History is replete with the social upheaval of scientific revolution. In this repeating saga of humanity, there are always two camps: the established ‘consensus’ and the heretical new thinkers.

The most infamous of these upheavals was the debate between the terra-centric (flat earth types) and heliocentric camps of the renaissance. The consensus was held by the Catholic Church who had determined (with loose and unfounded logic) that the Earth was the center of the universe – and they it’s smartest and most wise (of course)

The heretics were those watching and measuring reality: Tycho Brahe, Johannes Kepler, Nicolaus Capernicus and Galileo Galilei - some of humanity’s most brilliant and open minded scientists. As these people began to observe the heavens and make precise measurements night after night, they began to unravel the mysteries of the night sky. They discovered planets, theorized about them orbiting a large mass, and finally discovered the Earth actually revolved around the Sun.

For these amazing achievements these people were prosecuted by the naysayers of the Church:

Nicolaus Copernicus (German: Nikolaus Kopernikus; Italian: Nicolò Copernico; Polish: Miko?aj Kopernik (help·info); in his youth, Niclas Koppernigk;^[1] 19 February 1473 – 24 May 1543) was a Renaissance astronomer and the first person to formulate a comprehensive heliocentric cosmology which displaced the Earth from the center of the universe.^[2]

Copernicus’ epochal book, De revolutionibus orbium coelestium (On the Revolutions of the Celestial Spheres), published just before his death in 1543, is often regarded as the starting point of modern astronomy and the defining epiphany that began the scientific revolution. His heliocentric model, with the Sun at the center of the universe, demonstrated that the observed motions of celestial objects can be explained without putting Earth at rest in the center of the universe. His work stimulated further scientific investigations, becoming a landmark in the history of science that is often referred to as the Copernican Revolution.

…

By 1616 the attacks on the ideas of Copernicus had reached a head, and Galileo went to Rome to try to persuade the Catholic Church authorities not to ban Copernicus’ ideas. In the end, a decree of the Congregation of the Index was issued, declaring that the ideas that the Sun stood still and that the Earth moved were “false” and “altogether contrary to Holy Scripture”, and suspending Copernicus’s De Revolutionibus until it could be corrected. Acting on instructions from the Pope before the decree was issued, Cardinal Bellarmine informed Galileo that it was forthcoming, that the ideas it condemned could not be “defended or held”, and ordered him to abandon them. Galileo promised to obey. Bellarmine’s instruction did not prohibit Galileo from discussing heliocentrism as a mathematical fiction but was dangerously ambiguous as to whether he could treat it as a physical possibility.^[53] For the next several years Galileo stayed well away from the controversy.

…

The sentence of the Inquisition was delivered on June 22. It was in three essential parts:

• Galileo was found “vehemently suspect of heresy”, namely of having held the opinions that the Sun lies motionless at the centre of the universe, that the Earth is not at its centre and moves, and that one may hold and defend an opinion as probable after it has been declared contrary to Holy Scripture. He was required to “abjure, curse and detest” those opinions.^[59]
• He was sentenced to formal imprisonment at the pleasure of the Inquisition.^[60] On the following day this was commuted to house arrest, which he remained under for the rest of his life.
• His offending Dialogue was banned; and in an action not announced at the trial, publication of any of his works was forbidden, including any he might write in the future.^[61]

I snipped these passages from the Wikipedia pages on Capernicus and Galileo. It is a disgusting and disturbing part of humanity’s history. These people looked at the world in open and objective ways and saw what was there, transpiring right in front of them. Yet the ‘consensus’ crowd was so afraid of the real facts they censored the real results and ruined the careers of these ‘deniers’ of doctrine.

Fast forward to today and you see the Church of Al Gore/IPCC replaying history. But this time they do not have the reigns of law, nor the ability to shut down and censor dissent so coldly and easily.

For a while they were able to abuse the scientific review process and stamp out contrary studies, but that could not hold and someone with a more refined conscience and a true sense of the scientific method let leak the emails that proved the conspiracy to shut out the heretics of AGW. The milder inquisition in hiding was exposed. Though some still hold out for a more violent response:

We know who the active denialists are – not the people who buy the lies, mind you, but the people who create the lies.  Let’s start keeping track of them now, and when the famines come, let’s make them pay.  Let’s let their houses burn.  Let’s swap their safe land for submerged islands.  Let’s force them to bear the cost of rising food prices.

This person needs help.

As with the Heliocentric Revolution, it takes time to finally wash away the chains of consensus and once again walk in the light of discovery. But with so many more scientists today, much more capable tools and global data banks this round of cleansing won’t take centuries.

The following story at WUWT is a harbinger of new scientific enlightenment, and recalls one of the last scientific revolutions to sweep Mother Earth:

Today the Royal Astronomical Society in London publishes (online) Henrik Svensmark’s latest paper entitled “Evidence of nearby supernovae affecting life on Earth”. After years of effort Svensmark shows how the variable frequency of stellar explosions not far from our planet has ruled over the changing fortunes of living things throughout the past half billion years.

…

By taking me back to when I reported the victory of the pioneers of plate tectonics in their battle against the most eminent geophysicists of the day, it makes me feel 40 years younger. Shredding the textbooks, Tuzo Wilson, Dan McKenzie and Jason Morgan merrily explained earthquakes, volcanoes, mountain-building, and even the varying depth of the ocean, simply by the drift of fragments of the lithosphere in various directions around the globe.

The consensus of a rigid solid crust was blown away – again by a few out-of-the-consensus-box thinkers who pulled together data into a new picture of the world around us. The story Svenmark shows is how this Earth interacts with the galaxy around us. And how that galaxy can cause conditions that increase clouds, and thus decrease global temps as we are shielded from the Sun’s life giving energy. It shows how a cool Earth with lowered sea levels loses diversity and threatens life, while a warmer Earth with higher seal levels allows diversity and evolution to explode.

It also shows how CO2 is not a driver of temperature, but a result of higher temps and more water (sort of a “duh” moment in my opinion).

There have been many other studies out recently, showing how polar ice extent today is not much different from the 1930-1940 period (which is consistent with RAW temperature records which show a similar global temp as today). Another shows how satellites have disprove the climate models, and we all know how temperatures have not increased with CO2 for going on two decades (on average).

The theory of AGW is busted and dead. Now it is just a matter of time for the media to grow up and report on it, and the politicians to disconnect themselves from the mess. And it is a mess. You would think the CRU emails would have sent a shudder through all respectable and honorable men and women of science. But the group-think surrounding CO2 is so engrained it has taken even grosser events to begin to rattle the zealots. As with the Church and Galileo, there have been outright forgeries and fakes used to try and hide the reality.

But the truth of reality will break through the fiction of zealotry. At least we can say we are getting better at getting through these disturbing moments of lax judgement.

At NASA there are heart wrenching examples of when computations are wrong:

For those not aware, that is the Space Shuttle Challenger and Columbia, respectively, as we saw them in their final seconds.

When I see people deliberately manipulate data to give a false impression it makes my skin crawl. It’s not just some innocent lying or fooling, in some cases it is a clear act of fraud. It’s the case of the dangerous lie that causes pain suffering I cannot abide, not an untruth for a good cause (like keeping secrets). Sadly, some people are deluded that their cause is worthy of a little untruth. A peculiar arrogance to be sure.

We now have proof Global Warming is man made, in that it has been concocted by con artist pretending to be scientists. And that proof comes from the latest temperature data from that scourge of the scientific process and method, the University of East Anglia’s Climactic Research Unit (CRU).

But first, before we get to their faked data, we should look at CRUs raw data – data they have hidden from the public. Data that was exposed as part of Climategate in 2009. Here is a document that contains CRU generated quarterly temperature graphs for most of the world’s countries prior to being ‘processed’ into a false impression of warming. It is a must read for anyone who wants to know the truth about global temperatures.

Here is one sample of the data for Bolivia:

The four graphs represent quarters of a year: March-April-May, June-July-August, September-October-November and December-January-February. The red/purple lines represent the 2008 run of the CRU data, the black lines the 2005 run. The green line was added by me to illustrate how prior temperatures for Bolivia were actually higher than today (especially in the 1930s and 1940s). This example is repeated over much of the world, as I showed in a previous post on this data. Only a fraction of this data shows any significant warming (15-25% based on my earlier assessment).

One of the important results of that prior analysis was to show how the change in peaks for any given country (and any 3 month period) were  pretty much insignificant and well within the MEASURED natural variance. For example, look at Argentina MAM.

In the following graphs I first I identify what the lines represent. In the second diagram I show the difference in peak maximum from the pre-1960 period to the 2000′s (in this case ignoring the 1970-1999 period). The final diagram shows the total measure fluctuation for this country during this time of year:

Elements of the CRU Raw Temperature Graphs

Pre-1960 Peak vs 2000's Peak

Measured Temperature Variance For MAM, Argentina

The 0.3°C cooling for Argentina MAM in the CRU trend line (already a multi-averaged value) is actually only a 10% change compared to the overall variation in temperature. Hardly significant in my mind. Even if I used the late 20th century peaks it would be a 0.3°C increase. Much ado about nothing. 0.3°C is miniscule compared to daily temperature swings – nature and humanity will survive.

But what really struck me was how few of the  graphs come anywhere near showing a rising trend. Most look like this one – random fluctuations across a generally flat trend.

Finally, there is one more important document from CRU and the 2009 whistle blower. This document exposes CRU’s own confidence level of any single year’s regional temperature values, and it is a stunner.

Here we discover CRU’s gridded temperature values for 1969 (and I assume this applies in general to all years, with prior to 1950 being even less ‘accurate’) generally have an error of +/- 1-3°C (light blue to light green). This means it is impossible to discern a sub-degree change in gridded temps over any period. Simple math.

