Global Warming Scientist Admits Doubts

Proponents of man-made global warming have suffered a serious blow as leading climate change scientist Phil Jones now acknowledges that the earth may have been warmer in medieval times than now.

Jones also conceded in an interview with the BBC that during the past 15 years there has been no “statistically significant” warming.

“The admissions will be seized on by skeptics as fresh evidence that there are serious flaws at the heart of the science of climate change and the orthodoxy that recent rises in temperature are largely made-made,” Britain‘s Daily Mail observed.

Jones recently stepped down as director of the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit in Britain after leaked e-mails indicated that scientists there were manipulating data to strengthen the argument for man-made global warming.

The data have been used to support efforts by the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) to urge governments to cut carbon dioxide emissions and to produce the “hockey stick graph” that shows temperatures relatively stable for centuries before rising sharply in recent decades.

Critics of global warming crusaders believe there is evidence that the world was warmer than today between about 800 and 1300 A.D., during the so-called Medieval Warm Period (MWP), due to evidence of high temperatures in northern countries.

“There is much debate over whether the Medieval Warm Period was global in extent or not,” Jones said in the interview.

“The MWP is most clearly expressed in parts of North America, the North Atlantic, and Europe and parts of Asia.

“For it to be global in extent, the MWP would need to be seen clearly in more records from the tropical regions and the Southern Hemisphere. There are very few palaeoclimatic records for these latter two regions.

“Of course, if the MWP was shown to be global in extent and as warm or warmer than today, then obviously the late 20th century warmth would not be unprecedented.”

Marc Sheppard, environment editor of American Thinker, declares: “As the entire anthropogenic global warming theory is predicated on correlation with rising CO2 levels, this first-such confession from an IPCC senior scientist is nothing short of earth-shattering.”

He also writes: “Indeed, we know that, during the MWP, ice-free seas allowed the Vikings to settle a then comfortably warm Greenland, where colonies flourished for many centuries. Modern archaeologists digging through [Greenland’s] permafrost have uncovered bones and artifacts attesting to the villages established there.”

Despite his concession that there has been no “statistically      significant” warming over the past 15 years, Jones still maintains that    he is “100 percent confident” the climate has warmed and said      “there’s evidence that most of the warming since the 1950s is due          to human activity.”