Philip (Phil) Jones British climatologist Country: Great Britain

Biography of Philip "Phil" Douglas Jones

Philip "Phil" Douglas Jones, a British climatologist, was born in 1952 in Surrey, England. He received his bachelor's degree in Environmental Sciences from the University of Lancaster in 1973. He continued his studies at Newcastle University, where he obtained his master's and Ph.D. degrees in the same field in 1976 and 1978, respectively. His doctoral dissertation focused on the development of a spatially distributed watershed model for flood forecasting and river regulation, using the River Tyne as an example.

Jones began his career at the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia in 1976, even before completing his Ph.D. From 1976 to 1994, he conducted research, and later on, he also taught and supervised graduate students. From 1998 to 2004, Jones co-led the CRU with Jean Palutikof, and from 2004 onwards, he became the sole head of the CRU. The CRU not only conducted climate research but also provided reports on climate change to the United Nations and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

In 1998, Jones was appointed as a professor at the School of Environmental Sciences at the University of East Anglia. He also became a member of the Royal Meteorological Society of Britain in 1992 and served as a member of the editorial board of the International Journal of Climatology from 1992 to 1995. Additionally, Jones became a member of the Academia Europaea in 1998, the American Meteorological Society in 2001, and the American Geophysical Union in 2009. He also worked with the World Meteorological Organization.

Throughout his career, Jones published over a hundred scientific articles and authored several books, including "Climate Since A.D. 1500" in collaboration with Ray Bradley in 1992. He was one of the early proponents of creating a distributed temperature database. Jones frequently appeared in the media as an expert on global warming. In 2008, he predicted that it would be one of the warmest years on record, but it turned out to be the coldest in eight years.

One of Jones' notable projects was the monthly publication of summaries on the increase in global surface temperature. These summaries, which showed a significant rise in average global temperature over the past few decades (referred to as the "hockey stick" graph), were regularly updated on the CRU website. Skeptics argued that global warming was a natural process with minimal human influence. However, critics pointed out inconsistencies in the data, leading to debates about the accuracy and manipulation of the data.

In December 2009, after the CRU's server was hacked, and emails and other documents were made public, Jones temporarily stepped down from his position to allow for an investigation into the incident. The leaked emails raised concerns about possible data manipulation by the CRU to support the anthropogenic global warming theory. The incident, known as "Climategate," received significant media attention and led to calls for greater transparency in climate research.

Jones and the CRU defended themselves, claiming that the leaked emails were taken out of context and that there was no widespread manipulation of data. However, the controversy surrounding the incident had a significant impact on the public perception of climate science.

Jones resigned as the head of the CRU in December 2009, pending the outcome of the independent investigation. In a subsequent interview, he acknowledged that the temperature trend since 1995 was not statistically significant but maintained his belief in the anthropogenic nature of global warming.