Now let’s look at a key post at WUWT that shows the just released HadCruT4 data, and how it has been ‘adjusted’ since the 2008 release:

Data plotted by Joe D’Aleo. The new HadCRUT4 is in blue, old HadCRUT3 in red, note how the past is cooler, increasing the trend. Of course, this is just “business as usual” for the Phil Jones team. Here’s the older HadCRUT data set from 2001, compared to 2008 and 2010. The past got cooler then too.

To say this differently – the most recent half century period has not warmed at all. What has been ‘adjusted’ is the past – it is now cooler. But of course it is not really cooler. The past is past and is fixed. And our knowledge of the past is limited by the measurement accuracy (both in terms of consistency in instruments, consistency time of measurement, spatial coverage, etc). Globally we have very little accuracy prior to 1950 (we would be lucky if a global number could be within +/- 5°C).

Here is another blast from the past in terms of showing this historic revisionism which is more propaganda than science:

So why does the IPCC and CRU (and GISS, etc) have to keep ‘adjusting’ data to give the impression there has been recent warming?

The reason is because the IPCC has two sets of model outputs baselined and they cannot afford reality to reflect one of those outputs. One output confirms CO2 induced AGW, while the other confirms the IPCC was wrong to ring the alarm bells and all this is for nothing. I addressed this in a post a few years back (as did many others), but it bears repeating. Basically if we have flat temperature records that conform to IPCC sanctioned model outputs like this, the IPCC needs to close up shop:

Here we have South America showing two IPCC sanctioned scenarios. The blue output space is flat and represents zero CO2 driven AGW. The reddish band shows what would happen if there is CO2 driven AGW. Guess what the raw data looks like from CRU before adjusting? A reminder from Bolivia (which looks like all of the South American graphs):

Yep – it falls into the blue region. This means South America – as a whole – shows NO CO2 driven AGW. Neigher does North or Central America. And the only way to get the needed late 20th century rise is to drop the early 20th century record down to cooler.

Here is another post on the Nordic area of Europe, showing the same flat line and compared with the IPCC sanctioned model outputs.

So in summary what have we seen is:

• The latest ‘adjusted’ CRU data set shows no recent warming, just historic cooling as they fudged their data once again. These adjustments need to exposed to the public and debated to determine their validity and confidence levels. My guess is they would fail.
• The raw CRU temperature data – prior to ‘adjustment’ – has always shown little to no ‘global‘ warming. It shows some isolated regional warming, and some regional cooling. But over all, the majority of the country records show no significant change in temperature when you compare the early 1900′s to the early 2000′s.
• The raw CRU data lines up extremely well with IPCC model outputs that predict no CO2 induced global warming. Only the ‘adjusted’ data shows the required uptick in temps that comes close to (but not to the same level as) the predicted warming.
• The CRU has reestablished itself as a propaganda house, not an institute of open science.

Nuff said.

]]> http://strata-sphere.com/blog/index.php/archives/18198/feed 4 http://strata-sphere.com/blog/index.php/archives/18155 http://strata-sphere.com/blog/index.php/archives/18155#comments Sun, 04 Mar 2012 15:15:03 +0000 AJStrata http://strata-sphere.com/blog/?p=18155 The recent incident where a top global warming alarmists admitted to identity theft and wire fraud (and soon will most likely be found guilty of creating a fraudulent documents) is the latest in a chain of false information and outright lies promulgated by the debunked Catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Warming (C-AGW) community (e.g., the United Nations IPCC, the United Kingdom’s CRU, the United States EPA, etc). Note we now have to add a “C” to AGW since the fact the world warms and cools is now not such a novelty anymore.

The chain of falsehoods began with the infamous Hockey Stick graph produced by the CRU for IPCC. That graph contained numerous lies. Firstly it used poor statistics (one would have to call it statistical chicanery if done with forethought instead of by the ignorance of a zealot) to remove the measured climate variability that has been detected since the Roman Warm period. This ‘trick’ erased the climate changges seen through the Little Ice Age and into the current warm period.

Let me be clear here, Mann’s flat historic temperature record is not true. That was proven by professional statisticians many times over.

Figure 1: Mann's Fictional Temperature Reconstruction

Figure 2: More Accurate Historic Reconstruction

But the Hickey Stick Graph not only flattened historic climate change, it also hid critical problems with the temperature proxies used to develop Mann’s reconstruction. You will note in figure 1 above that the blue reconstructed data of the hockey stick handle is appended with a bright red blade rising up dramatically. That red blade of completely different data was added to ‘hide the decline’ – a now infamous euphemism for the fact the tree rings in the modern period started to diverge from the hypothesized recent warming. If that graph was honest and complete, the blue handle would have turned downward dramatically – not upward.

Mann deleted this key data from the results – an inconvenient truth he hid from the public and policy makers. Instead he slapped on some other estimates from questionable ground temp measurements to create the myth that we are experiencing historic warming. This is completely unethical, and in my area of expertise (space exploration) a firing offense – if not worse.

We of course are not experiencing never before seen warming. As can be seen in Figure 2 and numerous studies, today is not warmer than the Roman or Medieval Warm Periods. Therefore humanity’s increased industrial activity can only have a minor effect on the overall global climate – if at all. It is still up to the zealots of C-AGW to prove human produced CO2 is the driver, and CO2 increases are the cause (not the result as many studies show) of a warming global climate.

The next suite of crimes against science, ethics and the truth came when someone at the CRU blew the whistle and made public a series of emails and data that had been collected at CRU in response to Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests. Now many people will claim I have no proof that the source of the email dumps was (a) associated with CRU or (b) from the FOIA pool of information gathered by CRU at the time. But the fact is that is the only logical answer (see here). And given how the recent Gleick Fakegate incident has played out versus the CRU Climategate, it is now clear the reason there is no legal action being taken by CRU is because they know the source and legally cannot touch them.

In the CRU emails we learned of more than just fudging data. We learned of professional oppression, coercion and even extortion to censor opposing scientific results and views. The CRU Hockey Team was caught red handed working a conspiracy (very close to a  RICO criminal act) to silence or professionally destroy those who not only doubted their claims, but who challenged their claims and were exposing their lies and omissions.

And then there was the cover up – which probably pushed the VRU whistle blower to expose the emails in the end. When reading the emails one finds CRU scientists willing to do anything to cover up their mistakes and avoid FOIA requests. See here for a forensic analysis of Phil Jones’ emails over time and how he dealt with his legal responsibilities.

The next step towards the dark side by they Warmists was in fact the 4th IPCC report itself. Due partially to   a lack of new evidence to support C-AGW, but also in the face of mounting contrary evidence, the IPCC propaganda machine went full-throttle Chicken-Little in 2007. In their haste to yell ‘fire’ on this crowded planet, the IPCC 2007 report was riddled with exaggerations without any scientific foundation. The most infamous claim was how 80% of the Himalayan Glaciers would be gone by 2035.

So now we reach 2012 with one Peter Gleick committing a series of crimes in order to create a propaganda event against an institute that simply is not buying the C-AGW BS. Thankfully for the entirety of scientific endeavors, and those who seek truth in a professional manner, the episode has not just backfired but exposed the rot at the core of C-AGW. Those C-AGW proponents who made up pathetic excuses for Gleick’s crimes have done more to undermine the credibility of C-AGW than 1,000 reasonable scientific papers of contrary results. The science may be hard to grasp, but the ethics (or lack of therein) are simple.

So why the panic moves by Gleick and his fellow travelers? Why do they once more fall into the gutter?

I believe the escalating corruption inside the C-AGW community (from fudging their own data, to censoring contrary data, to violating FOIA laws, to open fraud and theft) is because the C-AGW hypothesis is running out of time. These zealots were so over confident because of the holiness of their quest they overstated their confidence and then their conclusions. Now all that arrogance and ignorance is coming home to roost.

A few interesting reports out in the last 2 weeks illustrate what I mean. First off, the real world data is now statistically so far off from the IPCC theories that each passing year is another data set proving the hypothesis of C-AGW to be completely wrong:

Abstract: Global temperatures measured since 2005 are incompatible with the IPCC model predictions made in 2007 by WG1 in AR4. All subsequent temperature data from 2006 to 2011 lies between 1 and 6 standard deviations below the model predictions. The data show with > 90% confidence level that the models have over-exaggerated global warming.

Here is another important report in the same vain:

We check the main predictions of the climate models against the best and latest data. Fortunately the climate models got all their major predictions wrong. Why? Every serious skeptical scientist has been consistently saying essentially the same thing for over 20 years, yet most people have never heard the message. Here it is, put simply enough for any lay reader willing to pay attention.

Alarmists' C-AGW Model & Predictions

Skeptic's Model & Predictions

The climate models get them all wrong. The missing hotspot and outgoing radiation data both, independently, prove that the amplification in the climate models is not present. Without the amplification, the climate model temperature predictions would be cut by at least two-thirds, which would explain why they overestimated the recent air and ocean temperature increases.

The data does not lie, neither does the math. You can take ALL of the prior IPCC predictions – based on their flawed hypothesis – and see the same result. There models and predictions are wrong with higher confidence levels than ever claimed for C-AGW and the human CO2 component.

Finally, the evidence continues to mount showing global climate driven primarily by solar output, and that the current reduction in solar activity is indicating a cooler global climate for the next few decades. This solar based theory is 1000 times more compelling than C-AGW.

The reality check is happening now, and the C-AGW hypothesis is crashing and burning. For its desperate clingers-on it is clearly time to pull out all the stops – especially the ethical ones. At least that is what they believe.

