This expands a bit on Steve's post re the email interchange between Phil Jones and Warwick Hughes, and also has a go at summarising what all the dodgy data problems are and mean, and where we, that is the entire community that is concerned about this issue, on all sides. might usefully go next. All contributions very welcome.

My two bob's worth is as follows:

I think the forum title above is possibly now the critical question in this climate change debate.

The people who are so certain that carbon dioxide and its cohorts are changing the climate, from Ban Ki Moon to Al Gore to Nicholas Stern and Tim Flannery and all the rest of that vast crowd of genuinely community-minded folk, should now tell us what it is they know on the science front, that the rest of us cannot perceive.

Perhaps they could do that after reading some of the carbon-sceptical literature, with a little more attention than they usually apply to the scientific detail in that literature, and a little less attention to details as to who it is that is daring to try and think for themselves without the full approval of and certification from their particular pet priesthood. It is a sad world that cannot admit that useful and original thought on any topic can come from anywhere. Science is not meant to be the exclusive temple of some self-appointed set of group-think experts.

The current situation re the data that the carbonists seem to most like, when telling us "the science is settled," all looks very unsettled to me.

First, the temperature database for the world has to be redone totally. This because the people in charge of and who constructed the basic dataset for global climate, HadCRUT (Hadley - Climate Research Unit Temperature), Phil Jones and co., now say their predecessors threw away the original raw data in the 1980's. But that is a new story. Warwick Hughes from Australia has worked for years to demonstrate that the urban heat island effect is seriously skewing global temperature graphs upwards and has not even remotely been properly discounted, despite all protestations to the contrary. When he asked Phil Jones, the East Anglia University's Climate Research Unit's director, about and for some of the relevant data from Siberia, the email interchange ran like this:

"Warwick Hughes to Phil Jones, September 2004:

Dear Phillip and Chris Folland (with your IPCC hat on),
Some days ago Chris I emailed to Tom Karl and you replied re the grid cells in north Siberia with no stations, yet carrying red circle grid point anomalies in the TAR Fig 2.9 global maps. I even sent a gif file map showing the grid cells barren of stations greyed out. You said this was due to interpolation and referred me to Phillip and procedures described in a submitted paper. In the last couple of days I have put up a page detailing shortcomings in your TAR Fig 2.9 maps in the north Siberian region, everything is specified there with diagrams and numbered grid points.
[1] One issue is that two of the interpolated grid cells have larger anomalies than the parent cells !!!!?????
This must be explained.
[2] Another serious issue is that obvious non-homogenous warming in Olenek and Verhojansk is being interpolated through to adjoining grid cells with no stations, like cancer.
[3] The third serious issue is that the urbanization affected trend from the Irkutsk grid cell near Lake Baikal, looks to be interpolated into its western neighbour.
I am sure there are many other cases of this, 2 and 3 happening.
Best regards,
Warwick Hughes (I have sent this to CKF)

Phil Jones to Warwick Hughes, same email:

Warwick, I did not think I would get a chance today to look at the web page. I see what boxes you are referring to. The interpolation procedure cannot produce larger anomalies than neighbours (larger values in a single month). If you have found any of these I will investigate. If you are talking about larger trends then that is a different matter. Trends say in Fig 2.9 for the 1976-99 period require 16 years to have data and at least 10 months in each year. It is conceivable that at there are 24 years in this period that missing values in some boxes influence trend calculation. I would expect this to be random across the globe.

Warwick, Been away. Just checked my program and the interpolation shouldn’t produce larger anomalies than the neighbouring cells. So can you send me the cells, months and year of the two cells you’ve found ? If I have this I can check to see what has happened and answer (1). As for (2) and (3) we compared all stations with neighbours and these two stations did not have problems when the work was done (around 1985/6). I am not around much for the next 3 weeks but will be here most of this week and will try to answer (1) if I get more details. If you have the names of stations that you’ve compared Olenek and Verhojansk with I would appreciate that.

Cheers, Phil

Then later, Phil Jones replied:

Subject: Re: WMO non respondo
… Even if WMO agrees, I will still not pass on the data. We have 25 or so years 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. … Cheers Phil"

That email interchange demonstrates not only a determination not to share the data with a serious fellow-scientist who had just raised questions about glaring errors. It shows a worrying level of error and incompetence.

As many have now said, that is behaviour and an attitude that is contrary to the basic principles of science. For that attitude alone Jones is not remotely fit for that very important job and should be removed permanently. But also, if Phil Jones had been working with the basic data, the un-fudged numbers, for 25 years, it was clearly there when he started and for all that time after. One way or another, the man is lying, unless I have missed something critical or do not understand plain English. He can go write his "mea culpa" autobiography and live very well off the proceeds; it will sell splendidly. So we do not have to worry about his welfare. All sort of hysterical folk are now baying for his blood, but he is in fact only guilty of minor misdemeanours, if he is guilty, which remains to be determined. It is merely the scale of the effect of his behaviour that is awesome, but that is probably legally irrelevant. We cannot sue him for trillions, his book will not cover it, so we will have to take it on the chin. More fools us collectively, for not checking, for so many years. The managements of the IPCC, the British Met office, the University of East Anglia, and the WMO, the Royal Society of London, the Governments of You Name it, from the USA to Kiribati, should now also consider early retirement. Because, with the certainty of fools, they have been insisting that carbon dioxide is pushing up global temperatures.

