To: "Phil Jones" <p.jones@uea.ac.uk>
Subject: RE: Dr Sonja BOEHMER-CHRISTIANSEN
Date: Wed, 28 Oct 2009 17:32:24 -0000
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I know, I feel for you being in that position. If its any consolation we've had it here for years, very pointed commentary at all external seminars and elsewhere, always coming back to the same theme. Since Sonja retired I am a lot more free to push my environmental interests without ongoing critique of my motives and supposed misguidedness - I've signed my department up to 10:10 campaign and have a taskforce of staff and students involved in it.... Every now and then people say to me sotto voce with some bemusement, 'and when Sonja finds out, how will you explain it to her...!'
Graham
-----Original Message-----
From: Phil Jones [mailto:p.jones@uea.ac.uk]
Sent: 28 October 2009 16:39
To: Graham F Haughton
Subject: RE: Dr Sonja BOEHMER-CHRISTIANSEN
Dear Graham,
Thanks for the speedy reply. Just like you
are, we are trying here to do bits of research
mostly related to the current set of contracts we
have. Trying to respond to blogs is just not part
of the deadlines we have entered into with the
Research Councils, the EU and DEFRA.
You are probably aware of this, but the
journal Sonja edits is at the very bottom of
almost all climate scientists lists of journals
to read. It is the journal of choice of climate
change skeptics and even here they don't seem to
be bothering with journals at all recently.
I don't think there is anything more you can
do. I have vented my frustration and have had a considered reply from you.
Cheers
Phil
At 18:45 27/10/2009, you wrote:
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>Dear Phil, sorry to hear this. I don't see much
>of her these days, but when I do see Sonja next
>I'll try and have a quiet word with her about
>the way the affiliation to us is used, but at
>the moment in fairness she is entitled to use it
>in the way she does. Fortunately I don't get to
>see many of these email exchanges but I do
>occasionally hear about them or see them and
>frankly am rarely convinced by what I read. But
>as with all academics, I'd want to protect
>another academic's freedom to be contrary and
>critical, even if I personally believe she is
>probably wrong. I agree with you that it'd be
>better for these exchanges to be conducted
>through the peer review process but these forms
>of e-communication are now part of the public
>debate and its difficult to do much about it
>other than to defend your position in this and
>other fora, or just ignore it as being, in your words, malicious.
>
>I can understand your frustration and I am
>pretty sure I'd be feeling exactly the same in
>your shoes, but I am not sure at the moment that
>I can do much more. If you think I can and
>should do more then feel free to ring and I am happy to discuss the matter.
>
>Graham
>
>
>-----Original Message-----
>From: Phil Jones [mailto:p.jones@uea.ac.uk]
>Sent: 27 October 2009 17:05
>To: Graham F Haughton
>Subject: Dr Sonja BOEHMER-CHRISTIANSEN
>
>
> Dear Professor Haughton,
> The email below was brought to my attention
>by the help desk of UKCP09 - the new set of UK
>climate scenarios developed for DEFRA. It was
>sent by the person named in the header of this
>email. I regard this email as very malicious. Dr
>Boehmer-Christiansen states that it is beyond her
>expertise to assess the claims made. If this is
>the case then she shouldn't be sending malicious
>emails like this. The two Canadians she refers
>to have never developed a tree-ring chronology in
>their lives and McIntyre has stated several times
>on his blog site that he has no aim to write up
>his results for publication in the peer-review literature.
> I'm sure you will be of the same opinion as
>me that science should be undertaken through the
>peer-review literature as it has been for over
>300 years. The peer-review system is the
>safeguard science has developed to stop bad science being published.
>
> In case you want to read more about the
>subject my colleague Keith Briffa has just put this up on his web site.
>
> http://www.cru.uea.ac.uk/cru/people/briffa/yamal2009/
>
> It has taken him some time, partly as he has
>been off after a serious operation in June. He
>has had to return early to respond to this. He
>has also had some difficulty contacting our Russian colleagues.