The truth is the overly dramatic (or over-egged for our UK friends) claims of C-AGW were lost years ago. Lost to bad math and hidden data, lost to unethical decisions, lost to a lack of a true scientific method and lost to a lack of professionalism. You can’t undo years down the wrong path with a stupid propaganda stunt. But by the number of Gleick defenders coming out of from under their rocks, it is clear we are not done with that kind of nonsense. (Update: Noticed this link at WUWT discussing the excuse-mongering from the green left).

The C-AGW proponents rang the alarm bells, and the broader community of scientists and engineers answered. The problem for C-AGW proponents – the answer was the IPCC got it wrong.

For those looking for insight into how science progresses, I suggest you read the following – which is playing out right now:

Kuhn argued for an episodic model in which periods of such conceptual continuity in normal science were interrupted by periods of revolutionary science. During revolutions in science the discovery of anomalies leads to a whole new paradigm that changes the rules of the game and the “map” directing new research, asks new questions of old data, and moves beyond the puzzle-solving of normal science.

It is hard for the zealots of C-AGW to realize this, but they are not leading this current round of revolutionary global-scale science. They were simply the catalyst of failures in conventional thinking (discovered anomalies) that initiated the revolutionary thinking. And now their C-AWG hypotheses are being replaced with new, better scientific theories.

The continued efforts of the climate establishment to eliminate “extreme views” can acquire a seriously threatening nature when efforts are directed at silencing scientific opposition. In our op-ed we mentioned the campaign circa 2003 to have Dr. Chris de Freitas removed not only from his position as editor of the journal Climate Research, but from his university job as well. Much of that campaign is documented in Climategate emails, where one of the signatories of the Trenberth et al. letter writes: “I believe that a boycott against publishing, reviewing for, or even citing articles from Climate Research [then edited by Dr. de Freitas] is certainly warranted, but perhaps the minimum action that should be taken.”

The truth cannot be silenced – end update

Background: Some people on the skeptic side of the climate debate do not like harsh and pointed commentary on the forging, faking and mud slinging habits of the alarmists crowd. Personally I cannot understand this, but then again I don’t come from industry (Steve McIntyre) or the news media (Anthony Watts) or Academia (Judith Curry). The level of tolerance to mistakes, etc in these areas is not wrong – it is just very different from mine.

I work in a world were sloppy statistical or inaccurate mathematical work can have horrific results. And where the act of silencing dissenting voices kills:

The Challenger accident has frequently been used as a case study in the study of subjects such as engineering safety, the ethics of whistle-blowing, communications, group decision-making, and the dangers of group-think. It is part of the required readings for engineers seeking a professional license in Canada^[56] and other countries. Roger Boisjoly, the engineer who had warned about the effect of cold weather on the O-rings, left his job at Morton Thiokol and became a speaker on workplace ethics.^[57] He argues that the caucus called by Morton Thiokol managers, which resulted in a recommendation to launch, “constituted the unethical decision-making forum resulting from intense customer intimidation.”^[58] For his honesty and integrity leading up to and directly following the shuttle disaster, Roger Boisjoly was awarded the Prize for Scientific Freedom and Responsibility from the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Many colleges and universities have also used the accident in classes on the ethics of engineering.^[59][60]

Information designer Edward Tufte has used the Challenger accident as an example of the problems that can occur from the lack of clarity in the presentation of information. He argues that if Morton Thiokol engineers had more clearly presented the data that they had on the relationship between low temperatures and burn-through in the solid rocket booster joints, they might have succeeded in persuading NASA managers to cancel the launch; to demonstrate, he took all of the Thiokol data given during the briefing and placed it on a single graph of O-ring damage versus external launch temperature, clearly showing the effects of cold on the degree of O-Ring damage, then placed the proposed launch of Challenger on the graph according to its predicted temperature at launch. The launch of Challenger was so far away from the coldest launch with the worst damage ever seen to date that even a casual observer could have determined the danger level was severe.

Emphasis mine. And when reading this, appreciate the valid importance of these conclusions – because 7 people paid with their lives to learn them. Nearly 20 years later NASA experienced another episode of ‘consensus’ group-think when it lost the Columbia Space Shuttle:

To illustrate the organizational problems of safety awareness, Richard Feynman attached a personal appendix to the Rogers Commission Report. It is equally relevant to the CAIB report. In it, he wrote: “It appears that there are enormous differences of opinion as to the probability of a failure with loss of vehicle and of human life. The estimates range from roughly 1 in 100 to 1 in 100,000. The higher figures come from the working engineers, and the very low figures from management. What are the causes and consequences of this lack of agreement? … we could properly ask, ‘What is the cause of management’s fantastic faith in the machinery?’”

The CAIB report found these same misperceptions by management and concluded that they contributed to the accident. Both reports also examined the ability of schedule pressures to influence safety-related design decisions.

In NASA we know that exposing errors and miscalculations is the only ethical answer to determining the right path to take. We know that to misrepresent the clear results of data is as close to a crime as you never want to be. That includes hiding divergences and not publishing error/confidence bars.

If you look at the essence of what caused the Challenger/Columbia disasters it was:

1. Censoring dissenting views behind the myth that group-think is 100% right – this leads to missing the obvious and correct answers that only a few may see.
2. Presenting information in confusing and inaccurate forms that hide the true results of the data – this leads to wrong conclusions by people in the decision making hot seat.
3. Obsessive belief in the conventional wisdom as being 100% right (be it machinery or AGW CO2 warming) – this blindly leads people down the wrong path to disaster.

The Global Warming Alarmists are wedded to the very things that destroyed two shuttles and their crews. Which is why I will never let up in alerting people to the dangers of bad data and oppressive group-think. Others can try less forceful corrective actions. But the repetitive, unethical turns made by alarmists actually requires a more forceful response – not a less timid one. Timidity in the face of group-think  kills in the face of obvious errors and false conclusions. With that context, I think people will appreciate tone of this post.

Main Post: When the false Hockey Stick (showing never-before-seen-warming) was exposed in the middle of the last decade, you would think the alarmists would have learned their lesson about misrepresenting data. Fudging and hiding data (like the directly measured disconnect between tree rings and global/regional temperatures) is scientifically unethical. In the applied engineering world it could be cause for criminal prosecution.

But no – the zealots were on God’s side. So the ends justified any means. Therefore onward they marched.

When the censoring of scientific debate was exposed in the CRU emails at the end of the last decade, you would think those paragons of ‘ climate science’ virtue would stop their madness and consider how far they had sunk. It was clear that a cadre of self appointed ‘experts’ (whose only expertise appears to be in producing shoddy statistics) worked over time to punish dissenting views and data. They almost succeeded.

The problem they faced? The Roman and Medieval Warm Periods which show up clearly as warmer periods in recent history in numerous scientific studies. These prior warm periods negate the hypothesis that the current warming is a result of human produced CO2 (as opposed to the Earth rebounding from what is know as the Little Ice Age). Did the zealots learn their lessons after this?

No. Instead they trotted out a series of white-washed investigations that conveniently avoided the damning emails from the Hockey Team. Emails that included a clear conspiracy to avoid FOIA laws. A coordinated effort to violate laws is as unethical as it can get folks. So you would think this would cause some to stop and assess whether they were saving the world or circling the sewer drain.

But no. Now we have another step by the alarmists to the dark side. We now have forgeries and theft to create a fictional news story:

At the beginning of 2012, I received an anonymous document in the mail describing what appeared to be details of the Heartland Institute’s climate program strategy. It contained information about their funders and the Institute’s apparent efforts to muddy public understanding about climate science and policy. I do not know the source of that original document but assumed it was sent to me because of my past exchanges with Heartland and because I was named in it.

Given the potential impact however, I attempted to confirm the accuracy of the information in this document. In an effort to do so, and in a serious lapse of my own and professional judgment and ethics, I solicited and received additional materials directly from the Heartland Institute under someone else’s name. The materials the Heartland Institute sent to me confirmed many of the facts in the original document, including especially their 2012 fundraising strategy and budget. I forwarded, anonymously, the documents I had received to a set of journalists and experts working on climate issues.

Here we have one Peter Gleick of the Pacific Institute admitting to identity theft in the act of stealing proprietary documents. In addition, we have another conundrum where facts don’t line up with the claims. From a time line of events created by Steve McIntyre we see that the forged ‘strategy’ document supposedly sent to Gleick actually was created AFTER he stole the proprietary information from Heartland:

On or before Feb 13, the “unknown person” or an associate (who subsequently called himself Heartland Insider), fabricated a document entitled “Confidential Memo: 2012 Heartland Climate Strategy Memo”. Its pdf version was created on Feb 13 at 12:41 Pacific time.

Although media that were duped by the fake memo have tried to argue that its contents are fully supported by the board documents, in my opinion, numerous claims in the fake memo, including the money quotes that animated so many articles, are readily seen to be unsupported by the unfabricated documents, as well as being untrue.

I don’t think Gleick’s mea culpa holds up. His timeline of events points to some anonymous source for the start of this, but the document dates point to the forgery coming after the theft.

More importantly though, this incident actually destroys the Alarmists’ claims by destroying their credibility. As noted at WUWT, Judith Curry has an interesting assessment of what is now motivating the alarmists. In this there is a section I want to highlight and expand upon:

There does seem to be an IPCC/UNFCCC ideology, let me try to lay it out here.

1. Anthropogenic climate change is real.
2. Anthropogenic climate change is dangerous and we need to something about it.
3. The fossil fuel industry is trying to convince people that climate change is a hoax.
4. Deniers are attacking climate science and scientists.
5. Action is needed to prevent dangerous climate change.
6. Deniers and fossil fuel industry are delaying UNFCCC mitigatory policies.

