Climate Scientist Phil Jones On Warming

The Distortion

Led by the UK's Daily Mail (a center for climate denialism, by the way), and hyped by the truthiness of Drudge, the climate deniers completely ignore what climate scientist Phil Jones actually says and try to make the case that he didn't say that the planet was warming, that he, in fact, said the exact opposite.

The Truth

The trick the denialists use in this one is a common one for them: take scientific jargon out of context and make it mean something completely different. If you go to the actual BBC interview from which they take the quote, he actually says that, if you cherry-pick a single year of 1995 as a starting point, the warming hasn't been significantly significant since then. All this means is that the noise in the data makes it impossible to pick out the exact amount of warming because it's very difficult to do that in such a short time-frame. His words:

The positive trend is quite close to the significance level. Achieving statistical significance in scientific terms is much more likely for longer periods, and much less likely for shorter periods.

That's jargon, clearly. That's the point. It's scientific jargon that basically means, "Look, it's tough to achieve 'statistical significance' in short periods. Don't focus on that. It's not meaningful." He doesn't say anything about the truth of the warming except to say that it's "quite close to the signficance level." Here's Dr Jones later in the interview:

Q: How confident are you that warming has taken place and that humans are mainly responsible?

Dr Jones: I’m 100% confident that the climate has warmed. As to the second question, I would go along with IPCC Chapter 9 – there’s evidence that most of the warming since the 1950s is due to human activity.

Clear, emphatic. The planet is warming, and the evidence states that most of it since 1950 is due to human activity.

The denialists love to twist scientific jargon to try to say something completely different and make it mean something it doesn't. It's part of the overall disregard for science and the scientific method that has built so much of our society over the last 5 centuries.