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Q&A: Professor Phil Jones, BBC News
History may see the interview of CRU’s Professor Phil Jones by the BBC’s Roger Harrabin on 12 February 2010 as the opening of the end-phase of the long-running “alarmists versus sceptics” debate.
The gap between these two schools has never yawned as widely as media reports often suggest. Both agree that climate is always changing, that we have recently been in a warming period (with tiny temperature changes), that “greenhouse theory” has some validity, and that human activities are capable of impacting climate. The core dispute lies in the detection and attribution of ‘anthropogenic global warming’ (AGW), and is brought out in the following exchange:
Harrabin – How confident are you that warming has taken place and that humans are mainly responsible?
Jones - I’m 100% confident that the climate has warmed. As to the second question, I would go along with IPCC Chapter 9 – there’s evidence that most of the warming since the 1950s is due to human activity.
Sceptics say any human causation was trivial. This dispute was addressed directly:
Harrabin - what factors convince you that recent warming has been largely man-made?
Jones - The fact that we can’t explain the warming from the 1950s by solar and volcanic forcing.