Here is another observation in Curry’s post that has me shaking my head, this one from a Mike Nisbet:

Urgent calls to escalate the war against climate skeptics may lead scientists and their organizations into a dangerous trap, fueling further political disagreement while risking public trust in science. A major transformation is needed in how scientists and their organizations engage the public and policymakers.

In my opinion item #4 is the rot at the center of all this. It is this arrogance that alarmists have clung to in order to rationalize their forays into unethical behavior. It is echoed in the snippet from Mike Nisbet. It is also dead wrong. They are not the totality of science or scientists. They are simply on one side of a debate.

The most powerful source of attack on the AGW hypothesis is coming from professional and independent scientists, as well as a number of professional engineers who apply scientific principles everyday. It is not an attack on ‘science’, it is just the alarmists on the losing end of a heated scientific debate and, in response, turning to desperate measures to salvage their disproved claims. The attack on science is from the rot that flows from the arrogance of the alarmists.

The fact is it is people like McIntyre, Watts, Curry and many others (me to some extent) are more than capable of investigating the alarmists’ claims and developing their own conclusions. And their work has successfully pointed out the flaws in the theories, the diversion from reality of the models and the errors in the conclusions of alarmists. In response to their first true bout of scientific debate that they could not censor or control, the alarmists began by fudging and hiding data (the infamous hockey stick), moved to censorship and professional vendettas (CRU emails), through to cover ups and fake investigations, and now on to forgery/theft.

This is nothing more than alarmists losing ugly. This is the losing side getting desperate because they thought they were saving the planet and instead were self destructing. They let their emotions and egos get in the way of their vows of professionalism (which is a frustrating and slow process with no glamor). I have little sympathy for these people. I have no respect for them. I see no reason to hold back.

In my professional world a simple shadows of these kinds of traits have resulted in horrific results, full of pain and suffering. The extent that alarmists have fallen is beyond the pale for many of us. These people deserve a blunt and full assessment of their actions. And the taxpayers who funded them also deserve for these people be held to account, both in their claims and their breach of ethics.

Major Update At End!

I have struggled with whether to post this or not, but as I contemplated my assessment of who the FOIA.org is (the person or persons behind the release of CRU emails and documents in 2009 and 2011) I decided the person(s) behind Climategate is/are probably known to authorities and protected. In fact, my suspicion is the document releases may be another CRU attempt to try and slip past the public scrutiny they so fear.

Let’s look at this question logically and with the technical insight a career around computer systems can provide.When combined with my lifetime living in the shadow of the world’s political super bowl (DC) I tend to see things from a very different angle.

I helped design some of this country’s most challenging command, control, communications and computer systems. I spend a lot of time these days reviewing proposed computer system architectures and implementations for the government. I know something about the data volume, data mining and storage problems and technologies implied in trying to hack this much information.

I also work on government programs and have decades of experience dealing with their bureaucratic games, not to mention living in the rarefied community of PhDs, Science, Aerospace, International partnerships, etc.

So with that as some attempt at demonstrating my bona fides (without giving away too much), let’s look at the evidence.

Jeff Id (Condon) over at Air Vent has been of the opinion FOIA.org was a younger person, technically very adept and still a bit of romantic at heart:

For the readers here, it isn’t that I don’t believe it was a student, it is that I don’t know either way. Some friends with more knowledge than I on computers have pointed out some fairly technically sophisticated behavior in the releases which make me reconsider. I brought up the RC hack to Leslie, pointing out that no adult with sensitive information would release it that way. It’s a prank-like behavior. Of course, there is a certain narcissism which comes with a hacker mentality that sometimes delays the adult thought process. When I was in college, a stunt like that would sound like fun. Now — NO effing way.

I tend to disagree with Jeff here, mainly because the released data has been so carefully culled of non-pertinent content. Personal information is redacted – which takes a lot of time to do. The topics of discussion are COMPLETELY within the scope of the mass of FOIA requests pending at CRU prior to the release. Two waves of releases, with the second being so much larger but clearly reviewed and cleansed of non-FOIA information. That all indicates professionalism, not a prank mentality.

Clearly this mass of information spanning emails and documents was being collected by CRU to meet the FOIA requests submitted to CRU. It is also clear in many of the emails Jones was losing the battle of FOIA, but fighting to the end. Very near the end it looked first like the information was going to be released, until a new delaying tactic was invented. I think this created a tipping or decision point.

I suspect Climategate was a combination of realizing the skeptics had a case, Jones et al were creating mythical and unlawful barriers to following the law, and someone at CRU decided the information had to be released. I will lay out my evidence for this conclusion now. But realize, any act that complied with FOIA rules and regulations is not illegal – no matter the tactics and methods used to disseminate the information! Keep that in mind as we explore how FOIA might have been seen as an unavoidable opportunity to tarnish the skeptics instead of the alarmists.

OK, my first conclusion is the Climategate data is clearly not randomly culled from CRU servers, but was the data being pulled together for complying with the FOIA. Emails confirm this repository was created. Let us begin in September of 2008 with an email (#1852) from Micheal Mcgarvie (Tasked by UEA to be FOIA Lead) to the CRU crew on the FOIA actions:

Colleagues,

Apart from a reply from Phil saying that he would get back to me on this I have heard nothing further.

I have ploughed through all the emails relating to the FOIA requests and will discuss with Dave tomorrow. If there are any emails between yourselves which mention Mr Holland or to other parties internally or externally could you forward them to me please.

On the basis of the emails in David’s file I don’t think that we need to meet to discuss this request. Once I have reviewed anything else that is around I will let you kbnow whether we need to meet or not.

I am afraid that we have to comply with this request under law.

Many thanks

Michael

Emphasis mine. This email clearly indicates that the CRU FOAI emails have been collected and analyzed as of September 2008. At this stage it is just for communications with Mr. Holland, but it will grow in scope.

As to the stress inside CRU and UEA, note this email from Phil Jones in September 2008 (#4251):

Michael,

All my emails according to Eudora that mention David Holland also include you or Dave amongst the recipients or the senders. So you have them all.

I have many others that mention Holland. These relate to work I’m doing with Dutch colleagues or someone in the Bridge Club I belong to who has the same surname.

Cheers

Phil

This claim of compliance will not stand the test of time. Jones is about to make a serious admission. Now let’s go to a pivotal email from December 2008 (#1897) that reveals Jones thwarting FOIA laws. These excerpts are in order of the exchanges between Dave Palmer (CRU FOIA lead) and Phil Jones (CRU FOIA lead miscreant). It begins with a message from David Palmer:

Gents,

Please note the below. I am not in a position to deal with the substance of Mr. McIntyre’s comments but now have to handle his request under DPA (which means a troll through your files for material that identifies Mr. McIntyre). Please note that under the DPA, comments about an individual are the personal data of that individual and subject to access under a DPA subject access request. Ergo, I would strongly advise all to be careful in what you put in your correspondence.

This is clearly an internal CRU alert to “behave” with regards to FOAI laws. Jones’ response is a bit of a jaw dropper:

Dave,

Do I understand it correctly – if he doesn’t pay the £10 we don’t have to respond?

With the earlier FOI requests re David Holland, I wasted a part of a day deleting numerous emails and exchanges with almost all the skeptics. So I have virtually nothing. I even deleted the email that I inadvertently sent.

Whoa! Didn’t Dr. Phil Jones of CRU tell Micheal Mcgarvie of UEA he provided all the emails in question just two months prior? One has to wonder if Palmer and Mcgarvie had a little chat after this exchange, and what they thought of their egocentric colleague.

As a manager and owner of a government contracting company, this is a firing offense. Palmer must have been stunned to realize Jones’ easily admitted to breaking the FOIA laws. Palmer’s response indicates how he feels about Jones’ actions, something that I am sure colored their professional relationship throughout the next year:

Phil, you must be very careful about deleting material, more particularly when you delete it. Section 77 of the FOIA state as follows:

77. (1) Where

(a) a request for information has been made to a public authority, and

(b) under section 1 of this Act or section 7 of the [1988 c. 29.] Data Protection Act 1998, the applicant would have been entitled (subject to payment of any fee) to communication of any information in accordance with that section, any person to whom this subsection applies is guilty of an offence if he alters, defaces, blocks, erases, destroys or conceals any record held by the public authority, with the intention of preventing the disclosure by that authority of all, or any part, of the information to the communication of which the applicant would have been entitled.

Like I said, Jones’ actions are worthy of summary firing.

In another December 2008 email (#1228330629) Jones brags to Ben Santer (who is also facing FOIA requests here in the US) on his unlawful ways:

The inadvertent email I sent last month has led to a Data Protection Act request sent by a certain Canadian, saying that the email maligned his scientific credibility with his peers! If he pays 10 pounds (which he hasn’t yet) I am supposed to go through my emails and he can get anything I’ve written about him. About 2 months ago I deleted loads of emails, so have very little – if anything at all.

The timing on these emails is the Santer email is from December 3rd, the Palmer admonition is from December 8. Phil’s admission to Palmer is on December 3rd as well.

Tim Osborn and Keith Briffa, to their credit, took a different path. From another email in October 2008 (#4569) we find them complying to Dave Palmer. So Jones is a bit of a rogue here. Briffa and Osborn mention they have sent all their data to David Palmer – which means the data was collected and being filtered well in advance of the “leak”.

Another worthy read on the delaying tactics by CRU is up at Climate Audit (two actually if you follow the embedded link to part 1 of the story). Heels dug in, Jones was still losing the battle. Apparently this stuck in his craw big time.

By the time October 2009 roles around Jones is grumpy and irritated. He has been forced to make a lot of concessions (see email #1192):

Phil’s comment:

No one, it seems, cares to read what we put up on the CRU web page.

