Examination of Witnesses (Question
Numbers 120-139)

PROFESSOR EDWARD ACTON AND PROFESSOR PHIL JONES

1 MARCH 2010

Q120  Dr
Harris: You would not object to sending peer reviewers or editors that
data?

Professor
Jones: No, but they have never asked.

Q121  Dr
Harris: Okay. Moving on to something else, there is this whole “hide
the decline” business I want to talk to you about. There was a concession
from at least one set of critics that the “trick” is probably not an
issue because they recognise that it is a term used.

Professor
Jones: It is the best way of doing it.

Q122  Dr
Harris: It may not be the view of all of your critics but at least you have
some on the record saying that that is now not the issue. But then you will
recall there was an exchange I had, if you were listening, with them about this
question of hiding the decline and I just wanted you to respond to their
assertion that when you did that it was not set out in the publications—I must
say I have not gone back to the publications to read them so I am relying on
your view on this but I am sure it can be done—and that in fact it was never shown
that this was going on. Whereas your evidence from the UEA says very clearly
that this is part of the published scientific record that you were doing it and
the reasons you were doing that, and that can be criticised or agreed with by
other scientists. Can you just talk about that?

Professor
Jones: That particular email relates to this document that I produced
for the World Meteorological Organisation at the end of the last millennium in
1999. One of the curves was based on tree ring data which showed a very good
relationship between the tree rings and the temperature from the latter part of
the nineteenth century through to 1960, and after that there was a divergence
where the trees did not go up as much as the real temperatures had. We knew
that because we had written a paper the year before in 1998 in the journal Nature
which discussed this divergence between tree growth and temperatures in recent
times. Not all tree ring series show that but this particular one we knew did,
so we knew that putting the tree ring series in from 1960 onwards would be
wrong because it does not agree with the instrumental temperature. What we did
for this simplified diagram was to put the instrumental data on the end from
1960, so that only applies to one of these curves on this cover. We had written
about it the year before, in one of the first papers on the divergence
problem—I think other groups had actually called it the divergence problem—and,
since then, we have been working with other tree ring data trying to improve
the way we process the data to try and make sure we keep as much of the low
frequency information on longer timescales in the trees because you have to
standardise trees in a certain way to produce temperature reconstructions.

Q123  Dr
Harris: My question is: in subsequent papers when that was done was it
always explicit, albeit only by reference to the Nature paper to which
you were referring?

Professor
Jones: It was always explicit in the subsequent papers because some of
the subsequent papers have improved the processing techniques.

Q124  Dr
Harris: Did you understand what those witnesses (if you heard them) meant
when they said that they could not see, they thought the hiding of the decline
approach—which is a label from an email—the identifying and dealing with the
divergence problem, was itself hidden. You do not accept that?

Professor
Jones: We do not accept it was hidden because it was discussed in a
paper the year before and we have discussed it in every paper we have written
on tree rings and climate.

Q125  Dr
Harris: While I have you on trees, if I may, an assertion was made by the
first panel that all the data on trees before a previous date relates to one
pine tree. I would like to call this “the case of the lonesome pine”;
is that a problem from your perspective?

Professor
Jones: No, it is not a problem at all. That particular reconstruction
went back to 1400, or just after 1400, and that is because there are
insufficient trees to go back before that, there are more than just one. We
have criteria to determine how far you can go back in terms of the number of
trees you have at a certain number of sites.

Q126  Dr
Harris: It is not lonesome.

Professor
Jones: No.

Q127  Graham
Stringer: Professor Acton—you have probably read about it—the Speaker in
this place lost his job partly because he seemed to think it was more important
to pursue people who had leaked MPs’ expenses rather than deal with the issue
which seemed to show some problems in the way members had claimed the expenses.
Do you not think that your assertions and your submission to this Committee are
going along the same line as being very concerned with the leaks and then
prejudging the outcome of the inquiry in what you say?

Professor
Acton: I hope not. The point of setting up the independent inquiry is
to hear it and allow it to look absolutely fully into all the matters before
it. I want to know the full truth; I am surprised you find a prejudging here
and I am concerned.

Q128  Graham
Stringer: The reason I say that is there is a statement from your
Pro-Vice-Chancellor, Trevor Davies, who argues exactly the case that Professor
Jones has been arguing, that Professor Jones has no case to answer and the only
way you can read your submission to this Committee is to say that you agree
with Professor Jones.

Professor
Acton: Do you mean about the climate science?

Q129  Graham
Stringer: Yes.

Professor
Acton: Ah. Muir Russell’s independent review is not looking at the
science, it is looking at allegations about malpractice. As for the science
itself, I have not actually seen any evidence of any flaw in the science but I
am hoping, later this week, to announce the chair of a panel to reassess the
science and make sure there is nothing wrong. It is amongst the most thoroughly
endorsed and co-witnessed science there is. Professor Jones has 450 co-authors
from 100 universities—from Princeton, from Yale, from Columbia, from Imperial,
from Oxford—there could be scarcely more prestigious and completely autonomous
scientists endorsing it. I am a historian, it would be extraordinary for me to
cast doubt on it.

