Climategate Update

Last week the United Kingdom Information Commissioner’s Office-the body that administers the Freedom of Information Act-said the University of East Anglia had flouted the rules in its handling of an FOI request by British amateur climate analyst Doug Kennan.

Today the Guardian reported how Phil Jones, head of the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia, withheld information requested under freedom of information laws.

The CRU scientist’s wrongdoing and cover-up were only revealed after thousands of University of East Anglia emails were leaked to the internet, in an incident now known as Climategate.

It should be noted that the Competitive Enterprise Institute is involved in helping to further uncover the scandal that Keenan discovered. CEI’s legal team already has submitted a number of FOIA requests to government-employed climate scientists involved in the Climategate emails.

According to the Guardian,

“Jones and his Chinese-American colleague Wei-Chyung Wang, of the University at Albany in New York, are being accused of scientific fraud by an independent British researcher over the contents of a research paper back in 1990.

That paper, which was published in the prestigious journal Nature, claimed to answer an important question in climate change science: how much of the warming seen in recent decades is due to the local effects of spreading cities, rather than global warming?…

…The pair, with four fellow researchers, concluded that the urban influence was negligible. Some of their most compelling evidence came from a study of temperature data from eastern China, a region urbanising fast even then….

…But many climate sceptics did not believe the claim…

…But when Jones turned down requests from them to reveal details about the location of the 84 Chinese weather stations used in the study, arguing that it would be “unduly burdensome”, they concluded that he was covering up the error.

And when, in 2007, Jones finally released what location data he had, British amateur climate analyst and former City banker Doug Keenan accused Jones and Wang of fraud.

He pointed out that the data showed that 49 of the Chinese meteorological stations had no histories of their location or other details. These mysterious stations included 40 of the 42 rural stations. Of the rest, 18 had certainly been moved during the study period, perhaps invalidating their data…

…By then, Keenan had published his charges in Energy & Environment, a peer-reviewed journal edited by a Hull University geographer, Dr Sonja Boehmer-Christiansen.

The paper was largely ignored at the time, but Guardian investigations of the hacked emails now reveal that there was concern among Jones’s colleagues about Wang’s missing data – and the apparent efforts by Jones and Wang over several years to cover this up.

Those concerns were most cogently expressed to Jones by his ex-boss, and former head of the CRU, Dr Tom Wigley. In August 2007, Wigley warned Jones by email: “It seems to me that Keenan has a valid point. The statements in the papers that he quotes seem to be incorrect statements, and that someone (W-C W at the very least) must have known at the time that they were incorrect.”