…

If we have lost any data it is the following:

1. Station series for sites that in the 1980s we deemed then to be affected by either urban biases or by numerous site moves, that were either not correctable or not worth doing as there were other series in the region.

2. The original data for sites that we adjusted the temperature data [Phil: for known inhomogeneities, or what?] in the 1980s. We still have our adjusted data, of course, and these along with all other sites that didn’t need adjusting.

3. Since the 1980s as colleagues and NMSs [National Meteorological Services] have produced adjusted series for regions and or countries, then we replaced the data we had with the better series.

Now let’s posit what is happening by the end of 2009. Jones’ is finally admitting to CRU and UEA FOIA folks that his stonewalling has been a tissue of half truths. He has admitted to deleting emails, and seems to finally admit to deleting/losing original source data. The FOIA folks have been very patient with Jones, even as he grouses endlessly about having to act like a profesional (from an August 2009 email (#3497)):

I also don’t see why I should help people, I don’t want to work with and who spend most of their time critisising me.

Now, if I was a FOIA manager at CRU or UEA, I would be fed up with Jones’ and his dangerous games. After years of supporting his cause you learn he lied to you as well as the skeptics – what would you do? I would let the information out and let him sink or swim on his own.

Except CRU and UEA would have their professional and academic reputations destroyed. One of the more bizarre series of documents in the Climategate 1 dump is all this material to build up the UEA image because it was sinking behind other UK schools, losing prestige, money and hope for the future. At the same time Jones is playing games with FOIA, UEA is looking to salvage and build its reputation. I think this completely irrelevant material was included by FOIA.org in the Climategate 1 data to explain how another force was at work during this period within UEA. Everything dumped was dumped for a reason.

So when it looked like CRU had to release all this damning data, the only thing they could do was control the method of release. And here is where some interesting speculation can be explored.

What if the Climategate dumps were initiated by CRU or someone related to UEA/CRU for thew purpose of the inevitable FOIA compliance? What if the plan (dumb and desperate as it sounds) was to overwhelm the skeptics with a massive pile of information, and then allow their green media enablers to cover for them?

This scenario makes sense in lots of ways. As has been noted, the initial leak was attempted at Real Climate – the Hockey Team’s own spin machine blog. But nothing happened for weeks? Was this a preemptive alibi? Does it make sense to try and dump damning data on an ally’s doorstep, where it will be censored like the comments from all skeptics?

Clearly CRU heard of this event from their Real Climate allies, but CRU did not get ahead of the news.Were they waiting see how it played out (i.e., to see if their media buds could keep the lid on through Copenhagen)? If they were actually orchestrating the ‘leak,’ it would make sense they lay low and not respond to the attempt at Real Climate. This also makes sense if they wanted to see if they could run this below the radar. Especially when the links were dropped  on smaller blogs in the US and UK. Even if it got out, they small blogs could be targets of intimidation.

Remember, this data was collated for the FOIA responses. It was only available on a few machines (if not just one) with some serious protection (privacy rules at a minimum). While Jones may be a total computer illiterate, I doubt UEA would not enlist some smart and capable people to handle such sensitive information. Remember, the CRU servers had been hit many times, and they did not want this information out.

So we have a closely held, limited access set of information only so many people could see. let alone copy. In a day adn age where I know someone could find any email or document from me pretty much any time, I find it hard to believe they don’t know who accessed the FOIA data. It was/is an ENORMOUS amount to move – if unzipped. If zipped before the move, the logs would show who was on at the time. They should have a very small number of people to look at and check. So why nothing after 2+ years?

Another angle to look at is the Wikileaks Group. Instantiated in 2006 and making news from 2007 onward, it provided an interesting example on methods for releasing information. What if this started to plant strange ideas in the minds of Jones, et al?

I am not saying this is the only or best answer to the question. But FOIA.org spent 2 years culling the emails and cleansing them of unrelated content for the Climategate 2 release. A large and expensive effort, and something only someone who lived and breathed the purposes underpinning the Freedom of Information legislation would take the time to do. By example, Wikileaks embarks on no such efforts and simply blasts away after failing to extort something in return. This is not the work of a hacker or a leaker who wants to punish.

Even their moniker – FOIA.org – pays homage to their cause. Maybe the final bow to the political machinations of Jones and his crew was to agree to a ‘novel’ method of disclosure – one which would cast a shadow on the skeptics. All the while COMPLYING with the intent of FOIA (the information is out there now!).

And when this Hail Mary, desperate attempt failed to contain the damage, the CRU/UEA crew embarked on a series of white-wash investigations, clearing Jones et al of any wrong doing, when any prosecutor worth their salt could use the mountains of Jones’ admissions to nail him for perjury six ways to Sunday. If UEA was worried about their reputation (as the document dump shows) then this seems like the best option out of a lot of bad options.

I believe this theory (totally speculative) is worth pursuing. As one ponders its pros and cons (and they are numerous on both sides) I think the scales tip to it being very close to the truth. It surely fits the M.O. of the Hockey Team, the morals of the FOIA folks, and the desperation of CRU and UEA.

Major Update: OK, been reading a lot over at Climate Audit and was pointed to a CRU Mole:

A Mole

OK, folks, guess what. I’m now in possession of a CRU version giving data for every station in their station list .

…

Just to prove that I have actual CRU station data, here is the 60th series (Lund Sweden), covering the period 1753-1773:

I find the usage of the term ‘mole‘ way too enlightening.  This is from July 25th, 2009 and the data in question is for a FOIA request in process and being stonewalled by CRU. “Mole” clearly implies someone inside CRU or UEA. Could their initials be DP? Compliance is compliance.

I have become much more cognizant of file dates now that I have a better handle on the timeline of events. And I noticed a bunch of data files (under FOIA/documents/osborn-tree3 of the original Climategate 1 directory structure) that were all produced on October 12, 2007. A very interesting time for the Hockey Team, as this was around the time of the IPCC AR4 work. I just had to find out why these were leaked and what they contained!

The data files are:

• reginstr_aprsep_ALL.txt
• reginstr_aprsep_CSU.txt
• reginstr_aprsep_ENA.txt
• reginstr_aprsep_ESU.txt
• reginstr_aprsep_NEUR.txt
• reginstr_aprsep_NORTH.txt [not addressed here]
• reginstr_aprsep_NWNA.txt
• reginstr_aprsep_SEUR.txt
• reginstr_aprsep_SOUTH.txt [not addressed here]
• reginstr_aprsep_SWNA.txt
• eginstr_aprsep_WSU.txt

They show the “Regional-mean CRUTEM1 instrumental temperature for Apr-Sep for region XXX“, where “XXX” is the acronym of the file you see above. This is a direct copy of the comment header in each file. So all these files contain the CRU regional temperature anomalies constructed from the CRU temperature database (CRUTEM1) . They are computed for the regions shown below in a Briffa/CRU diagram (H/T Steve McIntyre). The legend of the diagram is also from McIntyre’s blog site.

Note the 2007 files use “WSU” [assuming here Western Soviet Union?] instead of “WSIB” [Western Siberia], as used by Briffa. The file “ALL” contains the integration of all the data into a Northern Hemisphere record.

Briffa et al. [Nature 1998] Fig 1a. Definition of regions and number of sites: southwestern (SWNA, 53 sites), northwestern (NWNA, 30) and eastern (ENA, 34) North America; northern (NEUR, 46) and southern (SEUR, 72) Europe; western (WSIB, 42), central (CSIB, 31) and eastern (ESIB, 6) Siberia; all 125 sites in SWNA and SEUR form the composite region SOUTH, and all 189 sites in the six northern regions form the NORTH region; ALL is an average of all 314 sites.

Clearly these files were used to correlate tree ring data to regional instrument-based temperatures that represent the modern record. It is by this comparison between rings and temps that tree chronologies/series are ‘calibrated’. If the calibration is suspect, then the comparison of rings from the past (e.g., The Little Ice Age and Medieval Warm Period) are also suspect.

I have long suspected that the CRU processing of temperature data from the local daily values (now supposedly lost to time) to gridded monthly values, and then to regional seasonal values, and finally to global annual values gave the CRU gang many opportunities to introduce adjustments (inadvertently or via deliberate assumptions). Adjustments that could skew the temperature record to one side of the debate. Each step is a point to introduce uncertainty, error and whatever else the math wishes to tease out.

This data gave me an opportunity investigate this theory, and I was not disappointed. The following are graphs of each data files, showing the CRU regional temperature  anomaly curves up through 1992 (apparently the end of the CRUTEM1 data set). Note how these results DO NOT look like the normal IPCC temperature diagram, with a constant rising global temperature from the late 1800′s to today, with a small pause around 1940.

Here is a classic IPCC, CRU, NCDC, GISS modern instrument temperature profile from NCDC (click to enlarge):

Keep this in mind while we peruse the 2007 profiles used to correlate the tree rings to the ‘real’ modern record!

First up, ESU (assuming here Eastern Soviet Union – or Eastern Siberia) - click any graph to enlarge.

This is the shortest of the series, beginning in 1932. The blue area denotes mean temperature anomalies for the April-September period (the season for tree growth), for each year (assumed °C for units). The trend line (brown) is a 10 year running average. While the annual anomaly fluctuates greatly (-4.5° to +2.1° C) the moving 10 year average is pretty benign. It rambles between -1°C and +0.5°C. Also note how today’s temperature is not much different than the 1930′s, 1940′s and 1970′s. The average is -0.23°C with a median of -0.04°C (this will become important in a bit).

