Next year will mark 20 years since the publication of the two landmark Jones et al papers that launched the dataset that underpins IPCC Global Warming as we now know it. For over 200 years Earth has been recovering from the Little Ice Age (LIA) and the associated solar minimums so of course warming has taken place. Our position in continuing to draw attention to the appalling deficiencies in the Jones et al methodologies can be expressed simply by in effect saying the following to the IPCC and their cohorts.

If you are proposing huge changes to the world economic system, surely the onus is on you to measure global temperature trends using data that does not include many hundreds of temperature records contaminated by local urban heat islands. That is what this review is about, a stepping stone to generating global temperature trends from land station data much less contaminated by urbanization than the Jones et al IPCC trends.

A great and pervasive mythology has grown up over two decades that the Jones et al papers somehow “adjusted for urbanization”. If anyone can demonstrate this we are open to being told. Certainly Jones et al make many “corrections” for the multitude of, steps, jumps and inhomogeneities that bedevil temperature data due to site moves and various station changes. To confuse this with their data being “adjusted for urbanization” is indeed a gross misapprehension. [Page listing all Southern Hemisphere stations.]

Readers can judge for themselves the veracity of the Jones et al statement on p1216 of Jones et al 1986b, where they state that “… very few stations in our final data set come from large cities.” This glib and lulling statement is detached from the reality that 40% of their ~300 SH stations are cities with population over 50K.

First the two 1986 papers by Jones et al:

Northern Hemisphere Surface Air Temperature Variations: 1851-1984
P.D. Jones, S.C.B. Raper, P.M. Kelly, and T.M.L. Wigley, R.S. Bradley and H.F. Diaz;
Journal of Applied Meteorology: Vol. 25, No. 2, pp. 161-179.

and

Southern Hemisphere Surface Air Temperature Variations: 1851–1984
P.D. Jones, S.C.B. Raper, and T.M.L. Wigley;
Journal of Applied Meteorology: Vol. 25, No. 9, pp. 1213–1230.

[Supporting documentation (~350 page book) published by Office of Energy Research , Carbon Dioxide Research Division, US Department of Energy]

For the first time on the www 23 scanned pages of “Station History and Homogeneity Assessment Details” from the Scandinavian and USSR pages of the lengthy Appendix A have been posted. Interested readers should ask for copies of TR022 and TR027 from here

Jones PD , Raper SCB, Cherry BSG, Goodess CM, Wigley TML, Santer B, Kelly PM, Bradley RS, Diaz HF, (1985) TR022 A Grid Point Surface Air Temperature Data Set for the Northern Hemisphere. Office of Energy Research , Carbon Dioxide Research Division, US Department of Energy. Under Contract No. DE-ACO2-79EV10098

and

Jones PD , Raper SCB, Cherry BSG, Goodess CM, Wigley TML, (1986c) TR027 A Grid Point Surface Air Temperature Data Set for the Southern Hemisphere. Office of Energy Research , Carbon Dioxide Research Division, US Department of Energy. Under Contract No. DE-ACO2-79EV10098

Despite the fact that these were long and complex papers in their own right, backed up by ~350 pages of station documentation for over 4,000 stations and at least a reel of magnetic tape, these papers sailed serenely through the review process each in about three months, without a single “Comment” being published in the Journal of Climate and Applied Meteorology, a publication of the august American Meteorological Society (AMS).

[Abstracts for all issues can be read online]

The N Hem. paper in in the February issue and S Hem. in September. Spend a few minutes checking other papers and you will see that many papers reporting results from vastly simpler and less voluminous research projects than Jones et al were delayed in review often up to a year.