Chinese Puzzle

The guardian.co.uk, a paper not noted for its scepticism about Man Made Global Warming, has uncovered what appears to be fraud in the Phil Jones account of Chinese weather stations.

Phil Jones, the beleaguered British climate scientist at the centre of the leaked emails controversy, is facing fresh claims that he sought to hide problems in key temperature data on which some of his work was based.

A Guardian investigation of thousands of emails and documents apparently hacked from the University of East Anglia's climatic research unit has found evidence that a series of measurements from Chinese weather stations were seriously flawed and that documents relating to them could not be produced.

Jones and a collaborator have been accused by a climate change sceptic and researcher of scientific fraud for attempting to suppress data that could cast doubt on a key 1990 study on the effect of cities on warming – a hotly contested issue.

Today the Guardian reveals how Jones withheld the information requested under freedom of information laws. Subsequently a senior colleague told him he feared that Jones's collaborator, Wei-­Chyung Wang of the University at Albany, had "screwed up".

. What amuses me about this is that Climate Audit had made similar claims in 2007 and they had left no mark on the good science of the climate researchers.

Did Jones et al 1990 “fabricate” its quality control claims? This hard-hitting question is asked by Doug Keenan here. He cites the following claims from Jones et al 1990 and Wang et al:

The stations were selected on the basis of station history: we chose those with few, if any, changes in instrumentation, location or observation times. [Jones et al.]

They were chosen based on station histories: selected stations have relatively few, if any, changes in instrumentation, location, or observation times…. [Wang et al.]

Keenan observed that those statements are vital for the papers. For many years, no one knew what stations were used in Jones et al 1990. Only after recent FOI actions in the UK publicized here at CA did a list of the stations used in Jones et al 1990 become available in March 2007, after years of obstruction. Since then, Keenan has corresponded recently with both Jones and Wang, seeking a valid explanation of the above claims. His conclusion:

The essential point here is that the quoted statements from Jones et al. and Wang et al. cannot be true and could not be in error by accident. The statements are fabricated.

So far the discrepancies uncovered by McIntyre have proved to be true and the cover ups and obfuscations of the Team have appeared to be false. And it is early days yet. Not even three months into ClimateGate and the IPCC report is falling apart.