Next up, lets look at CSU (Central Siberia or Soviet Union):

This series is much longer, extending back to 1878. What just jumps out is how the 1930′s and 1940′s were clearly much warmer in this regional summer series than today. The annual season anomalies range from -3° to +3°C, with the 10 year average usually between -1°C and +1°C. The exceptions being an extreme cold period in the 1880′s and the aforementioned warm period in the ’30′s and 40′s. The average was +0.1°C, with a median of +0.11°C. So far we are not seeing the usual IPCC dramatic rise in modern temperature.

Now onto WSU (assuming Western Siberia/Soviet Union):

Amazing. We now have covered the entire Norther Russia/Siberia region and no dramatic increase in temperature. This series is one of the full length series starting in 1856. It has an annual seasonal anomaly that ranges from -3.1° to +2.4°C. But that 10 year running average pretty much stays between ±0.5°C after 1900. The exception being a cold spell in the 1880′s. The average is -0.1°C, with a median of -0.16°C.

Now let’s move onto North Europe (NEUR):

A pattern is clearly emerging here. We see no ramp up of temperatures from the early 1900′s to today. While the range of seasonal anomalies in this region goes from -2.8° to +2.1°C, the 10 year running average meanders between ±0.9°C. Here again we see that the CRU numbers are indicating a much warmer period in the 1930′s to 1940′s range as opposed to today.

I have noted this many times before (see here and here) regarding how the this period nearly 80 years ago is basically the same as today – and prior to the large increases of atmospheric CO2. For this series the average was -0.02°C, with median of +0.11°C.

Now we are going to get into some data that goes beyond the lack of a ramped up temperature curve. Those averages and means are now going to come into play. Here is the Southern European seasonal mean anomalies from CRU as computed in 2007:

OK, if you are casually glancing (or your eyes are glazing over) you may have missed something very different in this graph verses the others. If I was not working the graph formats I might have easily missed it. The range of seasonal anomalies is -2.2° to +3.9°, which seemed a bit skewed warm. In fact, the entire graph seems to be warm, which is odd since this is a regional anomaly data set – basically looking at this region’s temperature history and supposedly comparing it to itself. So the 10 year average should run pretty much close to the y=0 line (like all the previous ones did).

This data, though, has an average of +0.41°C!  That is four times higher than the data/graphs so far. The median is +0.44°C. We still have the modern times cooler than the 1930′s and 1940′s warm spell, and on par with temps in the 1850′s and 1860′s. But this mysterious ‘adjustment’ upward to warmer struck me as odd. So I ‘normalized’ the data around the average (subtracting it from all values) and recomputed.

Here is the ‘normalized’ SEUR data:

This new data set has an average of 0.0°C and a median of +0.3°C (basically shifted down by 0.41°C). The range is a much more balanced -2.9° to +3.2°C. This is not the last time we will see such a shift in the regional anomaly data.

Now onto America! Since we have been moving east to west so far, let’s continue on to Eastern North America (ENA):

This is the last series not to have issues with its average/mean. It also shows again a very flat temperature signature from the 1930′s/1940′s and today. The annual seasonal anomaly fluctuates between -2.7° to 2.6°C. The 10 year average meanders between ±0.9°C. It has an average of +0.07°C and an median value of +0.24°C.

We are now heading into the last stretch with two more series. Remember, these are CRU produced instrument temperatures from CRUTEM1 (something supposedly lost due to lack of file space in the 1980′s). If these are CRU derived values used in 2007, the implications are not good for Phil Jones, CRU or the Hockey Team.

Our next stop is Northwestern North America (NWNA):

Again we see the strange situation where this region’s instrument record is shifted to the warm side – as if it is not being compared to itself but some arbitrary value of what CRU deems ‘normal’. As is easily seen, the seasonal anomalies spend a majority of their time above zero. The range is shifted to the warm side, with a range spanning -1.95° to +3.05°C. The 10 year average barely spends any time below zero, running from -0.4°C to 1.4°C. Not surprisingly we discover this data series has an average of +0.41°C, and a median of +.28°C.

While this one series has a significant warm period in the late 1800′s (which clearly is beyond what we see today) the fact is it also has a modern day anomaly which is not all that warm when looking at the 10 year average. Not surprisingly today’s temps are on par with the 1930′s and 1940′s.

Note: there is no data from 1879-1880 and 1888-18898 – so the values are set to zero. When I average all sets together later, I do not include these years for this series – only years where there is actual measurement data.

If we do the same adjustment as I did before (subtracting the average from each value and recomputing) the ‘normalized’ data set looks like this:

This data has an average = 0°C with a median of -0.12°C

The final data set is for the Southwest North America (SWNA):

Again, this data set seems inconsistent for a regional history since its average and median are not very close to zero. We see this massive warm period in the late 1800′s, followed by a cool spell which ends in the 1930′s and 1940′s. Today’s temperatures in this series are well below the initial warm spell in the late 1880′s and below the next warm spell in the 30′s and 40′s. The average = +0.35°C – 3 times the first series we looked at. It has a median of +0.22°C.

I will do one more normalization calculation on his set and we will be ready for the grand totals:

This ‘normalized’ data has an average of 0°C and a median of -0.13‡°C. Note how this normalized data set has no significant warming past 1946. Interesting how a slight adjustment can ripple throughout a data set.

So, how would a normal person “average” these regional mean anomalies to produce a complete Northern Hemisphere temperature record useful to compare millennium? Well, I have no clue what CRU did, but I took each region’s seasonal anomaly (when there was a value) and averaged it to create a Northern Hemisphere value for the year. Since these are seasonal values (Apr-Sep) over a large region encompassing many grids, stations, days and months, it would seem to me these are all representative delta‘s from year to year for temperature in that region. Nothing beyond averaging seems prudent. They may be to some common reference period (or not), but to me you simply average these already averaged values and you should get the “ALL” results.

Not so. The following is AJStrata’s straight forward averaging of the regional annual anomaly compared to CRU “ALL”:

Strange results, don’t you think? I have added a few more things to this graph to highlight the questionable results. First note how the CRU data (red) seems to fluctuate a lot more than my straightforward average. Why is that? I took the averages of the regional values (when there were values). How could CRU produce more variability? This is true both in the yearly seasonal values (red area) and the 10 year running average (red line).

And look where the linear trend lines end up (dashed lines). The CRU linear trend shows +0.9°C increase over the period, ending with a +0.7°C final value. My simple averaging method shows a +0.5°C increase (almost half the CRU rise), ending at +0.4°C.

I will say it again, how can the variability increase over the regional values when averaging? Must be that new-fangled math.

And now let’s consider the three data sets with what seem to be biased anomalies. As I noted I computed “normalized’ versions of these data sets to see what the impact would be. So let’s look at an averaged Northern Hemisphere average using these 3 updated data sets, and compare them to CRU:

Now this is truly interesting. This looks nothing like the NCDC graph I showed at the beginning. And if you notice the normalization has caused the CRU and AJStrata solutions to ‘diverge’ quite a lot. First off, the late 1800′s don’t look nearly as warm in my results. The two solutions look very close up until the 1930-1940 warm spell, where the CRU ‘average’ goes way up. CRU over achieves again when we look at the recent temp record average, running  a +0.5°C ahead by the end with the 10 year average line.

The CRU 10 year average ends with a +1.1°C anomaly trend, where my results show a much more benign +0.5°C (a value expected from normal warming coming out of the Little Ice Age). Is this defensible given the regional values? Did someone apply some nifty weighting (basically leaving a stealthy finger on the balance scales)?

I am confounded as to how CRU was able to take averages over regions and increase the variability, and also have three series that are clearly skewed to the warm side (since they are supposed to be regional anomalies compared to the regional ‘norm’). How convenient that both of these mathematical quirks increase the warming of modern day in comparison to yester-years.

Coincidence? How many coincidental mistakes can one group of people have before the probabilities run out?

To recap. This data was computed in 2007, most likely for the IPCC AR4 reports. It is used to calibrate tree rings, so it is probably more accurate than the highly ‘adjusted’ instrument temp records we see published (like the NCDC graph above). It is an intermediate product, and therefore can shed insight into where the data was before final polishing (er, adjustments) was applied.

What does it mean? Not sure, it just smells funky.

I will be posting the raw data as soon as I can make sure the excel sheet is web-proof. Check back for updates

Major Update: Well, well – it seems Tim Osborn admits to the artificial adjustments used by CRU (and shown at the end of this post) in a Dec 2006 email to coworker Thomas Klienen (email #4005):

Unfortunately we haven’t yet published the details of how the gridding and calibration were done. Also we have applied a completely artificial adjustment to the data after 1960, so they look closer to observed temperatures than the tree-ring data actually were — don’t rely on the match after 1960 to tell you how skilfull they really are!

Looks like Osborne just confirmed my analysis of Osborn-Briffa  for me! - end update

Since the Climategate 2 emails have come out I have been able to gain a lot more context on the workings (or should I say shenanigans) of the Hockey Team and their efforts to hide the fact the science was rapidly pointing away from  their claims of historic recent warming. Not only was the CRU temperature record completely unverifiable and unmaintained (see here), the premise behind tying today’s temperature back 1500 years via tree rings was also a fool’s errand and completely unfounded (see here).

These two revelations alone are enough to deem the AGW science D.O.A, since the CRU gridded data sets cannot be replicated even by CRU (let alone independent analysis) and the foundational principle that supposedly connects tree rings (and other biological proxies) to local modern temperatures cannot be applied. Mathematically the story is a mess.

In these posts and others I have laid out how the Hockey Team responded when faced with the realization that the science was not confirming their ideology. Instead of rejecting their conclusions and following the data, they attempted to cover the problems up, obscuring the problems from the science community. And in this post I show how bad it really got.