>
> The claims on the Climate Audit site are
>exaggerated, but get taken completely out of
>context by the other blog sites that get referred
>to in Dr Boehmer-Christiansen's email. I will
>draw your attention to two things
>
> 1. The Yamal chronology is only used in 3 of
>the 12 millennial temperature reconstructions in Ch 6 of the 2007 IPCC Report.
>
> 2. McIntyre was sent the data for Yamal by our
>Russian colleagues on Feb 2, 2004.
>
> I realize Dr Boehmer-Christensen no longer
>works for you, but she is still using your affiliation.
>
> Best Regards
> Phil Jones
>
>
> From: Sonja A Boehmer-Christiansen <Sonja.B-C@hull.ac.uk>
> Date: 2 October 2009 18:09:39 GMT+01:00
> To: Stephanie Ferguson <stephanie.ferguson@ukcip.org.uk>
> Cc: "Peiser, Benny"
><B.J.Peiser@ljmu.ac.uk>, Patrick David Henderson
><pdhenderson18@googlemail.com>, Christopher Monckton <monckton@mail.com>
> Subject: RE: Please take note of
>potetially serious allegations of scientific 'fraud' by CRU and Met Office
>
>
>
>
> Dear Stephanie
>
> I expect that a great deal of UKCIP work
>is based on the data provided by CRU (as does the
>work of the IPCC and of course UK climate
>policy). Some of this, very fundamentally, would
>now seem to be open to scientific challenge, and
>may even face future legal enquiries. It may be
>in the interest of UKCIP to inform itself in good
>time and become a little more 'uncertain' about its policy advice.
>
> Perhaps you can comment on the following
>and pass the allegations made on to the relevant people.
>
> It is beyond my expertise to assess the
>claims made, but they would fit into my
>perception of the whole 'man-made global warming'
>cum energy policy debate. I know several of
>the people involved personally and have no
>reason to doubt their sincerity and honour as
>scientists, though I am also aware of their
>highly critical (of IPCC science) policy positions.
>
> I could also let you have statements by
>Steve McIntyre and Ross McKitrick. Ross McKitrick
>currently teaches at Westminister Business School
>and who is fully informed about the relevant
>issues. He recently addressed a meeting of about 50 people in London.
>
> Best wishes
>
> Sonja B-C
>
> Dr.Sonja A.Boehmer-Christiansen
> Reader Emeritus, Department of Geography
> Hull University
> Editor, Energy&Environment
> Multi-Science (www.multi-science.co.uk)
> HULL HU6 7RX
> Phone:(0044)1482 465369/465385
> Fax: (0044) 1482 466340
>
>
> TWO copied pieces follow, both relate to CRU and UK climate policy
>
> a. THE MET OFFICE AND CRU'S YAMAL SCANDAL: EXPLAIN OR RESIGN
>
> " Jennifer Marohasy <jennifermarohasy@jennifermarohasy.com>
>
> Leading UK Climate Scientists Must
>Explain or Resign, Jennifer Marohasy
> <
><http://jennifermarohasy.com/blog/2009/09/leading-uk-climate-scientists->
>http://jennifermarohasy.com/blog/2009/09/leading-uk-climate-scientists-
> must-explain-or-resign/>
>
> MOST scientific sceptics have been
>dismissive of the various reconstructions of
>temperature which suggest 1998 is the warmest
>year of the past millennium. Our case has been
>significantly bolstered over the last week with
>statistician Steve McIntyre finally getting
>access to data used by Keith Briffa, Tim Osborn
>and Phil Jones to support the idea that there has
>been an unprecedented upswing in temperatures
>over the last hundred years - the infamous hockey stick graph.
