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Science 19 February 2010: Vol. 327. no. 5968, p. 934. [DOI: 10.1126/science.327.5968.934]
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News of the Week, Newsmaker Interview by Eli Kintisch
Embattled U.K. Scientist Defends Track Record of Climate Center
Phil Jones is at the center of a swirling controversy over e-mails stolen or leaked from the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia in the United Kingdom, which he has directed since 2004. In the 3 months since those messages came to light, Jones has been battered by criticism that the e-mails reveal a failure to share climate data publicly and an effort to prevent certain papers from being cited in international climate change reports. He's stepped down temporarily from his job to allow for an independent inquiry, and he's been treated for depression.
But Jones hasn't walked away from the battlefield. "I've got no agenda here. I'm not a politician. I'm just a scientist," he told Science during an interview last week from the University of East Anglia. Jones declined to talk about allegations concerning the hacked e-mails, citing the ongoing investigation. But he forcefully defended the quality of the center's efforts to create a global temperature database, which points to an average 0.1°C warming of Earth's land areas per decade since 1900. That work earned him a 2002 medal from the European Geosciences Union, among other acclaim.
Here are some highlights from the interview.
Q: If the CRU data set were set aside, are there other data that corroborate your findings about rising temperatures?
P.J.: There's the two other data sets produced in the U.S. [at NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration]. But there's also a lot of other evidence showing that the world's warming, by just looking outside and seeing glaciers retreating, the reduction of sea ice ... overall, the reduction of snow areas in the Northern Hemisphere, the earlier [annual] breakup of sea ice and some land ice, and river ice around the world, and the fact that spring seems to be coming earlier in many parts of the world.
Q: Critics say that your producing the same trends as the NASA and NOAA data sets is insignificant given that you start with the same raw data.
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P.J.: There are differences. The two American sets use a larger number of [temperature] stations than we do. They both use about 7200 stations, and we use about 5000 stations. But we look at that data in different ways and have different techniques for deciding whether the stations are used or not.
Q: One of the real challenges is going from the available raw data to the final temperature sets that you release. Do you feel that you have released enough information that someone could repeat that exercise?
P.J.: Yes, I feel they have. [Our papers] have been peer-reviewed; we've been doing this work for almost 30 years now. [NOAA] has something called the Global Historical Climatology Network, and people can download the station data—it's essentially the same data, it may not be exactly the same—they could go and take that data, make their own choices about what stations to use, ... they could reproduce their own gridded temperature data. A lot of the people at the moment criticize what we do but [are not doing] anything constructive and new.
Q: A sticking point with some of your critics has been how much of the data isn't available.
P.J.: We've been putting up more of the data online on the U.K. Met Office site [covering] 80% of the stations we use. You can download the data and you can download the program we use to produce the data sets.
Q: One concern is whether there are adequate procedures in place to assure the quality of this data.
P.J.: That's the sort of work we've done in the past and published in the papers.
Q: You've emphasized that you have a small staff. Would more people checking these data be a useful thing?
P.J.: It could be useful, but then we've got to bring them up to speed in terms of what we're looking for. ... The national meteorological services [which provide the raw numbers] are doing quality control on this data before it even reaches us.
Q: When during your career has pressure from outsiders to criticize or, as you would put it, "distort" your work become significant?
P.J.: In 2007, [as] the blog sites started then. I had responded to some of these people in years earlier but had given up. ... I just didn't have the time to respond. They didn't seem to want to understand.
Q: One of the skeptics who wanted station data was Warwick Hughes. What did you mean when you wrote in an e-mail to him that "even if WMO [World Meteorological Organization] agrees, I will still not pass on the data. We have 25 or so years invested in the work."
P.J.: I'd rather not go there. It was an e-mail written in haste.
Q: When did the pressure become severe?
P.J.: In July 2009, we received 60 Freedom of Information requests in a few days—each request was for five countries' worth of data. We probably should've responded to these requests in a different way. We stand by the science that we were doing. Maybe we need to be more proactive and open about releasing data. But the 60 requests were just too much to deal with at that one time.
Q: Do you have any regrets about how you handled the chapter you've co-authored in the 2007 IPCC report?
P.J.: No regrets, but I don't really want to go talking about IPCC. I stand by that chapter.
Q: Why are you speaking out now?
P.J.: It just seems like the right time. It was too difficult back in November and December.