The epitome of this disinformation was to hide the decline seen between the modern (and most accurate) temperature record and tree rings – the so called “decline” or “divergence”. Steve McIntyre has done a great service in exposing this spin campaign,  showing how graphs of tree ring data aligned with temperature data would look under full disclosure of the results:

Click to enlarge and note how the orange line drops down from around 1940-1960. When this happens it means – as far as tree rings are concerned – the climate today is the same as in the Medieval Warm Period. At least the local ecosystem is the same.

So how did the Hockey Team deal with this most inconvenient of truths? They truncated the data and slapped the modern temperature changes (not values!) from the CRU temperature record at the end of the plot (the red line). This is the same CRU gridded data that has not been verified and cannot be reproduced.

This is all known because of the infamous Phil Jones’ email talking about how he used Micheal Mann’s Nature trick to hide the decline (eamil #3451 from November 1999):

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.

A trick indeed! Many times the Hockey Team has stated there are many independent studies confirming the Hockey Stick. Well I dove back into the Climategate 1 files and discovered a folder call “Harris-Tree”, with some interesting IDL code in it. Most intriguing is the fact many of the files (“recon_xxx.pro”) are nearly identical in structure. These are:

• recon_esper.pro (Feb 2002)
• recon_jones.pro (Apr 1999)
• recon_mann.pr (Oct 2000)
• recon_overpeck.pro (Mar 2002)
• recon_tornyamataim.pro (Apr 1999)
• recon1.pro (Jan 1999)
• recon2.pro (Aug 1999)

When I first looked at these files I initially though someone was just doing a batch run of series – until I noticed the file dates (in parenthesis). These dates are the ‘modified/last updated’ dates in the files, so they actually span 3 years, not just 6-7 supposedly independent studies. In addition, there is another infamous file in the batch called briffa_sep98_e.pro dated Sep 1998. I assume this is part of MBH 1998 study. This file has the stunning admission that the data has been fudged to make the modern period look warmer:

;
; PLOTS ‘ALL’ REGION MXD timeseries from age banded and from hugershoff
; standardised datasets.
; Reads Harry’s regional timeseries and outputs the 1600-1992 portion
; with missing values set appropriately.  Uses mxd, and just the
; “all band” timeseries
;****** APPLIES A VERY ARTIFICIAL CORRECTION FOR DECLINE*********
;
yrloc=[1400,findgen(19)*5.+1904]
valadj=[0.,0.,0.,0.,0.,-0.1,-0.25,-0.3,0.,-0.1,0.3,0.8,1.2,1.7,2.5,2.6,2.6,2.6,2.6,2.6]*0.75         ; fudge factor

In 1998 the team was very unsophisticated in their ‘hiding’ efforts. They simply fudge-factored it to bump up the modern temps by around 2+ °C. But afterwards things become much more ‘coordinated’ and sophisticated, because the next 4 years would see the application of ‘the trick’.

Before I go any further, let me draw attention to email #0112 from Feb 2007, which highlights a common Mann assertion:

You’re not even remotely correct in your reading of the report, first of all. The AR4 came to stronger conclusions that IPCC(2001) on the paleoclimate conclusions, finding that the recent warmth is likely anomalous in the last 1300 years, not just the last 1000 years. The AR4 SPM very much backed up the key findings of the TAR The Jones et al reconstruction which you refer to actually looks very much like ours, and the statement about more variability referred to the 3 reconstructions (Jones et al, Mann et al, Briffa et a) shown in the TAR, not just Mann et al.

Mann is acting like Jones 1999, Mann 2000, Briffa (unknown) were completely independent – but the CRU IDL code files prove otherwise. All these studies use the same CRU gridded temperature data Phil Jone conveniently lost. But moreover, they all go to great lengths to hide the decline using a common code base. Here is the header from each, in time order (note the period start [perst] and period end [peren] dates hard coded into the programs):

recon1.pro (Jan 1999)

;
; Computes regressions on full, high and low pass MEAN timeseries of MXD
; anomalies against full NH temperatures.
; THIS IS FOR THE AGE-BANDED (ALL BANDS) STUFF OF HARRY’S
;
; Specify period over which to compute the regressions (stop in 1940 to avoid
; the decline
;
perst=1881.
peren=1960.
;

recon_tornyamataim.pro (Apr 1999)

;
; Computes regressions on full, high and low pass MEAN timeseries of MXD
; anomalies against full NH temperatures.
; THIS IS FOR THE AVERAGE OF TORNE-YAMAL-TAIMYR
; CALIBRATES IT AGAINST THE LAND-ONLY TEMPERATURES NORTH OF 20 N
;
; Specify period over which to compute the regressions (stop in 1940 to avoid
; the decline
;
perst=1881.
peren=1960.
;

recon_jones.pro (Apr 1999)

;
; Computes regressions on full, high and low pass MEAN timeseries of MXD
; anomalies against full NH temperatures.
; THIS IS FOR THE Jones NH10 reconstruction
; CALIBRATES IT AGAINST THE LAND-ONLY TEMPERATURES NORTH OF 20 N
;
; Specify period over which to compute the regressions (stop in 1940 to avoid
; the decline
;
perst=1881.
peren=1960.
;

recon2.pro (Aug 1999)

;
; Computes regressions on full, high and low pass MEAN timeseries of MXD
; anomalies against full NH temperatures.
; THIS IS FOR THE AGE-BANDED (ALL BANDS) STUFF OF HARRY’S
; CALIBRATES IT AGAINST THE LAND-ONLY TEMPERATURES NORTH OF 20 N
;
; Specify period over which to compute the regressions (stop in 1940 to avoid
; the decline
;
perst=1881.
peren=1960.

recon_mann.pr (Oct 2000)

;
; Computes regressions on full, high and low pass MEAN timeseries of MXD
; anomalies against full NH temperatures.
; THIS IS FOR THE Mann et al. reconstruction
; CALIBRATES IT AGAINST THE LAND-ONLY TEMPERATURES NORTH OF 20 N
; IN FACT, I NOW HAVE AN ANNUAL LAND-ONLY NORTH OF 20N VERSION OF MANN,
; SO I CAN CALIBRATE THIS TOO – WHICH MEANS I’m ONLY ALTERING THE SEASON
;
doland=1     ; 0=use Mann NH  1=use Mann land north of 20N
;
; Specify period over which to compute the regressions (stop in 1940 to avoid
; the decline
;
perst=1881.
peren=1960.

recon_esper.pro (Feb 2002)

;
; Computes regressions on full, high and low pass Esper et al. (2002) series,
; anomalies against full NH temperatures and other series.
; CALIBRATES IT AGAINST THE LAND-ONLY TEMPERATURES NORTH OF 20 N
;
; Specify period over which to compute the regressions (stop in 1960 to avoid
; the decline
;
perst=1881.
peren=1960.

Now we have to be careful here not to jump to too many conclusions, but the evidence on its face is pretty damning. We did perform some code comparisons and the differences appear to be basically changes for input files, some filtering  and output files. The code of these recon files is definitely an evolutionary branch through time.

While the common header is used throughout, the programmer took time to correct it for each ‘independent’ study. In fact, by the time we get to Esper 2002 someone finally notices the ‘stop in’ year is not 1940 anymore, but set in peren=1960. In Esper this long running disconnect is finally corrected. So this tells me the header is valid and all these runs work to ‘hide the decline’ – as Phil Jones admits he did in November 1999, copying Michael Mann.

What I see is strong evidence of collusion to imply a range of independent studies are confirming MBH98. But of course they are not independent if they use the same code and same processed CRU temperature record. And all of them truncate their series to hide any exposure of how tree rings indicate modern cooling (especially compared to the Medieval Warm Period).

Where was this code used? Were its outputs used in the final papers? No one can tell for sure right now – but if someone could rerun this code, produce the graphs and compare them to the independent studies we would have a strong indication. My guess is the likelihood is very high since the code was adapted over the course of 3 years and maintained with updated comments.

BTW, These are not the only files with headers/comments claiming to hide the decline.

For example there is hovmueller_lon.pro from Feb 2007, with this header:

;
; Plots a HovMueller diagram (longitude-time) of meridionally averaged
; growing season reconstructions. Uses “corrected” MXD – but shouldn’t usually
; plot past 1960 because these will be artificially adjusted to look closer to
; the real temperatures.
;

This header is identical to a Nov 1999 version of the same program – so was the header not updated in 2007 or is it still accurate? Who knows. All the way into 2007 the team could have been using ‘corrected’ tree ring densities and truncating series to hide the decline.

Same thing with data4alps.pro dated Aug 2008, which has this interesting warning:

if doabd ne 0 then begin
openw,1,’osborn_briffa_WITHLOWFREQ.alps.dat’
endif else begin
openw,1,’osborn_briffa.dat’
endelse
printf,1,’These are gridded, calibrated estimates of mean warm-season’
printf,1,’(April-September) temperature anomalies (degC with respect to the’
printf,1,’1961-1990 mean), based on tree-ring density records.’
;
printf,1
printf,1,’IMPORTANT NOTE:’
printf,1,’The data after 1960 should not be used.  The tree-ring density‘
printf,1,’records tend to show a decline after 1960 relative to the summer‘
printf,1,’temperature in many high-latitude locations.  In this data set‘
printf,1,’this “decline” has been artificially removed in an ad-hoc way, and‘
printf,1,’this means that data after 1960 no longer represent tree-ring
printf,1,’density variations, but have been modified to look more like the
printf,1,’observed temperatures.’

Incredible. The true measurements have been ‘artificially removed in an ad hoc way‘ and replaced with fictional data that ‘have been modified to look more like observed temperatures‘. And this is in 2008 (if the comments are up to date).

