Free market think tank director John Roskam is the latest Australian commentator to be caught out distorting a climatologist’s quotes to support his argument against global warming.

On Monday night’s Q&A program on the ABC, Roskam, executive director of the Institute of Public Affairs, confidently asserted that climatologist Phil Jones, a key academic in the climate-gate affair, had conceded that “the world hasn’t warmed since 1995”.

roskam

Roskam’s claim — which went uncorrected by host Tony Jones or his fellow panelists — follows last week’s revelation that News Limited columnist Piers Akerman had used a fictitious quote to accuse former IPCC chairman John Houghton of climate change alarmism.

If you missed Q&A on Monday, here is how the exchange unfolded:

JOHN ROSKAM: Kevin Rudd is running a million miles away from the ETS. You had, the other day, one of the leading climate change scientists in the world say the world hasn’t warmed since 1995.

(GROANS FROM AUDIENCE AND PANEL MEMBERS)

JOHN ROSKAM: Now, we can run, and Malcolm you can sigh, Mungo you can sigh, those are not my words. The point is whether…

MUNGO MACCALLUM: Whose words are they?

JOHN ROSKAM: They’re Philip Jones, the head of the Climate Research University, the basis of climategate, so whether you believe in climate change or not, undeniably the public is losing faith in the debate.

But has Jones ever really made such a statement? When asked in a February 13 interview with the BBC whether there has been no statistically-significant global warming since 1995, Jones responded:

“Yes, but only just. I also calculated the trend for the period 1995 to 2009. This trend (0.12C per decade) is positive, but not significant at the 95% significance level. The positive trend is quite close to the significance level. Achieving statistical significance in scientific terms is much more likely for longer periods, and much less likely for shorter periods.”

Thus, Phil Jones did not say there had been no global warming since 1995; in fact, he said the opposite. Global temperature records show there has been warming since 1995, he says, but it is difficult to establish the statistical significance of that warming given the short nature of the time involved. The warming trend consequently doesn’t quite achieve statistical significance.

In the interview Jones does say global warming since 1975 is statistically significant. Yet Jones’s statement was seized upon by the UK tabloid The Daily Mail as a “u-turn” and spread like wildfire through the blogosphere, with scepticallly-inclined bloggers using it as evidence to show scientific support for the global warming hypothesis is crumbling.

John Roskam told Crikey he had not taken Dr Jones’s words out of context.

“Global warming believers would prefer that Phil Jones didn’t say that, but he did,” he said. “I absolutely stand by my comment in the context of the show. This comment from Phil Jones has international significance.”

Roskam says he would like to have added that Jones said there has been no “statistically significant” warming, but was interrupted before he had a chance.

“I’m not a scientist but I’m happy to call myself a sceptic,” Roskam said. “I let people draw their own conclusions about the global warming hypothesis.”

Roskam told Crikey that Christopher Monckton’s statements have been repeatedly distorted and taken out of context by ABC reporters during his recent visit to Australia.

Matthew England, IPCC author and joint director of the UNSW Climate Change Research Centre, says the scientific evidence is unambiguous: the world has warmed since 1995.

“It’s untrue to say there has been no warming since 1995. In the period 1995 to 2008 or 1995 to 2009, there is evidence of warming no matter how you look at the data.”

England says the stress Jones has been under since the leaking of the now infamous climate-gate emails may explain his convoluted answer to the BBC. (Watch Crikey‘s interview with Matthew England at the Copenhagen climate change summit here).

According to the Copenhagen Diagnosis, a summary of peer-reviewed research papers that have been published since the IPCC’s last assessment report:

“Over the past 25 years temperatures have increased at a rate of 0.190C per decade… Even over the past 10 years, despite a decrease in solar forcing, the trend continues to be one of warming. Natural, short-term fluctuations are occurring as usual but there have been no significant changes in the underlying warming trend.”

John Connor, CEO of the Climate Institute think tank, says Roskam “should have checked his facts before weighing into the debate”.

“The great irony in the current debate about the science of climate change is that the deniers are attempting to take the moral high ground by pointing to supposed errors, uncertainties and cover-ups in the science, but are themselves resorting to dishonest tactics,” he said.

“A healthy dose of scepticism is good for science and good for public policy, but the combination of denial and dishonesty is a dangerous medicine.”