Dr. Peiser’s complete submission to the UK Parliamentary Committee is complete below. Dr. Peiser was editor of the journal which handled the fraud allegations on the urban warming papers by Jones and Wang.
These papers were used to present urban warming as having a minimal effect on the surface temperature record, which is something I disagree with. I’m supposed to disagree as a skeptic, but the evidence of substantial urban warming bias in the temperature records is too great to ignore and requires a complete re-study, something Anthony Watts has taken on for the US in his surfacestations project. In the Wang paper, the stations in question were stated to have well considered histories to prevent contamination caused by time of observations, station moves and instrument changes. Keenan’s paper in particular alleged that these claims were not accurate. When Jones failed to answer in a timely manner, the correspondence became contentious to say the least. Here is a relevant quote from the emails.
Regarding the Chinese meteorological data analyzed by Wang et al. [GRL, 1990] and Jones et al. [Nature, 1990], it now seems clear that there are severe problems.
In particular, the data was obtained from 84 meteorological stations that can be classified as follows. 49 have no histories 08 have inconsistent histories 18 have substantial relocations 02 have single-year relocations 07 have no relocations Furthermore, some of the relocations are very distant–over 20 km. Others are to greatly different environments, as illustrated here: http://www.climateaudit.org/?p=1323#comment-102970 The above contradicts the published claim to have considered the histories of the stations, especially for the 49 stations that have no histories. Yet the claim is crucial for the research conclusions. I e-mailed you about this on April11th. I also phoned you on April 13th: you said that you were in a meeting and would get back to me. I have received no response. I ask you to retract your GRL paper, in full, and to retract the claims made in Nature about the Chinese data. If you do not do so, I intend to publicly submit an allegation of research misconduct to your university at Albany.
Douglas J. Keenan
My bold below.
H/T John Pittman and Anastassia Makarieva.
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Memorandum submitted by Dr Benny Peiser (CRU 38)
1. I am the editor of CCNet and the co-editor of the journal Energy &Environment (E&E). Further details may be obtained from the CCNet and E&Ewebsites: CCNet: http://www.staff.livjm.ac.uk/spsbpeis/CCNet-homepage.htmE&E: http://multi-science.metapress.com/content/121493/?p=5b7d9587cb4a4f608c91190241affac3&pi=0 . I am prepared to give oral evidence at the Committee’s evidence session in elaboration of my written submission. I have no declarable interests.
2. The CRU e-mails under investigation suggest that climate scientists (not only at CRU but also elsewhere) have actively sought to prevent a paper on alleged research fraud from being published in violation of principles of academic integrity.
3. In the following, I will outline the chronology of the CRU-Keenan affair as documented in the published CRU e-mails and according to unpublished e-mail correspondence between me and Dr Jones.
4. It should be noted that the CRU e-mails regarding the Jones-Keenan affair are incomplete. I am in the possession of e-mail correspondence with Phil Jones about the Keenan paper that is not included in the published CRU e-mails. The point is that the ‘unauthorised publication’ referred to in the terms of reference is by no means a complete publication. There is likely to be much more other CRU email traffic bearing on the question of the CRU’s scientific integrity, over and above the emails already disclosed. In the interest of veracity and transparency all correspondence by CRU researchers regarding the fraud allegations in question should be disclosed in full so the exact nature and extent of attempts to prevent the publication of Keenan’s paper can be established.
5. In the summer of 2007, I was a guest editor of a special issue of E&E (“The IPCC: Structure, Process and Policy,” – E&E Volume 18, Number 7 – 8 / December 2007).http://multi-science.metapress.com/content/n2541g9607j1/?p=5be0956c6848417c85c79247097c97ad&pi=0
6. On 29 August 2007, I received an e-mail from Doug Keenan with his paper titled “The Fraud Allegations against Wei-Chyung Wang.” In this paper, Keenan accused Wei-Chyung Wang (State University of Albany, SUNY, New York, USA) of scientific fraud. In his paper, Keenan documented evidence that Wang had fabricated information about Chinese meteorological weather stations. His allegations concern two publications: a) Jones P.D., Groisman P.Y., Coughlan M., Plummer N., Wang W.-C., Karl T.R. (1990), “Assessment of urbanization effects in time series of surface air temperature over land”, Nature, 347: 169-172; and b) Wang W.-C., Zeng Z., Karl T.R. (1990), “Urban heat islands in China”, Geophysical Research Letters, 17: 2377-2380. The study by Jones et al (1990) has been a corner stone in multiple IPCC reports about the allegedly minimal role of the effect of urban heat islands on the global temperature record. The latest (2007) assessment report by the IPCC concluded that urbanization effects are insignificant with regards to global warming. One of the key papers to underpin this conclusion is the study by Jones et al. (1990). To refute Keenan’s claims of scientific fraud would have only required the release of documentary information about the Chinese weather stations in question which Wang has long claimed to possess.
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