Blogs have Hijacked Peer Review Process says ‘Climategate’ Scientist

As the director of the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia in Norwich Phil Jones has been at the center of the Climategate controversy and authored many of the emails that critics contend undermine the credibility of the organization.  In an exclusive interview with Nature Jones defended allegations that he and colleagues published data that they knew might be biased by urbanization of temperature sensors.  Jones states,

"The science still holds up" though, he adds. A follow-up study verified the original conclusions for the Chinese data for the period 1954–1983, showing that the precise location of weather stations was unimportant. "They are trying to pick out minor things in the data and blow them out of all proportion," says Jones of his critics.

Regarding his use of surface temperatures instead of tree-ring proxy data (i.e., tree-ring data is used for the past to represent temperatures but is inconsistent with the same over the past 20-years), Jones also defended his practice and suggested,

"We need more reconstructions from different parts of the world to reproduce a better history of the past thousand years". Jones challenges his critics to help with those efforts. "Why don't they do their own reconstructions?" he asks. "The work that's been published has been through the peer-review process; if they want to criticize that they should write their own papers."

Finally, Jones is quite concerned that critics have redefined the peer review process:

But he fears that the aftermath of the climategate affair is undermining the integrity of the scientific review process. "I don't think we should be taking much notice of what's on blogs because they seem to be hijacking the peer-review process," says Jones.

Readers may want to also refer to this post as they consider the veracity of Jones' claims.

Interestingly, a comment on the article, posted by Douglas J. Keenan, states,

This news report discusses my work on the Chinese weather-station data, but provides no references for that work. The main reference is this: Keenan, D. J. Energy & Environment, 18, 985-995 (2007). It is freely available on the web.

The news report also misrepresents my allegations.

My principal allegation is that some of the data on station histories never existed. Specifically, Jones et al. (1990) claim to have sourced their data from a report that was published by the U.S. Department of Energy and the Chinese Academy of Sciences. Yet for 49 of the 84 meteorological stations that Jones et al. relied upon, the DOE/CAS Report states "station histories are not currently available" and "details regarding instrumentation, collection methods, changes in station location or observing times … are not known". Those statements imply that the quoted claim from Jones et al. is impossible: "stations were selected on the basis of station history: we chose those with few, if any, changes in instrumentation, location or observation times". My paper presents more details; some updates are available via http://www.informath.org/apprise/a5620.htm .

The comment continues with additional useful information.