Climate Audit

In today’s post, I will return to my series on false claims in Mann’s lawsuit about supposed “exonerations”. ( For previous articles, see here).

One of the most important misconduct allegations against Mann – the “amputation” of the Briffa reconstruction in IPCC TAR – was discussed recently by Judy Curry, who, in turn, covered Congressional testimony on the incident by John Christy, who had been a Lead Author of the same IPCC TAR chapter and whose recollections of the incident were both first-hand and vivid.

In one of the major graphics in the IPCC 2001 report, declining values of the Briffa reconstruction were deleted (“amputated” is Christy’s apt term), resulting in the figure giving a much greater rhetorical impression of consistency than really existed. This truncation of data had been known (and severely criticized) at Climate Audit long before Climategate.

However, the incident came into an entirely new light with the release of the Climategate emails, which showed that senior IPCC officials had been concerned that the Briffa reconstruction (with its late 20th century decline) would “dilute the message” and that Mann was equally worried that showing the Briffa reconstruction would give “fodder to the skeptics”.

Christy gave the following damning summary of Mann’s conduct as IPCC TAR Lead Author:

Regarding the Hockey Stick of IPCC 2001 evidence now indicates, in my view, that an IPCC Lead Author working with a small cohort of scientists, misrepresented the temperature record of the past 1000 years by (a) promoting his own result as the best estimate, (b) neglecting studies that contradicted his, and (c) amputating another’s result so as to eliminate conflicting data and limit any serious attempt to expose the real uncertainties of these data.

Christy left out a further fundamental problem in the amputation: there was no disclosure of the amputation in the IPCC 2001 report itself.

The impropriety of deleting adverse data in an IPCC graphic was easily understood in the broader world of brokers, accountants, lawyers and fund managers and one on which there was negligible sympathy for excuses. Not only did this appear to be misconduct as far as the public was concerned, the deletion of adverse data in the IPCC graphic appeared to be an act of “omitting data or results such that the research is not accurately represented in the research record” – one of the definitions (“falsification”) of academic misconduct in the NSF and other academic misconduct codes.

Further, both the Oxburgh and Muir Russell reports concluded that the IPCC 2001 graphic was “misleading”.

However, NONE of the inquiries conducted an investigation of the incident. Each, in turn, ignored or evaded the incident. I’ll examine the evasions in today’s post.

Today’s post will open consideration of the EPA documents referred to in Mann’s pleadings, a topic that is not easily summarized. Today’s discussion of the EPA documents will only be a first bite.

Exposition of the IPCC 2001 Incident
The deletion of adverse data in Mann’s section of the IPCC 2001 report was one of the top two or three Climategate issues at Climate Audit. I wrote the first detailed exposition on December 9, 2009 here. Disentangling the chronology of hiding the decline has been a work in progress: about six months later, I did a far more detailed analysis (see here) and there is further information in CG2 that needs to be incorporated.

My article prompted a prominent story in the Daily Mail – linked from CA here on December 12. The Daily Mail re-drafted the Hide the Decline graphic. Their graphic later became the cover on Andrew Montford’s second book, and was used (incorrectly attributed) in CEI’s petition for reconsideration (see below).

Oxburgh
As noted previously, the Oxburgh panel was not asked to examine Mann’s conduct, but to examine a list of eleven academic publications by CRU scientists. Oxburgh noted in passing that it was “regrettable” that IPCC “neglected to highlight” the discrepancy between the Briffa reconstruction and actual temperatures, but found “no fault” with the underlying publications by CRU authors:

For example, CRU publications repeatedly emphasize the discrepancy between instrumental and tree-based proxy reconstructions of temperature during the late 20th century, but presentations of this work by the IPCC and others have sometimes neglected to highlight this issue. While we find this regrettable, we could find no such fault with the peer-reviewed papers we examined.

I do not share Oxburgh’s opinion that there was no “fault” in the academic papers, but do agree that the larger fault was in the IPCC presentation. Nor do I agree that Oxburgh’s phrase “neglect to highlight” adequately describes the actual amputation of data. But even with these objections, Oxburgh took issue with the IPCC TAR graphic.

However, Oxburgh did not go beyond the finding that the IPCC neglect was “regrettable”. His failure to investigate the IPCC incident was sharply criticized by me and others at the time, but to no avail.

