they should have some standards for the code they write (and the science that they do?) Colleges are full of kids who speak fluent code and who, I’m sure, would be happy to work in a prestigious science environment. Perhaps some of them should be hired? I’m sure it’d be cheap enough.

And why is climate science held to a far lower standard than any other science?