Hadley’s Phil Jones Whistling Past the Graveyard

Hadley’s Phil Jones Whistling Past the Graveyard

From ICECAP, November 11, 2008

Comments by Joe D’Aleo on Reuter’s story

2008 Set to be About 10th Warmest Year
By Alister Doyle, Reuters Environment Correspondent

This year is on track to be about the 10th warmest globally since records began in 1850 but gaps in Arctic data mean the world may be slightly underestimating global warming, a leading scientist said on Tuesday. A natural cooling of the Pacific Ocean known as La Nina kept a lid on temperatures in 2008 despite an underlying warming trend, said Phil Jones, director of the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia in England.

“This year is about 10th,” he told Reuters in a telephone interview. “La Nina in the Pacific lasted longer than we envisaged.” Jones’s unit is one of the main sources of global climate data for the United Nations. The warmest year on record was 1998, followed by 2005 and 2003, with other years this century closely bunched. Tenth place would make 2008 the least warm since 1999. The update marginally cools an estimate from January, when Jones’s unit and the British Met Office (Britain’s meteorological service) estimated that 2008 would be “another top 10 year,” near the bottom of the ranking.

The U.N. Climate Panel says human emissions of greenhouse gases, mainly from burning fossil fuels, are blanketing the planet. Rising temperatures will bring more floods, heatwaves, more powerful storms and rising sea levels, it says.

Jones said temperature records may fractionally underestimate warming because of gaps in measurements in the Arctic for 1961-90, the benchmark years for judging change, and problems in verifying ocean temperatures. “The world is probably a little warmer than we are measuring,” he said. Read more here of Jones spinning more tales.

Icecap Note: Recall it was Jones early in January 2007 who warned 2007 would be the warmest year on record and 2008 would surely end up top ten. At the risk of sounding like Andy Rooney, did you ever notice how they are always trying to find more warmth by finding proof that the high tropical atmosphere or ocean temperatures were measured wrong or find surrogates that prove it was cooler before and warmer now. How about looking at the known warm biases that dwarf these adjustments like a 66% station dropout, tenfold increase in missing data, little or no urbanization or land use change adjustment based on flawed science and bad siting. Even here in the US, recall Anthony Watts’ band of volunteers have found only 4% of the nearly 600 stations surveyed thus far met the government’s standards for ideal siting and 69% were poorly or very poorly sited. Why isn’t the same kind of attention paid to finding and correcting those errors.

The answer to that rhetorical question is that like at least half a dozen peer reviewed papers have shown, that would show that the warming is up to 50% exaggerated and that this might only be a top 20 or 30 warmest year. NOAA and NASA GISS are no better. Only the satellite data can be trusted but unfortunately it only goes back to 1979. NOAA (Karl and Petersen), NASA (Hansen and Schmidt), Hadley (Jones) have thrived on budgets fattened by the global warming issue. They have won the lottery and will do whatever it takes to keep the annuity checks coming.

Jones blamed El Nino and La Nina and a quiet sun for the cooling. A big step forward. But what he doesn’t realize that given the switch to a cool PDO, there will be more cooling La Ninas which with a sun going into a 200 year Dalton Minimum like slumber, will ensure the cooling continues. Download post here.