Q130  Graham
Stringer: I meant both actually, both the science and the procedures that
had been followed, because one of the things you have said in your memorandum
is that the Information Commissioner said that no “breach of the law has
been established”, but the letter from the Commissioner states “the
prima facie evidence from the published emails indicates an attempt to defeat
disclosure by deleting information”. It is hard to imagine a more
clear-cut or cogent prima facie piece of evidence, is it not, and yet you have
taken the opposite view? You have supported the science—I accept the fact that
you are not a scientist—but you have also supported the administrative process
and that is rather prejudging it.

Professor
Acton: May I comment because I am rather puzzled about the statement
from the ICO because, as I understand it, our principle is that prima facie
evidence is evidence which on the face of it and without investigation suggests
that there is a case to answer. To my mind there is prima facie evidence; why
else did I set up the Muir Russell independent review? Prima facie evidence is
not the same as, “you have been found to breach”. You explain it to
me if you would; I am very puzzled. If it is sub judice, if, as we had in a
letter 10 days ago from the ICO, the investigation has not even begun, I am
puzzled how we could have been found to breach if there has been no
investigation.[5]

Q131  Graham
Stringer: That is not what you said actually, you did not say that this is
yet to be judged, what you said is: this statement “indicated that no
breach of the law has been established”. That is you prejudging the case.

Professor
Acton: It has not been established—unless there has been an
investigation.

Q132  Graham
Stringer: Would it not have been better to say that?

Professor
Acton: I have tried to, rather succinctly. To establish is to have done
an investigation.

Q133  Graham
Stringer: Can I ask you a more general question on your attitude? I was
trying, perhaps not very successfully, to draw an analogy with our problems in
this place with the Speaker. Should you not actually have been delighted that
all these emails have been released? On one of the most important scientific
issues of our age, is it not really important that we have as much information
out there as possible?

Professor
Acton: It is, and I would think that one should go well beyond the
Freedom of Information Act, the issue is so important. Once it is in the minds
of some people, once they imagine there is a conspiracy to distort, then any
refusal of information, even if it is nothing to do with data but private
emails or commercial agreements, will feed that. I am longing for it to be
completely open but whether it is a good thing that the emails are thrown open
like that, I wait to judge. That there be much more public debate, I delight in
and I thoroughly agree with. I am anxious if the effect of the way in which it
is reported is disinformation, a sort of hint about something where there is
absolutely nothing hidden. It is in a way the most deeply confirmed and affirmed,
the major issue of a temperature graph from about 1850. The early medieval
period—we should be spending more money on that research, but the latter is so
overly endorsed by scientists I am puzzled that we should welcome a savouring
of doubt where scientists say “but there is no doubt”.

Q134  Graham
Stringer: Can you tell us how you came to choose Sir Muir Russell to run
this inquiry?

Professor
Acton: I took counsel from very senior figures, including those in
higher education, about somebody who would have knowledge of university life,
real experience of public life and command enormous respect for their
integrity, preferably whom I had never met. Muir Russell was the top name that
came to mind and I was delighted when he agreed to do it.

Q135  Graham
Stringer: Thank you. Can I go back to Professor Jones? I do not want to
repeat the previous exchange we had but I just would like to be clear in terms
of the answers to the questions from Doug and Evan about the repeatability of
the works you put out. You are saying very clearly that on a lot of the papers
you have put out other scientists, not that they need your working books,
cannot repeat that work when those papers are published because they do not
have the programs and the codes?

Professor
Jones: They have not got the programs or the data.

Q136  Graham
Stringer: So they cannot without that?

Professor
Jones: That is just a fact of life in climate sciences.

Q137  Graham
Stringer: That is very plain. Dr Graham-Cumming has made a number of
points: that it appeared that your organisation, writing the different codes
that it did, did not adhere to the standards one might find in professional
software engineering and that the code had easily identified bugs—he himself
claims to have identified bugs in the programs even after the BBC2
programme—that no visible test method was apparently used and they were poorly
documented. Is that true, is Dr Graham-Cumming right?

Professor
Jones: Those codes are from a much earlier time, they are from the
period about 2000 to 2004. The codes that were stolen were earlier and we have
people working on these at the moment, trying to do some other work, but they
do not relate to the production of the global and hemispheric temperature
series. They are nothing to do with that, they are to do with a different
project.

Q138  Graham
Stringer: Which project are they to do with, so that it is clear to us?

Professor
Jones: They are to do with a project that was funded by the British
Atmospheric Data Centre, which is run by NERC, and that was to produce more
gridded temperature data and precipitation data and other variables. A lot of
that has been released on a Dutch website and also the BADC website.

Q139  Graham
Stringer: Have you now released the actual code used for CRUTEM3?

Professor
Jones: The Met Office have, they have released their version.