The Trick

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edward g This film brought the issue of Climategate to my attention however I thought the explanation of "the trick" and the data "manipulation" was very poor. In the most crucial scene where the BBC had a chance to explain the issue, it failed. I was frustrated by the portrayl of Phil Jones, who seems utterly incapable of expressing himself. The real Phil Jones is more communicative - judging from the YouTube video footage at the House of Commons committee hearing. At the end of the day, all these academics and the BBC failed to present the facts in a clear way, which are that: 1. Phil Jones and his team took climate data from well-known databases that are available to any other scientist. 2. This data had copyright restrictions, meaning that he sometimes needed permission to distribute the data to a third party. However any scientist could go to the same sources and get copies of the data for themselves. 3. Phil Jones and his team analyse and interpret the climate data. That is the sole function of the team. They do not create the data themselves and so anyone else can do the same. 4. The width of a tree ring can indicate the temperature during that season. We say that the tree rings are a "proxy" for the temperature at that time. 5. There is a technique - or "trick" - for combining data from the tree rings with modern data of recorded temperatures. So the word "trick" was misunderstood by the climate sceptics reading the hacked emails. 6. No climate data was changed since the data was not under the control of Phil Jones's team and anyone wanting to check the results of his team's analysis could simply take the same data from the data databases and check it for themselves. 7. Phil Jones's team were inundated with Freedom of Information (FOI) requests from the climate sceptics. These requests should have been handled by a university department instead of the research team itself. 8. Any computer program code used to process the data should have been openly avaliable to scientists together with the published results of the teams analysis and a clear indication of which data sets on which databases were used for the analysis. Science films are not for everyone. They tend to overdo the drama at the expense of the science and the facts. This one does better that most and should be of interest to everyone on the planet. Rated 3.5/5 Stars •  Rated 3.5 out of 5 stars 03/31/23 Full Review isla s This is an interesting story - one I wasn't familiar with. Jason Watkins is a great actor, he plays somewhat recluse type characters really very well and this is no exception, as he plays the main character - Professor Philip Jones. I found the scenes featuring Philip and his wife to be somewhat poignant. However, the real problem with this TV film, shown on the BBC, is that there really wasn't enough in the way of context given, about what had happened in previous years, about Philips past, the research and so on. I felt confused about who certain characters were and quite exactly what was going on. I gather some things are still not known about the scandal, so obviously some things couldn't be explained but it did feel a little like I was watching a TV series mid way through. Its worth seeing for Watkins performance alone is what I'd say but unless your particularly interested in the true story this is based on and you know the basics of it, then I'm not sure I'd outright recommend it as such, no. Rated 3.5/5 Stars •  Rated 3.5 out of 5 stars 03/31/23 Full Review Audience Member The acting is strong and realizing how close we were to losing out on Phil Jones' climate expertise is infuriating. Instead of slogging through intense information, the movie keeps a decent pace and is entertaining as well as informative. Rated 3.5/5 Stars •  Rated 3.5 out of 5 stars 02/05/23 Full Review Audience Member For me this movie was compelling. Mind you, I have been following the climate debate for a long time and was following it during "Climategate", the subject of the movie. I never fully get my head around what Phil Jones did to "hide the decline", despite reading explanations. The movie covers it in a way that turned the lights on. Then there's the impact of climate denialists initiating Climategate to create doubt about climate science, and nearly killing a dedicated and skillful scientist in the process (Phil Jones admits he contemplated suicide). At the end of the movie, Phil Jones' wife refers to an American scientist that deplored the work of Jones and an American climate scientist, Michael Mann. The skeptical scientist was Robert Muller. He received a grant from the Koch brothers (US oil barons) to set up a research organization -- Berkley Earth -- with a mission to prove that Jones and Mann had misinterpreted or manipulated data, or both. But Muller was/is a serious scientist. He soon reported that his fresh look at the climate data returned basically the same results as those published by Jones and Mann. You couldn't write conspiracy fiction better than this stuff! A must-watch for anyone interested in the climate debate, especially young scientists. Rated 5/5 Stars •  Rated 5 out of 5 stars 02/23/23 Full Review Read all reviews

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