Their collective failure to uphold or even grasp the basic standards of science has resulted in an unholy mess. Enthusiasts with high moral principles but a limited grasp of geology and oceanography and the momentum of loaded coal trains are chaining themselves to train tracks on the other side of the world, here in the shimmery land of Oz, to stop coal export shipments. To the frozen north. People with lower morals, or perhaps even with higher ones, by their lights, will soon be blowing up train tracks and power pylons. You think high-minded folk would not do that? Nelson Mandela, a man I admired even when he was on Robben Island and it was a bit unfashionable in some quarters, used to blow up power pylons. As it was done expressly, he said, instead of blowing up soldiers in the opposing force (into which I had been conscripted), I thoroughly approved. And was delighted when the whole debate was amicably resolved, before all the lights went out.

Some kind of medal is owed by the world to Warwick Hughes and to Anthony Holland, who is now suing Jones, because his requests for the data under the British freedom of information legislation were also refused. And to all the other folk who also tried to get Jones to hand over his data. The legals can take their course, I am not particularly fussed.

But, as per the famous phrase "hide the decline," any sniff of such an attitude immediately makes the derivative work, the entire HadCRUT model, tainted and useless. That database, if Chris Monckton is correct, is the standard against which the only other three global temperature databases we have, are calibrated. That includes the one of the Goddard Institute of Space Sciences, which is what NASA uses. So, we have no reliable global data on temperature changes. It may all have been over-reading, in the last decade at last, because of wilful fudging, if not fraud.

Second, Mr Ban, Secretary-General of the UN, said some days back, that even if the temperature records were in doubt, which he disputes (so one wonders here he did Science 101), other data says exactly the same thing and can be trusted. He specifically mentioned the borehole temperature data, so we are no doubt going to hear more of that, as he is the spokesman for many large teams of carbonists. So I will have a preliminary go at that lot.

The idea is that past atmospheric temperatures are preserved in rocks, and that temperature changes make there way slowly down boreholes and can be properly interpreted years later. All you need for that lot to be useless, is for the heat flow from below, where, some 3,00 kms underfoot, it is about 4,000 degrees C. on an ordinary day, to be variable. Or for there to be some source of heat in the rocks close to the surface that h not been taken into account. The boreholes are being read, in effect, against the HadCRUT averages. That is because measuring temperatures in boreholes is easy, but understanding the results is very far from. Rocks vary considerably in their ability to transmit heat. It is not just that, say, basalts transmit heat at a different rate from granite. It is that basalts and granites and all the other words for igneous rocks are in fact terms covering ranges of rocks with varied mineral compositions, and so with varied abilities to transmit heat. Ask the folk trying to get the geothermal power industry up and contributing significantly. Just here in Queensland, we have plenty of granite within a few kilometres of, say, Brisbane, where the heat and power could be used. But the only useful hot granites found so far are about six hundred kilometres away, in the almost deserted SW corner of the state. Reasons, not enough radioactive minerals in the local rocks, and no effective sedimentary-rock insulating blanket over the top of the ones near here either. Also, the heat flow depends on the extent of fracturing and faulting of the rocks, and so on the amount of groundwater and air they contain and the flow of those in and out of the rocks. As we pump groundwater aquifers down around the globe, an fell the trees, of course the heat gong into the top hundred metres or so will increase. There used to be very efficient cooling systems there, evaporating water, and then moving that energy back up into the atmosphere. Trees, and just ordinary surface and near- surface eaporation. So even if the ground temperature record is actually recording what has happened in the atmosphere in the recent past, we have so poor an understanding of the causes of such heat flow changes, that the HadCRUT database looks far more trustworthy and a whole lot easier to unravel. Also, the amount of life underground is still quite unknown, but some observers have it that 90 percent of the biosphere is very small and is down there and respiring away. And, respiration moves heat.

I do not wish to offend those who have laboured long and hard measuring and interpreting drillhole temperatures, but I do not think they are even remotely understood as yet and I suspect they may never be useful for this particular purpose. There are far too many inscrutable variables for that lot ever to be an independent global temperature dataset. Mr Ban and his advisers may have a far better grasp of the geology that is relevant here, but in that case I think they are obliged to explain why the rough outline of concerns above is drivel.

Third, the claim that carbon dioxide levels are rising in step with temperatures is complete nonsense. Hence the desire at the CRU to "hide the decline." Atmospheric carbon dioxide levels, if we are to trust the Mauna Loa data from Hawaii (which I do not at all advise), also the world standard, here we go again, atmospheric CO2 levels have apparently been rising steadily, in an almost invariant, annually saw-toothed, concave curve. Meanwhile, global temperatures have been doing no such thing, but the greenhouse warming model, being subject to the laws of thermodynamics, which say you cannot hide heat, is now trying to hide the missing heat of the last decade in the oceans. There being no other place left to hide. "Hide the heat" would be their problem if their model was really working. But as it is not, they merely need a theoretical hiding place. But that is not so easy to find, as we have been monitoring the oceans independently of the University of East Anglia, and the ocean bluntly refuses to play along. They have not warmed appreciably. Game, set and match.

