Posted for Quirin Schiermeier
New Scientist reporter Fred Pearce – of fame for first having spread the story that all Himalayan glaciers might melt away by 2035 – is now doing his own investigation into emails leaked in November from the University of Norwich’s Climate Research Unit.
In the first instalment, which appeared today in the Guardian, Pearce claims to have revealed a potential case of scientific fraud.
“The Guardian has learned that crucial data obtained by American scientists from Chinese collaborators cannot be verified because documents containing them no longer exist. And what data is available suggests that the findings are fundamentally flawed,” the piece reads.
The study in question is a 1990 Nature paper on the effects of urbanization on surface temperature measurements in China. The study, led by former CRU director Phil Jones, found little evidence of a so-called urban heat island effect.
What Pearce says only towards the end of his article is that allegations of fraud stem from a 2007 article published in Energy & Environment, a journal edited by self-proclaimed climate skeptic Sonja Boehmer-Christiansen, a retired geography lecturer formerly at the University of Hull in the UK.
Skeptics have long suspected that a sub-set of 84 Chinese weather stations used for the study may have been moved during the 30-year study period, possibly invalidating the findings. Responding to complaints put forward in 2007, Jones’ collaborator, Wei-Chyung Wang of the University at Albany in New York, said that he obtained the station data from a Chinese colleague who had lost her notes on some of the stations’ locations.
But in a 2009 email to Jones, former CRU director Tom Wigley questioned Wang’s scientific rigour and said, “Why, why, why did you and W-C W not simply say this right at the start? Perhaps it’s not too late?”
The Guardian piece quotes Wang as saying: “I have been exonerated by my university on all the charges. When we started on the paper we had all the station location details in order to identify our network, but we cannot find them any more. Some of the location changes were probably only a few metres, and where they were more we corrected for them.”
Jones had in 2007 released what ‘metadata’ he had of the stations.
There is a broad agreement among climate scientists that the urban heat island effect on global temperature measurements is small.