Conveniently for some, a few days after the start of the 1009 UN climate talks, in Copenhagen, a host of emails hacked from the UK Climate Research Unit were leaked to the Internet. Over the coming weeks, paragraphs of the emails were taken out of context, distorted and severely exaggerated by the media and various blogs, as well as by global warming critics and conservative politicians, who hailed the documents as proof that global warming was not real. Now, Phil Jones, the expert that was behind ClimateGate, explains the confusion surrounding the aftermaths of the scandal, the
BBC News reports.
The professor says that a large amount of the climate data that he and his colleagues had at their disposal were not well organized at the time when critics called out for these pieces of information to be released. In retrospect, the expert states, he wishes that he had shared the data with those who demanded it, but adds that at the time, his decision seemed appropriate. However, Jones makes it abundantly clear that he or his team did not influence the climate data in a nefarious way, or influenced the scientific process to any extent. Global warming, the scientist reveals, is man-made, all available evidence show.
“The major datasets mostly agree. If some of our critics spent less time criticizing us and prepared a dataset of their own, that would be much more constructive,” Jones adds. The datasets he used are publicly available in the United States, and so everyone seeking to debunk global warming is welcomed to peer through the information, and come to different conclusions. However, the catch is that the study has to be done with scientific rigor, which is something most global warming “skeptics” are not capable of. Plus, they lost that debate a long time ago.
“We do have a trail of where the (weather) stations have come from but it's probably not as good as it should be. That's similar with the American datasets. There were technical reasons for this, with changing data from different countries. There's a continual updating of the dataset. Keeping track of everything is difficult. Some countries will do lots of checking on their data then issue improved data so it can be very difficult. We have improved but we have to improve more,” he states, referring to accusations that some of the data the team used cannot be back-tracked.
“I have no agenda. I'm a scientist trying to measure temperature. If I registered that the climate has been cooling I'd say so. But it hasn't until recently – and then barely at all. The trend is a warming trend,” he concludes, quoted by the British news agency.
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