Muir Russell
The Oxburgh report came out in early April 2010 several months before the Muir Russell panel. Like the Oxburgh panel, the Muir Russell panel made passim comments about the IPCC 2001 graphic but did not investigate its construction. The Muir Russel panel also distinguished between the IPCC 2001 graphic (which it found “misleading”) and the IPCC AR4 graphic (a “significant improvement”).

Here are Muir Russell’s comments on the IPCC 2001 incident (of which Mann was Lead Author), which they somewhat conflated with the WMO 1999 incident of the “trick” email:

In relation to “hide the decline” we find that, given its subsequent iconic significance (not least the use of a similar figure in the TAR), the figure supplied for the WMO Report was misleading in not describing that one of the series was truncated post 1960 for the figure, and in not being clear on the fact that proxy and instrumental data were spliced together. We do not find that it is misleading to curtail reconstructions at some point per se, or to splice data, but we believe that both of these procedures should have been made plain – ideally in the figure but certainly clearly described in either the caption or the text.

Muir Russell found that the disclosure in AR4 (Briffa – Lead Author) was a “significant advance” over Mann’s and that the description and presentation was no longer misleading:

We do not find that the way that data derived from tree rings is described and presented in IPCC AR4 and shown in its Figure 6.10 is misleading. In particular, on the question of the composition of temperature reconstructions, we found no evidence of exclusion of other published temperature reconstructions that would show a very different picture. The general discussion of sources of uncertainty in the text is extensive, including reference to divergence. In this respect it represented a significant advance on the IPCC Third Assessment Report (TAR).

While I agree that Briffa’s covering text in AR4 was less misleading than Mann’s corresponding section in AR3, I do not agree that the graphic had ceased to be misleading: it continued to truncate the Briffa reconstruction, thereby disguising the actual divergence by the Briffa reconstruction.

Ironically, the improved AR4 disclosure protecting Briffa had been inserted very grudgingly in response to my review comments as an IPCC AR4 Second Draft reviewer. I had asked Briffa (Mann’s successor as Lead Author) to show the decline in the IPCC spaghetti graph and explain the divergence. Briffa refused to show the decline (merely saying that this would not be “appropriate” – this led to David Holland’s FOI request and CRU’s email destruction program, another long backstory – but grudgingly agreed to add text disclosing the truncation and discussing the divergence problem. Although IPCC lead authors sneered at being asked to provide proper disclosure, they were happy enough to fall back on this disclosure as protection.

Again, watching carefully, while the Muir Russell panel was satisfied with the disclosure in AR4 (under Briffa’s supervision), it found the AR3 disclosure (under Mann’s supervision) to have been “misleading”.

Muir Russell in the Pleadings

Muir Russell’s cursory discussion of the “decline” was referred to in the original National Review memorandum (Dec 14, 2012) and Mann’s response in January 2013. Both memoranda have important defects.

National Review’s lawyers, after correctly and acutely observing that the Muir Russell report did not “offer any opinion on Mann”, noted that Muir Russell had described Jones’ WMO 1999 diagram as “misleading”, but inexplicably omitting any mention of the “similar” (in respect to truncation) diagram in Mann’s section of IPCC TAR:

Nor did it [Muir Russell] offer any opinion on Mann, who was not a part of CRU, but merely a collaborator with some of its scientists … It found that Jones’ use of the phrase “hide the decline” – a reference to the scientists’ presentation of instrumental data spliced with tree ring proxy data to deemphasize declining proxy temperature data after 1960 – demonstrated the “misleading” nature of the Hockey Stick Graph as portrayed on the cover of the 1999 WMO Report (page 8).

Mann’s lawyers pounced on this oversight and, with entirely unjustified self-righteousness, accused National Review of trying to “obfuscate the evidence”, asserting (incorrectly) that Muir Russell’s comment about “misleading” had “absolutely nothing to do with Dr. Mann, or with any graph prepared by him”:

In their brief, the NRO Defendants suggest that the University of East Anglia’s investigation actually found that the hockey stick graph was “misleading.” See NRO Mem. at 9, 35; . This allegation is yet another example of Defendants’ attempts to obfuscate the evidence in this case. The “misleading” comment made in this report had absolutely nothing to do with Dr. Mann, or with any graph prepared by him. Rather, the report’s comment was directed at an overly simplified and artistic depiction of the hockey stick that was reproduced on the frontispiece of the World Meteorological Organization’s Statement on the Status of the Global Climate in 1999.39 Dr. Mann did not create this depiction, and the attempt to suggest that this report suggested an effort by Dr. Mann to mislead is disingenuous.

