The United Kingdom’s Daily Mail reported Sunday that the scientist at the center of the controversy over fraudulent scientific assertions which serve as the basis for United Nation reports and the Obama Administration’s economy killing energy program has admitted that he has trouble “keeping track” of information and that his record keeping is “not as good as it should be.”

Professor Phil Jones, whose data is crucial to the theory of climate change, is refusing Freedom of Information requests to produce the data.  Colleagues say the reason is that the Professor may have actually lost the relevant papers. 

Sunday on the BBC Jones said there was truth to the observations of colleagues that he lacked organizational skills.  He conceded the possibility that the world was warmer in medieval times than now and suggested global warming may not be a man-made phenomenon.  Jones said that for the past 15 years there has been no ‘statistically significant’ warming.

Jones has been in the spotlight since he stepped down as director of the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit after the exposure of emails openly discussing the manipulation of data.  That raw data, collected from hundreds of weather stations around the world and analyzed by his unit, was used for years to bolster efforts by the United Nation’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change to press governments to cut carbon dioxide emissions.

Professor Jones stands accused of ‘scientific fraud’ for deliberately suppressing information and refusing to share vital data with critics.  But he denied he had cheated or unfairly influenced the scientific process, and said he still believed recent temperature rises were predominantly man-made.  Asked about whether he lost track of data, Jones said: “There is some truth in that. We do have a trail of where the weather stations have come from but it’s probably not as good as it should be.”

Professor Jones agreed that there had been two historical periods which experienced similar warming, from 1910 to 1940 and from 1975 to 1998, but he said these could be explained by natural phenomena whereas more recent warming could not.

Skeptics believe there is strong evidence that the world was warmer between about 800 and 1300 AD than now because of evidence of high temperatures in northern countries.  But climate change advocates have dismissed this as false or only applying to the northern part of the world.  Professor Jones departed from this consensus when he said: ‘There is much debate over whether the Medieval Warm Period was global in extent or not. The MWP is most clearly expressed in parts of North America, the North Atlantic and Europe and parts of Asia.

But Dr Benny Pieser, director of the Global Warming Policy Foundation, said Professor Jones ‘excuses’ for his failure to share data were as hollow as he had shared with colleagues and ‘mates’ [by e-mail].  He said that until all the data was released, skeptics could not test it to see if it supported the conclusions claimed by climate change advocates and added that the professor’s concessions over medieval warming were ‘significant’ because they were his first public admission that the science was not settled.

The Obama Administration and Congressional Democrats continue to fight for an energy policy they call “Cap and Trade” (or Restrict and Tax by critics) which would cost anyone who owns a light switch or rents one in America.  At a time of increasing concern over national financial stability, critics believe such a program would have devastatingly harmful effects both directly and in secondary costs to American consumers. 

Supporters also believe Al Gore invented the Internet and that he is not profiteering from climate change claims now suspected to be false.

To read the Daily Mail report, click here..