>
> Mr McIntyre's analysis of the data -
>which he had been asking for since
> 2003 - suggests that scientists at the
>Climate Research Unit of the United Kingdom's
>Bureau of Meteorology have been using only a
>small subset of the available data to make their
>claims that recent years have been the hottest of
>the last millennium. When the entire data set is
>used, Mr McIntyre claims that the hockey stick shape disappears
> completely. [1]
>
> Mr McIntyre has previously showed
>problems with the mathematics behind the 'hockey
>stick'. But scientists at the Climate Research
>Centre, in particular Dr Briffa, have
>continuously republished claiming the upswing in
>temperatures over the last 100 years is real and
>not an artifact of the methodology used - as
>claimed by Mr McIntyre. However, these same
>scientists have denied Mr McIntyre access to all
>the data. Recently they were forced to make more
>data available to Mr McIntyre after they
>published in the Philosophical Transactions of
>the Royal Society - a journal which unlike Nature
>and Science has strict policies on data archiving which it
> enforces.
>
> This week's claims by Steve McInyre that
>scientists associated with the UK Meteorology
>Bureau have been less than diligent are serious
>and suggest some of the most defended building
>blocks of the case for anthropogenic global
>warming are based on the indefensible when the
> methodology is laid bare.
>
> This sorry saga also raises issues
>associated with how data is archived at the UK
>Meteorological Bureau with in complete data sets
>that spuriously support the case for global
>warming being promoted while complete data sets
>are kept hidden from the public - including from
>scientific sceptics like Steve McIntyre.
>
> It is indeed time leading scientists at
>the Climate Research Centre associated with the
>UK Meteorological Bureau explain how Mr McIntyre is in error or resign.
>
> [1] Yamal: A "Divergence" Problem, by
>Steve McIntyre, 27 September 2009
> http://www.climateaudit.org/?p=7168
>
> Jennifer Marohasy BSc PhD
>
>
>
> b. National Review Online, 23 September 2009
>
><http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=ZTBiMTRlMDQxNzEyMmRhZjU3ZmYzODI5MGY4ZWI5OWM=>By
>
>Patrick J. Michaels
>
>
> Imagine if there were no reliable
>records of global surface temperature. Raucous
>policy debates such as cap-and-trade would have
>no scientific basis, Al Gore would at this point
>be little more than a historical footnote, and
>President Obama would not be spending this U.N.
>session talking up a (likely unattainable)
>international climate deal in Copenhagen in
>December. Steel yourself for the new reality,
>because the data needed to verify the
>gloom-and-doom warming forecasts have disappeared.
>
> Or so it seems. Apparently, they were
>either lost or purged from some discarded
>computer. Only a very few people know what really
>happened, and they aren't talking much. And what
>little they are saying makes no sense.
> In the early 1980s, with funding from
>the U.S. Department of Energy, scientists at the
>United Kingdom's University of East Anglia
>established the Climate Research Unit (CRU) to
>produce the world's first comprehensive history
>of surface temperature. It's known in the trade
>as the "Jones and Wigley" record for its authors,
>Phil Jones and Tom Wigley, and it served as the
>primary reference standard for the U.N.
>Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)
>until 2007. It was this record that prompted the
>IPCC to claim a "discernible human influence on global climate."
> Putting together such a record isn't at
>all easy. Weather stations weren't really
>designed to monitor global climate. Long-standing
>ones were usually established at points of
>commerce, which tend to grow into cities that
>induce spurious warming trends in their records.
>Trees grow up around thermometers and lower the
>afternoon temperature. Further, as documented by
>the University of Colorado's Roger Pielke Sr.,
>many of the stations themselves are placed in
>locations, such as in parking lots or near heat
>vents, where artificially high temperatures are bound to be recorded.
> So the weather data that go into the
>historical climate records that are required to
>verify models of global warming aren't the
>original records at all. Jones and Wigley,
>however, weren't specific about what was done to
>which station in order to produce their record,
>which, according to the IPCC, showed a warming of
>0.6° +/- 0.2°C in the 20th century.
>
> Now begins the fun. Warwick Hughes, an
>Australian scientist, wondered where that "+/-"
>came from, so he politely wrote Phil Jones in
>early 2005, asking for the original data. Jones's
>response to a fellow scientist attempting to
>replicate his work was, "We have 25 years or so
>invested in the work. Why should I make the data
>available to you, when your aim is to try and find something wrong with it?"
