Academic breaks silence to deny covering up flawed data about global warming
By Kunal Dutta
Wednesday, 3 February 2010
The scientist at the centre of the "Climategate" controversy last night denied claims that he covered up flawed data about rising world temperatures.
Professor Phil Jones, the former head of the University of East Anglia's climatic research unit, said the 20-year-old study questioned by sceptics "stood up to scrutiny" and was corroborated by more recent work. The UEA's research centre has been under fire from climate sceptics since 13 years of emails were stolen from its servers and posted online in November in the run-up to the UN climate talks in Copenhagen.
One newspaper claimed that Professor Jones deliberately withheld information from Douglas Keenan, a *independent student of climate change, who used a freedom of information request to query data from Chinese weather stations used in the 1990 study on global warming.
Professor Jones said he was certain that the study, which drew on 42 urban and 42 rural sites, was correct because it was validated by the new data. "I am confident.... the site movements that might have taken place at some of the sites were not that important to affect the average of the 42 sites," he said. …
"I think it's very important and it's potentially very serious for the future of mankind in decades to come."
Insisting that he "wholeheartedly" stood by the part of the IPCC's report to which he contributed, the academic added: "The work we do at the UEA is only a small part of climate science, Thousands of climate scientists around the world support our results." …
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