Mike’s Nature trick (East Anglia Emails Related)

So far one of the most circulated e-mails from the CRU hack is the following from Phil Jones to the original hockey stick authors - Michael Mann, Raymond Bradley, and Malcolm Hughes.

From: Phil Jones To: ray bradley ,mann@xxxxx.xxx, mhughes@xxxx.xxx Subject: Diagram for WMO Statement Date: Tue, 16 Nov 1999 13:31:15 +0000 Cc: k.briffa@xxx.xx.xx,t.osborn@xxxx.xxx

Dear Ray, Mike and Malcolm, Once Tim’s got a diagram here we’ll send that either later today or first thing tomorrow. I’ve just completed Mike’s Nature trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years (ie from 1981 onwards) amd from 1961 for Keith’s to hide the decline. Mike’s series got the annual land and marine values while the other two got April-Sept for NH land N of 20N. The latter two are real for 1999, while the estimate for 1999 for NH combined is +0.44C wrt 61-90. The Global estimate for 1999 with data through Oct is +0.35C cf. 0.57 for 1998. Thanks for the comments, Ray.

Prof. Phil Jones Climatic Research Unit Telephone +44 (0) xxxxx School of Environmental Sciences Fax +44 (0) xxxx University of East Anglia Norwich Email p.jones@xxxx.xxx NR4 7TJ UK The e-mail is about WMO statement on the status of the global climate in 1999 -report, or more specifically, about its cover image.

Back in December 2004 John Finn asked about "the divergence" in Myth vs. Fact Regarding the "Hockey Stick" -thread of RealClimate.org.

Whatever the reason for the divergence, it would seem to suggest that the practice of grafting the thermometer record onto a proxy temperature record – as I believe was done in the case of the ‘hockey stick’ – is dubious to say the least. mike's response speaks for itself.

No researchers in this field have ever, to our knowledge, "grafted the thermometer record onto" any reconstrution. It is somewhat disappointing to find this specious claim (which we usually find originating from industry-funded climate disinformation websites) appearing in this forum. But there is an interesting twist here: grafting the thermometer onto a reconstruction is not actually the original "Mike's Nature trick"! Mann did not fully graft the thermometer on a reconstruction, but he stopped the smoothed series in their end years. The trick is more sophisticated, and was uncovered by UC over here.

When smoothing these time series, the Team had a problem: actual reconstructions "diverge" from the instrumental series in the last part of 20th century. For instance, in the original hockey stick (ending 1980) the last 30-40 years of data points slightly downwards. In order to smooth those time series one needs to "pad" the series beyond the end time, and no matter what method one uses, this leads to a smoothed graph pointing downwards in the end whereas the smoothed instrumental series is pointing upwards — a divergence. So Mann's solution was to use the instrumental record for padding, which changes the smoothed series to point upwards as clearly seen in UC's figure (violet original, green without "Mike's Nature trick").

TGIF-magazine has already asked Jones about the e-mail, and he denied misleading anyone but did remember grafting.

“No, that’s completely wrong. In the sense that they’re talking about two different things here. They’re talking about the instrumental data which is unaltered – but they’re talking about proxy data going further back in time, a thousand years, and it’s just about how you add on the last few years, because when you get proxy data you sample things like tree rings and ice cores, and they don’t always have the last few years. So one way is to add on the instrumental data for the last few years.” Jones told TGIF he had no idea what me meant by using the words “hide the decline”. “That was an email from ten years ago. Can you remember the exact context of what you wrote ten years ago?” Maybe it helps Dr. Jones's recollection of the exact context, if he inspects UC's figure carefully. We here at CA are more than pleased to be able to help such nice persons in these matters.

There are graphs to illustrate what they are talking about in the article at the link.

I'm at work and can't access the source code.

Folks, it really looks like we have ourselves another Pentagon Papers moment. There too, documents were stolen which helped bring down an administration/political organization.

Beam me to Planet Gore !

Thursday, November 19, 2009

The Blue-Dress Moment May Have Arrived [Chris Horner]

I am not able to fully digest this at present, catching up with the boys from days away and then up at O-Dark-Thirty for a flight to California for a talk, but check out what Anthony Watts among others have posted.

Now, none of us can attest to the validity of what has been posted on a Russian server (nor can we even be sure of how it was obtained, though it purports to be non-classified data held by a purely public agency subject to freedom of information/transparency laws). But I'm told it's almost 61 megabytes of files, and after a few days of scrutiny appears (to the kind of people who would know) to be legitimate. And very revealing, both the data and what are represented to be comments and admissions by leading lights on Team Alarmist.

If legit, this apparently devastating series of revelations will be very hard for the media to ignore. I didn't say impossible — they're fully vested partners in the global warming industry, because catastrophism sells. But so does scandal, and this appears to be the makings of a very big one. Imagine this sort of news coming in the field of AIDS research. Then reflect that the taxpayer spends more on climate-related research than on the entire suite of AIDS programs, far beyond drug research.

11/19 06:00 PM Share

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