“There has been no warming since 1995”

As reported in the London Daily Mail, Phil Jones, the scientist at the center of the Climategate scandal in which leaked email documents reveal that IPCC scientists were manipulating data, has now made a series of major admissions, including the following:

* Data for the IPCC’s vital “hockey stick graph” used by climate alarmists has gone missing
* There has been no global warming since 1995
* Warming periods have happened before, such as the Medieval Warm Period—but NOT due to man-made changes

The interview of Jones was conducted by the still pro-alarmist BBC, which continues to insist that the leaked emails were “stolen,” even though they legally were supposed to have been released years ago as a result of requests filed through the U.K.’s Freedom of Information Act. Nevertheless, this stunning series of retractions of key positions that Jones and others have long claimed to be “settled” further places the entire global warming mantra in doubt. As the Mail notes:

Colleagues say that the reason Professor Phil Jones has refused Freedom of Information requests is that he may have actually lost the relevant papers. . . . The data is crucial to the famous ‘hockey stick graph’ used by climate change advocates to support the theory.

Professor Jones also conceded the possibility that the world was warmer in medieval times than now—suggesting global warming may not be a man-made phenomenon.

And he said that for the past 15 years there has been no ‘statistically significant’ warming.

Yet, Jones continued to defend his illegal refusal to provide the data to others for verification or explain why he could not do so:

Professor Jones criticised those who complained he had not shared his data with them, saying they could always collate their own from publicly available material in the US. And he said the climate had not cooled ‘until recently – and then barely at all. The trend is a warming trend’.

But Dr. Benny Pieser, director of the sceptical Global Warming Policy Foundation, said Professor Jones’s “excuses” for his failure to share data were hollow as he had shared it with colleagues and ‘mates’.

He said that until all the data was released, sceptics could not test it to see if it supported the conclusions claimed by climate change advocates.

He added that the professor’s concessions over medieval warming were ‘significant’ because they were his first public admission that the science was not settled.

In a further article in the Times of London, “World may not be warming, say scientists,” a series of additional scientists are confirming that there may in fact be no warming at all.

[N]ew research, including work by British scientists, is casting doubt on such claims. Some even suggest the world may not be warming much at all.

“The temperature records cannot be relied on as indicators of global change,” said John Christy, professor of atmospheric science at the University of Alabama in Huntsville, a former lead author on the IPCC.

The doubts of Christy and a number of other researchers focus on the thousands of weather stations around the world, which have been used to collect temperature data over the past 150 years.

These stations, they believe, have been seriously compromised by factors such as urbanisation, changes in land use and, in many cases, being moved from site to site.

Christy has published research papers looking at these effects in three different regions: east Africa, and the American states of California and Alabama.

“The story is the same for each one,” he said. “The popular data sets show a lot of warming but the apparent temperature rise was actually caused by local factors affecting the weather stations, such as land development.”

The Independent Institute’s publications on the science of climate change have consistently been shown to have been accurate, refuting the junk science used to defend the IPCC’s claims of climate alarmism:

Hot Talk, Cold Science: Global Warming’s Unfinished Debate, by S. Fred Singer, foreword by Frederick Seitz

New Perspectives in Climate Change: What the EPA Isn’t Telling Us, by S. Fred Singer, John R. Christy, Robert E. Davis, David R. Legates, and Wendy M. Novicoff