Key Scientist Admits No Warming In 15 Years

I don't know if you remember Professor Phil Jones, but he is the Director of the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia in Norwich. This is the organization that maintains the largest body of global temperature records in the world. Jones was also neck-deep in the recent ClimateGate scandal, involving the release of emails suggesting they abused the peer-review process and "cooked the books" on temperature records.

Jones has come under heavy fire in recent weeks, and recently made an almost complete u-turn in what he has been saying.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2009/nov/24/climate-professor-leaked-emails-uea

Professor Jones told the BBC yesterday there was truth in the observations of colleagues that he lacked organisational skills, that his office was swamped with piles of paper and that his record keeping is ‘not as good as it should be’. The data is crucial to the famous ‘hockey stick graph’ used by climate change advocates to support the theory.

Professor Jones also conceded the possibility that the world was warmer in medieval times than now – suggesting global warming may not be a man-made phenomenon.
And he said that for the past 15 years there has been no ‘statistically significant’ warming.

So he admits that the world may not be hotter than ever before, and he admits that temperatures haven't been rising. For 15 years! This amounts to a tacit admission that, contrary to prior claims, the science is not settled.

But Dr Benny Pieser, director of the sceptical Global Warming Policy Foundation, said Professor Jones’s ‘excuses’ for his failure to share data were hollow as he had shared it with colleagues and ‘mates’.

He said that until all the data was released, sceptics could not test it to see if it supported the conclusions claimed by climate change advocates.

He added that the professor’s concessions over medieval warming were ‘significant’ because they were his first public admission that the science was not settled.

So there you go... even the leading scientist in the ClimateGate scandal admits that the science isn't settled and the earth isn't warming.

Have you ever heard someone argue that "weather isn't climate?" Basically they're saying that a colder winter doesn't mean the climate has changed, and it's usually used to ridicule those who doubt global warming by pointing to things like the recent blizzards, especially those in the Southern US. We recently heard exactly this language from an Obama administration adviser.

http://thehill.com/blogs/e2-wire/677-e2-wire/81083-lubchenco-on-the-snowstorms-weather-is-not-climate

“It is important that people recognize that weather is not the same thing as climate,” said Jane Lubchenco, head of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

Lubchenco, speaking on NPR’s “Diane Rehm Show,” said the planet is warming but that weather is variable. The snowy weather, Lubchenco said, “is not a contradiction and it is not really unexpected.”

But my question is simple. Jones has admitted that the earth hasn't warmed for FIFTEEN YEARS. Maybe, just maybe, we can admit this isn't a statistical blip and that it may, in fact, indicate a long-term trend. In other words... after 15 years, doesn't weather become climate?