Even if you do no trust the laws of thermodynamics (and you really should, because they love you dearly and are on your side, whoever you are) you cannot trust the Mauna Loa data. We know for starters that the data there has been altered to cope with local volcanic eruptions. The measuring station there, in my opinion, is in the worst possible place on the planet, being the side of the biggest active volcano we have on earth. That site is so appalling, because we know perfectly well that basalt volcanoes first, emit copious quantities of carbon dioxide, even at temperatures as low as 100 degrees C (they erupt at 900 degrees C and above) and also, warm the oceans when they are prked on islands and are recharging their magma chambers, as has been the case of Mauna Loa, with some minor eruptions as interruptions, for the last 50 years. And, for one month the station had to be abandoned because of one of those eruptions. So there is no data. But there is no gap in the graph. The data for that month was invented. And the eruptions, where they could be measured, show no particularly large changes, so the data seems to have been fudged to fit the model. To "hide the incline," would be one way of seeing it. That lot is as suss as the HadCRUT data.

Fourth, the claim that present carbon dioxide levels are the highest in the last 400,000 years or in the last 740,000 years (the update offered to cope with the second deep Antarctic drillhole, EPICA-Dome C, is also complete nonsense. We do not have the remotest idea what past atmospheric CO2 levels were back 740,00 years ago or in fact at the peak of any interglacial period between then and now, of which there have been seven. The ice core sampling is quite incapable of spotting the highest CO2 values reached in the past, and the ice itself is incapable of preserving those levels anyway.

At the bottom of the EPICA hole, one CO2 sample, as far as I can understand what was done, was taken from the last 3.85 metre core length, s for all the rest of the hole, that being the standard sample length. That covered 4,600 years, down at the bottom, where the ice is a bit compacted by the three kilometres-plus of ice above. As CO2 levels in the atmosphere vary from year to year, unless the pattern was cyclic then, we have one chance in 4,600 of having picked the peak value. And, ice is brittle rock, gases diffuse from high concentrations to low concentrations, and continental ice is ever in motion, That is what all those icebergs are about. The ice flows till lage chunks break off at the edges of the icecaps at float away. But that pre-launch flow involves continuous deformation of the ice, at every level from the intermolecular to whopping great flat faults hundred of kilometres long. Flat faults remove or duplicate strata, depending on whether they are normal or reverse faults, (see Geology 101), and in the case of ice, untraceably. We now have some five deep ice drillholes in Antarctica, and when we got into a planetary panic, we had just two, Vostok and Dome C. both were drilled into essentially the same strata, though a few hundred kilometre apart. We have million of drillholes from both harder and softer rocks, drilled all around the palnet, and those and their record, we admit we do not understand all that well. But the interpreters of the ice cores, with just two under their belt, were able to tell us all about the past temperature and CO2 history of the planet, with sufficient coincidence that we can sensibly go on to de-commission most of our power stations, in a great rush? Smart folk, these deep-ice shamans. Do you wonder that the rest of us geologists are touch envious, but also, many of us, just a little sceptical of AGW?

OK. What's to do? Maybe this?:

1) Recover the original temperature data, that the CRU dumped. It must be there somewhere, probably with the World Meteorological Organisation, or in someone's garage somewhere. Data has a way of surviving. I went to the local tip, years ago. There, in about a dozen huge heavy files, were all the breeding records for a very successful type of cattle the local federal government pasture station had come up with, or more likely had claimed they had come up with, some farmer or bovine couple probably being the real stars. They may have all that on disk, but if not, they are still here, though a damn nuisance. So, there is hope for the world's temperature data.

Someone, Chris Monckton reports, by the way, got the original data for New Zealand out of his reluctant government and re-plotted all the data. The temperature climb of the last 60 years almost entirely disappeared. The steeper official graph, on which the NZ government is basing its economic strategy, appears to have been deliberately crooked. So, is New Zealand on another planet as those of us in Oz have so long contended), in this instance in merely having a climate that is not warming, or what?

2) Study every aspect of this huge topic again and very carefully. And then, without rancour and any more crookery, debate it again. And then work out what to do. Whoopee, more conferences. Maybe by Internet?

Rushing into vast economic change on the basis of theory with no real data to back it up and a mass of evidence to say it is nonsense, is just plain silly. It will bring ruin and wars to hundreds of millions of those of us who are not travelling too well already. It is most unlikely we can change the climate, as ever. But we can burn ourselves out as a species, if we insist on jousting all day in the desert with sandstorms, while the camels wander off.

This essay, like all the rest of mine, is in the public doamain. Use or ignore to suit.

Happy New Year, all. Have a really good one.

Peter.