Once again, Mann’s claim was untrue. The Muir Russell report had used the term “misleading” to describe both the WMO 1999 diagram (prepared by Jones) and the IPCC TAR diagram (of which Mann was Lead Author). So it was simply false to claim that the Muir Russell finding had “absolutely nothing to do with Dr Mann or with any graph prepared by him”. (As an aside, while Mann was not ultimately responsible for the WMO 1999 figure, Jones had sent it to Mann for comment/peer review prior to use and Mann had not taken exception to it. Indeed, when CRU later made T-shirts using the WMO diagram, Mann requested a T-shirt – presumably [self-snip].)

Parliamentary Committee, DECC, NOAA OIG
The UK SciTech Committee touched on the “trick” email, but did not mention the IPCC TAR diagram, which was not mentioned by the UK DECC or NOAA Inspector General either.

None of these five (previously reviewed) inquiries “exonerated” Mann in respect to the IPCC 2001 incident. In fact, none of them even investigated the incident, let alone made any attempt to apportion responsibility between Mann and Briffa for the amputation of the Briffa reconstruction.

Penn State Inquiry Committee
Nor did the report of the Penn State Inquiry Committee contain any reference to the IPCC 2001 incident. Their closest approach to the incident is contained in their following finding that there was “no credible evidence that he[Mann] ever did so [falsified], and certainly not while at Penn State” (this latter qualification perhaps being relevant since the IPCC 2001 preceded Mann’s appointment to Penn State):

After careful consideration of all the evidence and relevant materials, the inquiry committee finding is that there exists no credible evidence that Dr. Mann had or has ever engaged in, or participated in, directly or indirectly, any actions with an intent to suppress or to falsify data. While a perception has been created in the weeks after the CRU emails were made public that Dr. Mann has engaged in the suppression or falsification of data, there is no credible evidence that he ever did so, and certainly not while at Penn State. In fact to the contrary, in instances that have been focused upon by some as indicating falsification of data, for example in the use of a “trick” to manipulate the data, this is explained as a discussion among Dr. Jones and others including Dr. Mann about how best to put together a graph for a World Meteorological Organization (WMO) report. They were not falsifying data; they were trying to construct an understandable graph for those who were not experts in the field. The so-called “trick”1 was nothing more than a statistical method used to bring two or more different kinds of data sets together in a legitimate fashion by a technique that has been reviewed by a broad array of peers in the field.

The “amputation” of data in the IPCC 2001 diagram was near contemporary to the “trick” email incident, but was a different incident, using a different technique and with different lead responsibility. It was ludicrous to claim that the “amputation” of data in the IPCC 2001 diagram was “a statistical method used to bring two or more different kinds of data sets together in a legitimate fashion by a technique that has been reviewed by a broad array of peers in the field”: it wasn’t. Indeed, Christy’s Congressional testimony shows that even Mann’s IPCC TAR coauthors were unaware that he had amputated the inconvenient Briffa data.

Moreover, even the Muir Russell and Oxburgh panels agreed that the truncation of data in the WMO 1999 and IPCC 2001 graphics was “misleading”. “Omitting data or results such that the research is not accurately represented in the research record” is the definition of
falsification.

Further, the circumstances of the WMO 1999 and IPCC 2001 graphics were different: a point that Mann himself made vigorously, if not entirely accurately, in his pleadings. The term “trick” was only applied to by Jones to his construction of the WMO 1999 graphic and exegesis of various meanings of the term is irrelevant to whether the IPCC 2001 graphic was misleading. (ALthough I note in passing that the IPCC 2001 graphic does appear to have used “Mike’s Nature trick” (in the sense defined at CA) in its rendering of the Briffa reconstruction from the First Order Draft (October 1999 – right after the email exchanges) on.

The IPCC 2001 incident ought to have been investigated by Penn State. However, the Penn State Inquiry Committee did not take evidence from Mann’s critics, instead only taking evidence from Mann supporters, at least one of whom (Gerald North) had refused to read the emails out of “professional courtesy”. The Penn State procedure deserved all the derision that it received. (Subsequently one of the members of the Inquiry Committee contacted me and explained that the Inquiry Committee’s failure to contact me was intentional and not accidental: he said that Easterling (said to have “recused” himself) had not done so and had intervened to prevent me being contacted.)

