Daily Mail has detailed coverage on “hide the decline”.
From an email from Mann to Ammann, Rahmstorf, Briffa, Osborn and Jones on Aug 12, 2005:
Meanwhile, lets enjoy the media fiesta on …
Needless to say, the media fiesta was not at the expense of a Team member. Go here and in chain here .
Interesting online debate at MIT featuring Lindzen, Emanuel and others.
Emanuel foams about the supposed “premeditated and orchestrated distraction from important issues.” He and Andrew Lloyd Weaver need to compare notes about the shadowy KGB-fossil fuel interest-Macavity the Cat network, ground zero at the University of Victoria where the most recent outrage was the theft of a laptop from the anthropology lab.
Trevor Davies, University of East Anglia pro-vice chancellor with responsibiltiy for research and enterprise, recently condemned the use of “stolen” emails on behalf of the University of East Anglia e.g. here.
In email 0925823304.txt on May 4, 1999, Trevor Davies wrote to Phil Jones, Keith Briffa, Mike Hulme, Jean Palutikoff and Mick Kelly (who are referred to as the “CRU5” in the email) saying that he is in posession of a “leaked document” regarding funding from the research council, which he needs to keep secret to avoid “compromising the source”. On this earlier occasion, Davies didn’t appear to have any pangs of conscience about using leaked documents nor to have reported the source of the leaked document to local police. Davies:
I now have a leaked document which spells out some of the research councils’ thinking. I will get a copy over to CRU today. Please keep this document within the CRU5, since it may compromise the source. NERC and EPSRC are signed up. ESRC are not yet. Given the EPSRC stake, it will certainly be be useful to get RAL etc involved. The funding might be 2million per year. That might imply that the Councils favour multi-site, clusters, etc, but they stress they have no preconceptions.
The full letter is here.
Much recent attention has been paid to the email about the “trick” and the effort to “hide the decline”. Climate scientists have complained that this email has been taken “out of context”. In this case, I’m not sure that it’s in their interests that this email be placed in context because the context leads right back to a meeting of IPCC authors in Tanzania, raising serious questions about the role of IPCC itself in “hiding the decline” in the Briffa reconstruction.
Relevant Climategate correspondence in the period (September-October 1999) leading up to the trick email is incomplete, but, in context, is highly revealing. There was a meeting of IPCC lead authors between Sept 1-3, 1999 to consider the “zero-order draft” of the Third Assessment Report. The emails provide clear evidence that IPCC had already decided to include a proxy diagram reconstructing temperature for the past 1000 years and that a version of the proxy diagram was presented at the Tanzania meeting showing the late twentieth century decline. I now have a copy of the proxy diagram presented at this meeting (see below).
The emails show that the late 20th century decline in the Briffa reconstruction was perceived by IPCC as “diluting the message”, that “everyone in the room at IPCC” thought that the Briffa decline was a “problem” and a “potential distraction/detraction”, that this was then the “most important issue” in chapter 2 of the IPCC report and that there was “pressure” on Briffa and other authors to show a “nice tidy story” of “unprecedented warming in a thousand years or more”. [Update Dec 11 – see note at bottom on the chronology. Comments from readers have clarified that the issue at the Arusha meeting was that the Briffa reconstruction “diluted the message” more through its overall inconsistency as opposed to the decline, which was still relatively attenuated in the Arusha version. After the Arusha meeting, Briffa hastily re-calculated his reconstruction sending a new version to Mann on Oct 5, 1999 and it was this hastily re-done version that introduced the very severe decline that was hidden in the First Order Draft and Jones WMO Report]
The chronology in today’s posts show that the version of the Briffa reconstruction shown in the subsequent proxy diagram in the IPCC “First Order Draft” (October 27, 1999), presumably prepared under the direction of IPCC section author Mann, deleted the inconvenient portion (post-1960) of the Briffa reconstruction, together with other modifications that had the effect of not “diluting the message”.
About two weeks later (Nov 16, 1999) came the now infamous Jones email reporting the use of “Mike’s Nature trick” to “hide the decline” in a forthcoming WMO (World Meteorological Organization) report. Jones’ methodology is different than the IPCC methodology. Jones’ trick has been described in previous posts.