> Reread that statement, for it is
>breathtaking in its anti-scientific thrust. In
>fact, the entire purpose of replication is to
>"try and find something wrong." The ultimate
>objective of science is to do things so well that, indeed, nothing is wrong.
>
> Then the story changed. In June 2009,
>Georgia Tech's Peter Webster told Canadian
>researcher Stephen McIntyre that he had requested
>raw data, and Jones freely gave it to him. So
>McIntyre promptly filed a Freedom of Information
>Act request for the same data. Despite having
>been invited by the National Academy of Sciences
>to present his analyses of millennial
>temperatures, McIntyre was told that he couldn't
>have the data because he wasn't an "academic." So
>his colleague Ross McKitrick, an economist at the
>University of Guelph, asked for the data. He was turned down, too.
> Faced with a growing number of such
>requests, Jones refused them all, saying that
>there were "confidentiality" agreements regarding
>the data between CRU and nations that supplied
>the data. McIntyre's blog readers then requested
>those agreements, country by country, but only a
>handful turned out to exist, mainly from Third
>World countries and written in very vague language.
> It's worth noting that McKitrick and I
>had published papers demonstrating that the
>quality of land-based records is so poor that the
>warming trend estimated since 1979 (the first
>year for which we could compare those records to
>independent data from satellites) may have been
>overestimated by 50 percent. Webster, who
>received the CRU data, published studies linking
>changes in hurricane patterns to warming (while others have found otherwise).
> Enter the dog that ate global warming.
>
> Roger Pielke Jr., an esteemed professor
>of environmental studies at the University of
>Colorado, then requested the raw data from Jones. Jones responded:
> Since the 1980s, we have merged the data
>we have received into existing series or begun
>new ones, so it is impossible to say if all
>stations within a particular country or if all of
>an individual record should be freely available.
>Data storage availability in the 1980s meant that
>we were not able to keep the multiple sources for
>some sites, only the station series after
>adjustment for homogeneity issues. We, therefore,
>do not hold the original raw data but only the
>value-added (i.e., quality controlled and homogenized) data.
> The statement about "data storage" is
>balderdash. They got the records from somewhere.
>The files went onto a computer. All of the
>original data could easily fit on the 9-inch tape
>drives common in the mid-1980s. I had all of the
>world's surface barometric pressure data on one such tape in 1979.
> If we are to believe Jones's note to the
>younger Pielke, CRU adjusted the original data
>and then lost or destroyed them over twenty years
>ago. The letter to Warwick Hughes may have been
>an outright lie. After all, Peter Webster
>received some of the data this year. So the
>question remains: What was destroyed or lost,
>when was it destroyed or lost, and why?
>
> All of this is much more than an
>academic spat. It now appears likely that the
>U.S. Senate will drop cap-and-trade climate
>legislation from its docket this fall - whereupon
>the Obama Environmental Protection Agency is
>going to step in and issue regulations on
>carbon-dioxide emissions. Unlike a law, which
>can't be challenged on a scientific basis, a
>regulation can. If there are no data, there's no
>science. U.S. taxpayers deserve to know the
>answer to the question posed above. (Patrick J.
>Michaels is a senior fellow in environmental
>studies at the Cato Institute and author of
>Climate of Extremes: Global Warming Science They Don't Want You to Know.) "
>
>
>
>
>
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>
>
>Prof. Phil Jones
>Climatic Research Unit Telephone +44 (0) 1603 592090
>School of Environmental Sciences Fax +44 (0) 1603 507784
>University of East Anglia
>Norwich Email p.jones@uea.ac.uk
>NR4 7TJ
>UK
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Prof. Phil Jones
Climatic Research Unit Telephone +44 (0) 1603 592090
School of Environmental Sciences Fax +44 (0) 1603 507784
University of East Anglia
Norwich Email p.jones@uea.ac.uk
NR4 7TJ
UK
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