Without a direction from the Inquiry Committee, the Penn State Investigation Committee did not investigate the IPCC 2001 incident (or any of the other incidents that were of primary incident). The Investigation Committee recorded Dick Lindzen’s astonishment on this point.

The EPA Documents
Although the IPCC 2001 incident was not even mentioned in the Penn State reports, it was mentioned in the EPA documents cited in Mann’s pleadings. These documents did not originate in an investigation of academic misconduct by Mann or others, but in connection with the longstanding EPA regulatory proceedings leading up to and following from Massachusetts v EPA, and, in particular, in connection with EPA’s denial of various petitions to reconsider its GHG Endangerment Finding, a topic in which EPA was hardly a disinterested party. The backstory of these proceedings is itself very interesting, but, for the most part, well outside the scope of today’s post (the parties are once again gone to the U.S. Supreme Court in connection with EPA’s “tailoring rule” in Utility Air v EPA).

The salient point in the discussion below is that EPA appears to have been aware of Hockey Stick controversies and had wisely taken care to cover itself with caveats. It was therefore able to avoid taking any position on allegations concerning Mann’s IPCC 2001 diagram, which, for its purposes, was moot. But from the perspective of Mann’s pleadings, the EPA documents provide no “investigation” or “exoneration” of the amputation of data in the IPCC 2001 report.

The Endangerment Finding – Draft and Final
In April 2009, when the EPA, as one of the first acts of the new administration, issued a proposed Endangerment Finding and Technical Support Document.

It took (what appears to be) considerable care to avoid getting embroiled in the Hockey Stick controversy. It primarily relied on the relatively nuanced statements of the 2006 NAS Panel (rather than IPCC TAR or even AR4). For example, it quoted the NAS Panel as follows:

Very little confidence can be assigned to statements concerning the hemispheric mean or global mean surface temperature prior to about A.D. 900 because of sparse data coverage and because the uncertainties associated with proxy data and the methods used to analyze and combine them are larger than during more recent time periods.

It showed the spaghetti graph from the 2006 NAS Panel report, a graph that conspicuously did not include any of the three reconstructions used by Mann in IPCC TAR (Mann et al 1999; Jones et al 1998 or the truncated Briffa et al 2001). Their omission of the Briffa reconstruction is worth noting: in response to Folland’s original concern about “diluting the message”, Mann had originally suggested that the Briffa reconstruction simply be excluded from the spaghetti graph. Intentionally or unintentionally, this is what the NAS panel did as well.

Figure 1. EPA Draft Technical Support Document Figure 4.3 (from 2006 NAS Panel).

The final TSD contained only the following brief reference to IPCC AR4 also emphasizing uncertainty prior to AD1600 (the sentence on uncertainty was added in the final draft):

Considering this study and additional research, the IPCC (2007d) concluded: “Paleoclimatic information supports the interpretation that the warmth of the last half century is unusual in at least the previous 1,300 years. However, like NRC (2006b), IPCC cautions that uncertainty is significant prior to 1600 (Jansen et al., 2007)

The final Endangerment Finding was issued on December 7, 2009, a few weeks after Climategate. There had been a 60-day public comment period (closed on June 24, 2009) following the Draft Endangerment Finding. The final Endangerment Finding was accompanied by the EPA’s synthesis of public comments together with agency responses.

These documents attracted virtually no attention at climate blogs, which were then preoccupied with Climategate itself. However, these documents were an important stage in the convoluted U.S. regulatory process.

The next step in the U.S. regulatory process was for opponents of the EPA procedure to petition the EPA to reconsider their Endangerment Finding. Organizations opposing the Endangerment Finding had a short window (60 days, I think) for response. During that window, 10 petitions requesting reconsideration of the Endangerment Finding were submitted to EPA (see here for the 10 petitions).

The petitioners included the State of Texas, the State of Virginia and a variety of other opposing parties, including a joint petition submitted by CEI (jointly with the Science and Environmental Policy Project and the NIPCC). (Although Mann’s pleadings portrayed CEI as instrumental in instigating the Petitions for Reconsideration, it was one of the smaller players among the petitioners: for example, the State of Texas, not CEI, led argument in court proceedings.

