The recovery of Phil Jones - Back to the future

Back to the Future?

In 2008, in an message titled “IPCC and FOI”, Phil Jones asked Michael Mann to delete emails he might have gotten from Kieth Briffa, assuring him that Briffa would delete such emails as well. He said ‘they’ was going to get in touch with Caspar Ammann asking him to delete emails too. Responding to Jones, Michael Mann replied sphinx-like, that he would get in touch with Eugene Wahl about the matter.

Four scientists - Kieth Briffa, Michael Mann, Caspar Ammann, Eugene Wahl - all being set into motion by Phil Jones, deleting emails relating to the IPCC fourth assessment report - this is the picture we get, from one the emails in Climategate.

The alleged email exchange is below:

From: Michael Mann mann@xxxxxxxxx.xxx
To: Phil Jones p.jones@xxxxxxxxx.xxx
Subject: Re: IPCC & FOI
Date: Thu, 29 May 2008 08:12:02 -0400
Reply-to: mann@xxxxxxxxx.xxx

Hi Phil,
laughable that CA (Climate Audit) would claim to have discovered the problem. They would have run off to the Wall Street Journal for an exclusive were that to have been true.

I’ll contact Gene about this ASAP. His new email is: generwahl@xxxxxxxxx.xxx
talk to you later,

mike

Phil Jones wrote:

Mike,

Can you delete any emails you may have had with Keith re AR4? Keith will do likewise. He’s not in at the moment - minor family crisis.

Can you also email Gene and get him to do the same? I don’t have his new email address.

We will be getting Caspar to do likewise.

I see that CA claim they discovered the 1945 problem in the Nature paper!!

Cheers

Phil

Prof. Phil Jones
Climatic Research Unit Telephone [removed]
School of Environmental Sciences Fax [removed]
University of East Anglia
Norwich Email p.jones@xxxxxxxxx.xxx
NR4 7TJl, UK

--------

Michael E. Mann
Associate Professor
Director, Earth System Science Center (ESSC)
Department of Meteorology Phone: [removed]
503 Walker Building FAX: [removed]
The Pennsylvania State University email: mann@xxxxxxxxx.xxx
University Park, PA 16802-5013
Website
Now, a year after these series of exchanges were made public by Climategate, Jones, we are informed by Nature magazine, deleted the emails from just “bravado”.

“We just thought if they’re going to ask for more, we might as well not have them”

Apparently Jones deleted these emails, to “simplify his life”, by “not having them”, if they were requested by people “in the future”. Mindblowing.

The Nature article potrays Jones’ story through Climategate year One. He is shown as a sensitive man, sucked into a vortex of reactive maneuvers, outwitting critics, bloggers and sceptics, deleting emails in the process.  As much as one hopes for more transparency and data openness, one hopes Jones finds the right rationalizations to put his mind at rest first. Meanwhile the skeptics are not going to get anything in the near future, it seems.

Here is an interesting bit of “search-box” investigation you can perform. Look for the words ‘denier’ or ‘fossil-fuel’ in the article - you might just be surprised by the results.

See post here.

Nature Editors block sensible reply to commenter re Jones
By Rupert Wyndham

I thought people might be interested in this. As you see, I responded this morning to a piece in some Nature offshoot. People can judge for themselves whether or not my contribution in any way breaches acceptable standards of debate, good taste or whatever.

I suggest a small but illustrative example of the complete corruption of what was once a prestigeous publication.

From:
Date: 17 November 2010 10:07
Subject: [Nature News] Your post has been hidden
To: rupertwyndham@xxxxxxx

Dear Rupert Wyndham,

The following post you wrote on the Nature News website has been hidden by the moderator in accordance with our terms and conditions.

Kathleen Wood - “#15697
The ultimate irony for Jones and scientists like him is that he is engaged in a philosophical battle against people who use theology and pseudo-science rather than real science to support their claims. While critics are accusing Jones of skewing results to meet his hypotheses, the climate deniers are bound by no such scientific methods. Link.

What ‘scientific methods’ - and, by the way, scientific method is scientific method - singular not plural. For more than thirty years I have been observing the evolution of ‘environmentalist science’ from global cooling to global warming, to climate change, to global climate disruption. Two ‘philosophical’ features (to use Ms. Wood’s term) stand out:

a. a refusal to countenance any form of detached scientific debate;
b. the employment by default of personal abuse towards towards anyone who questioned the prevailing orthodoxy.

Science, as succinctly and elegantly defined by Prof. Richard Lindzen, is the ‘opposing dialectic between theory and observation’. Ms. Wood would make more useful contributions if she engaged with that proposition.

RW

-Nature News editors

NOTE: They posted the comment later.