Phil Jones was the man at the center of the CRU email leak last last year. Since then he has been hounded by deniers almost non-stop, but few of them have bothered to ask themselves whether or not the criticisms of Jones are valid. Instead they rabidly jump on any accusation with little regard for whether or not it has any merit.
Interestingly, at the recent denier conference put on by the Heartland Institute (a think tank that denies global warming and the dangers of tobacco smoke) there was a defence of Phil Jones by Roy Spencer a prominent climate contrarian:
“He says he’s not very organised. I’m not very organised myself,” said Professor Spencer. “If you asked me to find original data from 20 years ago I’d have great difficulty too.
“We just didn’t realise in those days how important and controversial this would all become – now it would just all be stored on computer. Phil Jones has been looking at climate records for a very long time. Frankly our data set agrees with his, so unless we are all making the same mistake we’re not likely to find out anything new from the data anyway.”
Today one can keep large amounts of data with relative ease. 20 years ago that was simply not the case. It is refreshing to hear that from Roy Spencer.
It is also refreshing to hear Spencer state that different surface temperature records, produced with different methodologies, are in agreement with each other. This replication increases our confidence in them, and is a major reason why the warming of the last century has been called unequivocal.
(h/t Cobey Beck)
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