The then just-released Climategate documents featured very strongly in all the petitions, though most of the petitions, in my opinion, did not do an effective job of connecting the emails to potential causes of reconsideration. In retrospect, there was a surprising amount of over-emphasis on the temperature record – an issue scarcely mentioned in the emails themselves, a point frequently made at Climate Audit, but mostly falling on deaf ears.

During the short time window in which reconsideration petitions could be submitted, the Climategate emails were still very recent and there were misunderstandings of the import of emails on both sides of the aisle, particularly in the widespread misunderstanding that the emails pertained to CRU temperature data, as opposed to the Hockey Stick and its treatment by IPCC.

Questions about temperature data are prevalent in the petitions. Many of the petitioners incorrectly thought that the Harry Readme pertained to the widely used CRUTEM record, whereas it pertained to the little-used CRUTS dataset. The comments about “highly artificial adjustments” in computer programs was similarly thought by some petitioners to pertain to CRU temperature data, whereas it was connected to the “Briffa bodge” (a CRU technique used prior to the later artifice of hide-the-decline). I will not attempt to further summarize or characterize the scope of the petitions, though it is an interesting topic.

The CEI Petition
On February 12, 2010, CEI, jointly with the Science and Enviromental Policy Project and the NIPCC, filed a Petition to Reconsider. Much of the petition was devoted to challenging the temperature record. They also cited a number of current stories about questionable IPCC assertions based on NGO reports e.g. Himalaya glaciers, Amazon rainforests, African agriculture.

The first bullet of Paragraph IV(A) of their petition raised the truncation of the Briffa reconstruction as follows:

At the October 2009 annual meeting of the Geological Society of America, Professor Don Easterbrook demonstrated how tree ring data from Russia, which show a cooling after 1961, were artfully truncated in graphs presented in IPCC publications. (See attachment at p 12.) This truncation gave the false impression that the tree ring data agree with reported late 20th century surface temperature data, when in fact they did not. This artful deceit, now exposed, indicates that the IPCC Assessment Report 4 (AR4) is scientifically questionable. The CRU emails leaked in November confirmed that this deception was deliberate. …

While CEI was 100% correct in its key claim that “truncation gave the false impression that the tree ring data agree with reported late 20th century surface temperature data, when in fact they did not”, their submission included several pointless errors: the diagram in the CEI petition did not originate with Don Easterbrook in October 2009, but post-Climategate from Daily Mail in December 2009. Worse, the diagram did not come from AR4, but from AR3. The description of the AR4 diagram had been grudgingly coopered up by Briffa, largely in response to my review comments, a point later used by EPA against CEI.

The EPA Denial Documents
In late July 2010, EPA issued a decision denying the petitions for reconsideration. Although there was then intense interest in Climategate inquiries, no one at the time seems to have noticed EPA’s discussion of Climategate or to have considered that EPA’s discussion of Climategate constituted an “investigation” of academic misconduct. Its first such mention did not occur until about six months later when SKS, as part of their campaign to “re-frame” Climategate, added it to their list of supposed “exonerations”.

The decision document was accompanied by a webpage that does not appear to have been subject to the same review processes as the formal documents. More on this in another post.

The IPCC Incident in the RTP Documents
The decision document was accompanied by three volumes of supporting documents (Response to Petitions – RTP) (see links here), in which EPA presented responses to comments synthesized from the various petitions, to which EPA presented responses.

The first volume of the RTP was mostly on temperature data controversies; the second volume was on controversies over IPCC errors and IPCC non-objectivity, while the third volume was mostly about interference with peer review and non-objectivity of US GRCP assessment literature. Less than 10% of the RTP dealt with the paleoclimate issues that actually dominate the Climategate emails.

The EPA did not provide the names of the authors and contributors to the the Response to Petitions or any information on procedures for the development and review of the document. It would be interesting to know the names of contributors and reviewers to the report. Were there outside contributors or reviewers, such as, perhaps, Gavin Schmidt, who had been a peer reviewer of the Technical Support Document for the Endangerment Finding itself?

The Response to Petitions also contains extended commentary on Climategate emails, though, from my perspective, the EPA made no or negligible effort to probe the actual meaning of the emails (e.g. its desultory or non-existent analysis of the “dirty laundry”, “dilute the message” and “fodder to the skeptics” emails or its bizarre citation of the contaminated Mann et al 2008 nondendro reconstruction as a supposed rebuttal of divergence issues).