Today, I’ll describe both the context of the IPCC version of the “trick” and progress to date in reverse engineering the IPCC trick.
Continue reading →
Increasingly nervous about progress at Copenhagen, the KGB-fossil fuel network have intensified their pressure on Andrew Weaver of the University of Victoria and climate modelers throughout the world. The most recent outrage was a laptop theft from an anthropology lab at the university. Breaking news from our correspondent at the University of Victoria, ground zero for KGB activity:
my colleague just called me at home to say that one of the anthropology offices and two labs had been broken into (locks jimmied) and that MY laptop is gone! Conspiracy!
Our correspondent reports that Andrew Ll. Weaver was immediately on the case, but once again, when he arrived on the scene:
Macavity’s not there.
Can the Russian secret service-fossil fuel interests go any lower than this latest outrage? Copenhagen waits with bated breath.
One of the most persuasive images in the global warming debate is a graph that Al Gore describes in his An Inconvenient Truth as “Dr. Thompson’s thermometer.” According to Gore, this graph is based on oxygen isotope ratios from ice cores collected by Lonnie Thompson and his colleagues, and provides “the most definitive” independent confirmation of the Mann, Bradley and Hughes Hockey Stick curve:
[T]he so-called global-warming skeptics often say that global warming is really an illusion reflecting nature’s cyclical fluctuations. To support their view, they frequently refer to the Medieval Warm Period.
But as Dr. Thompson’s thermometer shows, the vaunted Medieval Warm Period (the third little red blip from the left, below) was tiny compared to the enormous increases in temperature of the last half century (the red peaks at the far right of the chart).
As it happens, the graph that Gore presented really was the MBH HS, spliced together with an instrumental record as if they were a single series, and has nothing to do with Thompson’s ice core research. See “Al Gore and ‘Dr. Thompson’s Thermometer”. Continue reading →
Andrew Weaver, a modeler with the University of Victoria General Circulation Modeling Unit, has attracted considerable attention with his allegations that computer thefts at the University of Victoria were smoking gun proof of teleconnections between American fossil fuel interests, Russian secret agents and Climategate.
Andrew Ll. Weaver, a modeler with the University of Victoria General Crime Modeling Unit (no relation to Andrew Weaver, the General Circulation Modeler), today announced that the identity of the Climategate mastermind had been solved.
Continue reading →
Laura Nichols of the Penn State Daily Collegian Online here is way ahead of other journalists on the Penn State investigation – which was off the mark even faster than CRU. She reports that the investigation was convened under Policy RA-10, which describes the procedure for breach of standards set out under Policy AD-47.
A panel of personnel within the university is reviewing all of the e-mail correspondence between Mann and scientists at the University of East Anglia in England that was illegally leaked in November. University spokeswoman Annemarie Mountz said Penn State officials are conducting the inquiry, which began last week, under policy RA-10.
Nichols reported that Senior Vice President for Research Eva Pell is charged by the policy to head up the inquiry committee and did not return calls for comment by press time Tuesday and that Director of the Office of Research Protections Candice Yekel said while she is part of the committee, she cannot comment on the inquiry while it is still in progress.
The article continued:
More than $760 million in grants are given annually to research within Penn State, Mountz said. There will be no sanctions or restrictions placed on Mann or any grants during the inquiry. The university will also not be able to take any action or make any concrete determinations until the search has been completed, Mountz said.
Disconcerted at being left out of the recent Climategate publicity, Andrew Weaver of the University of Victoria on Vancouver Island breathlessly blamed (now here) recent break-ins at the university’s climate center on shadowy fossil fuel groups. Weaver connected the break-ins to Britain’s Climategate, which IPCC officials have attributed to shadowy Russian secret agents. Weaver said that the shadowy group took a “dead” computer and ruffled his papers. Weaver said that the ruffling of his papers was “evidence of a larger effort to discredit climate science”.
In other news from the University of Victoria, the Department of Anthropology issued an urgent warning about numerous break-ins throughout the campus, an excerpt from which folows: Continue reading →
Climate Audit 