The IPCC incident was discussed in RTP Comment 1-5, which cited the CEI complaint as follows:

Comment (1-5): The Competitive Enterprise Institute refers to a presentation by Don Easterbrook at the Geological Society of America (Easterbrook, 2009), stating Professor Easterbrook “demonstrated how tree ring data from Russia, which show a cooling after 1961, were artfully truncated in graphs presented in IPCC publications.” The petitioner claims “This truncation gave the false impression that the tree ring data agree with reported late 20th Century surface temperature data, when in fact they did not. This artful deceit, now exposed, indicates that the IPCC Assessment Report 4 (AR4) is scientifically questionable. The CRU e-mails leaked in November confirmed that this deception was deliberate.”

The EPA dismissed this comment as follows:

Response (1-5): EPA has reviewed the petitioner’s information and has determined that the graph provided by the petitioner from Professor Easterbrook’s talk is not from the AR4, but rather from the Third Assessment Report, which was published in 2001 and is no longer the most recent IPCC assessment report. In the AR4, the latest data on this issue was assessed and depicted in Figure 6.10. In this figure, three out of the 12 reconstructions terminate in 1960 (as noted in Table 6.1 in the same chapter), because the reconstructions in the underlying papers also terminate in 1960. Six of the 12 reconstructions extend to 1990 or later, again based on the time period covered by the relevant dataset.

EPA’s TSD actually uses a figure from the NRC (2006), which shows six reconstructions, one of which terminates in 1960. Because these assessment reports are showing the entirety of the data represented in the underlying literature, there is no evidence of any “artful deceit,” nor is this evidence that the AR4 is “scientifically questionable.”

As always, one has to watch exactly what is and isn’t being said.

Whereas CEI had pointed (albeit with incorrect identification) to the IPCC 2001 diagram (under Mann’s lead authorship) as an example of “artful deceit”, EPA’s response considered the diagrams in the NAS 2006 report and IPCC AR4, stating that these diagrams showed “no evidence of any “artful deceit.”

Because EPA had relied on NAS 2006 and IPCC AR4 in their Endangerment Finding, they were entitled to assess the diagrams that they had actually used. But nothing in this paragraph constitutes an “investigation” or “exoneration” of Mann’s truncation of the Briffa reconstruction in the IPCC 2001 report.

From EPA’s point of view, the caveats about the reconstructions in the Endangerment Finding protected against allegations of misrepresentation in the IPCC 2001 diagram. Further, they relied on IPCC AR4 (which as noted above, improved disclosure) and on the NAS 2006 report. Because of this, EPA was able to avoid examining alleged misconduct in connection with the IPCC 2001 report. (CEI’s erroneous attribution of the diagram to the wrong report was a fortuitous aid in this respect.)

In passing, I don’t agree with other aspects of the EPA analysis though this disagreement is not directly relevant to the point that they did not “investigate” or “exonerate” Mann’s conduct on this point. EPA observed that “three out of the 12 reconstructions [in AR4] terminate in 1960 (as noted in Table 6.1 in the same chapter), because the reconstructions in the underlying papers also terminate in 1960.”

However, this is either not entirely true or already tainted by IPCC considerations. The original Briffa papers on divergence also showed reconstructions into the 1990s, complete with decline. Indeed, the Oxburgh panel relied on this in their conclusion that the divergence had been properly disclosed in the underlying papers. The problem is that there is an all too typical Briffa inconsistency in the underlying papers: in one graphic, the reconstruction is not truncated (and shows) the divergence, while, in the spaghetti graph of Briffa et al 2001, the Briffa reconstruction was quietly truncated.

Even more problematically – and this goes right back to the 1999 Climategate correspondence – the IPCC assessment had ceased to be independent of the underlying literature. At the time (fall 1999) when Mann, Jones, Briffa, Folland and Karl were discussing their worries that they might “dilute the message” or “give fodder to the skeptics”, the version of the Briffa reconstruction subsequently used in AR4 (and AR3) had not been published and, in the version sent to Mann in early October 1999, had not been truncated. The first truncation of the Briffa reconstruction in IPCC documents was in the AR3 First Order Draft (late October 1999). This truncated a version of the Briffa reconstruction that was not truncated in its archive (in connection with Jones et al 1998).

[I’m going to add some discussion of how this incident is discussed in the pleadings. As noted in the comments, I pressed “Publish” before I had finished the post – stay tuned. ]