It seems clear to me there has been rampant collusion across many studies and almost a decade of work to hide the data that would end all the claims of historic recent warming. The code released in 2009 in Climategate 1 has plenty of examples of this same kind of disclaimer in the code. Mike Mann’s claims of independence ring hollow in light of these discoveries.

Some has a lot of explaining to do.

Update: Found one more file called calibrate_nhrecon.pr from Jan 2005:

;
; Calibrates, usually via regression, various NH and quasi-NH records
; against NH or quasi-NH seasonal or annual temperatures.
;
; Specify period over which to compute the regressions (stop in 1960 to avoid
; the decline that affects tree-ring density records)
;
perst=1881.
peren=1960.

This file also has the correction for 1960 in comment field. More interestingly are the list of series than can be run through this truncation function:

• openr,2,’/cru/u2/f055/data/paleo/esper2002/esper.txt’
• openr,2,’../tree5/phil_nhrecon.dat’
• openr,2,’../tree5/mann_nhrecon1000.dat’
• openr,2,’../tree6/tornyamataim.ave’
• openr,2,’/cru/u2/f055/data/paleo/ipccar4/data/mann03_orig.dat’
• openr,2,’/cru/u2/f055/data/paleo/ipccar4/data/crowley03_orig.dat’
• openr,2,’/cru/u2/f055/data/paleo/ipccar4/data/rutherford04_orig.dat’

Interesting list of names from IPCCar4.

Addendum: At the end of this post I note how Phil Jones finally admits he has lost or overwritten the original raw data from prior CRU products. One of Jones’ admissions is that his group continuously overwrites their data. He tries to say some data has not been ‘adjusted’ or deleted, etc. But the truth is he has reprocessed the data so many times very little of it is still pristine. As I said at the end, this invalidates all claims to date built upon this unverifiable data. Without the ability to reproduce results, then the results cannot be defended. My guess is only 10-20% of the data is untouched. And it is the ‘adjustments’ on the remaining that needs to be audited and cross checked. Going forward there may be some claims to be derived, but nothing in the current record that cannot be reproduced would be considered verified.

Addendum2: What we may be seeing in all this is the slow biasing of ground station data as discovered at NCDC recently. Would it be true irony if the ‘divergence’ Briffa detected in the tree rings was actually all the fudging Jones was doing on the temp record? - end addendum

In a previous post on the ClimateGate 2 emails I noted how Phil Jones, the head of CRU, was a serial deleter and FOIA dodger. I was being too kind.

I decided it would be worthy to paint the evolving picture of how this man lied to people requesting data and – worse – how he lied to his coworkers at UAE and CRU. If anyone is regretting the new release of emails it is Phil Jones (though Michael Mann will come in a close second).

The emails show over time an arrogant ass fool who felt he was too pure to be bothered with criticism, technical challenges and scientific scrutiny. Time and time again he simply made things up and communicated these fantasies as fact. The email record exposes a petty and whiny man whose career should now be truly over.

Let’s begin the story in Feb of 2004 with email 1076336623 between Phil Jones and Tas Van Ommen, who is holding proxy data from Antarctica. In the email Jones and Ommen conspire to deny Steve McIntyre the raw data he requested, even though Tas Van Ommen has the data in hand. The lies spewed by these two disreputable scientists is astonishing:

Ommen to Phil: What you will find below is (in reverse chronological order) an email interchange between Steve McIntyre and myself. He has been asking for LD [Law Dome] data for a while (since your GRL paper came out) and to my chagrin, I have put him off once already, for reasons I spell out below.

…

Ommen to McIntyre: Dear Stephen,

The 18O data used in Mann and Jones 2003 was provided as an advance copy in 2003, and you are welcome to have access to it and it will certainly be placed in public archives.

….

It is this next paper that controls the timeframe for release to you and archives. While I should await peer review for a release to the archives, I am happy to pass on a copy of the data set to you on an advance basis as soon as the paper is submitted I expect in a couple of months.

Phil to Ommen: Dear Tas,

Thanks for the email. Steve McIntyre hasn’t contacted me directly about Law Dome (yet), nor about any of the series used in the 1998 Holocene paper or the 2003 GRL one with Mike. I suspect (hope) that he won’t. I had some emails with him a few years ago when he wanted to get all the station temperature data we use here in CRU. At that time, I hid behind the fact that some of the data had been received from individuals and not directly from Met Services through the Global Telecommunications Service (GTS) or through GCOS.

Keep note of this lie about the Met Services, because Jones will later claim it was National Met Services (NMSs) that were the source and that it was they who were stopping him from providing the raw ground  station data.

A year later in Feb 2005 we have email #1107454306 between Mann and Jones. Here is what Jones has to say as be plays the part of a braggart:

The two MMs [McIntyre and McItrick] have been after the CRU station data for years. If they ever hear there is a Freedom of Information Act now in the UK, I think I’ll delete the file rather than send to anyone.

Jones is really worried about these two ‘skeptics’ since they know a lot more about statistic than poor ol’ Phil. And thus begins a sad saga of deception and delay. The man has lost his mind and now is obsessed with hiding the data – or more accurately the major problems with the data.

By  January 2007 (email #1432) the FOIA requests were starting to rattle CRU and now Jones is having to start ‘splaining what the fuss is all about.

I would suggest you contact the Met Office, to get their view on the use of FOIA on this. … The data requested are not on our site or theirs (Met Office). What is there [at CRU], as you’ve found out, is gridded data where we combine the station data, with marine data (which the Hadley Centre, Met Office only have)

Here Phil begins to admit he does not have the raw data anymore to reproduce the ‘gridded data’. It is the processed ‘gridded data’ that needs to be validated in order to determine if the grids are correctly built, which are in turn used to build regional, hemispheric and global temperature anomalies. If this first step is garbage (or biased), then all conclusions based on it are also garbage. Phil knows the raw data is needed to verify the gridded product.

Phil Continues:

I suspect this request is from a climate change skeptic who wishes to try and discredit me, by finding some bad data or bad stations which we likely shouldn’t have used [1]. The law of large numbers, however, means that the average is amazing robust to a few outliers. We have also spent years of effort trying to reduce these outliers to a minimum. It would be extremely difficult for anyone to exactly reproduce what we have with the Met Office jointly produced [2].

Two more hints of honesty from Jones. First he now claims the purpose is to find bad station data. He will repeat this in later emails, exposing the fact the data is not just lost, but in really bad shape. The second fact he exposes is it is nearly impossible to reproduce his past results. Which, per the standards of the scientific method, means the conclusions must be withdrawn. This also affirms the skeptics claims that one cannot simply go to the US data sets and rebuild Jones’ claims.

Finally Jones changes his story as it applies the NMSs:

The data have been collected over many years, and in come cases we have been given data from national met services (NMSs) on the proviso that we do not pass on the raw data to third parties, but we can use them in derived products – such as HadCRUT3.

Finally, I’m not sure this data are mine to pass on. I do pass small subsets of the data onto fellow scientists, but never the whole dataset. None of the data are collected by us. We assemble it from what NMSs in all the countries provide over a system called the CLIMATE network.

So Jones now claims he does get the data from the NMSs – completely opposite the claim he gave to Tas Van Ommen. He also notes that he has violated the rule on passing data to third parties before (and he actually has done it many times before). He’ll return to this subject in a gross and pathetic way in 2009.

By March 2007 (email #4341) comments at McIntyre’s Climate Audit site have caused University of East Anglia mamagers to take notice and start taking over the FOIA response battle:

I repeat, I am not primarily interested in the dispute between yourself and ClimateAudit and will keep my opinions to myself. However when I read that people are suggested methods of legal redress against the University for not supplying research data, I felt that I needed to act.

This is from Alan Kendell who had to alert one David Palmer (FOIA Manager) to the true mess Phil Jones had created. The echoes of this concern are captured in the email traffic captured at the end of this email – I suggest everyone read this in its entirety.  For example, Phil tries to claim the gridded data should be good enough (even though that is the result people want to verify):

I have told these people on several occasions that some of the data are restricted. They refuse to believe this. We make all the gridded data available on the CRU web site. 99.9% of climate scientists are happy with this, and our data are widely used.

Here Phil is lying to his CRU and UEA colleagues. He is not being open and honest, but he will be in less than a month. Phil whines and moans a lot as the new scrutiny kicks in. My favorite line is how on one hand Jones complains about having to deal with ‘blogs’, but on the other tries to point the powers that be at UEA to an alarmist blog for cover:

Alan,

I appreciate your concern about UEA and ENV’s image, but I don’t appreciate you calling our press office about what is happening on the Climate Audit website. The website is run by a self appointed group, who ignore most climate facts. They are not interested in getting at the truth. If you want to learn more about the subject I would suggest the Real Climate website.

One month later, in April 2007 (#email #0314) Phil starts coming clean on what is the real problem – he does not have the data to reproduce his results. This is a response he has worked with David Palmer:

I can’t do anything about B. This is because I don’t have a copy of the station data we had in 1990. The station database evolves and we weren’t able to keep versions of it – as we added, amended and deleted stations. We didn’t have the data storage luxuries we have now.

Tell him the best he can do is to use the current version of CRUTEM3(v) or CRUTEM2(v) – as the latter is still available on our web site, though not updated beyond 2005.

These latest versions are likely different from what we had in 1990. Australia and China have both released more data since then – it is likely that much of this was not digitized in 1990. He will say the grid resolution is now different, but this is again due to greater disk storage available.

It will take 2 years before this failure is made public. Along the way Jones will spin out variations of these lame and irrelevant excuses. By 2009  – after a year of trying to avoid complying with the law and acting like a real scientist – things begin to move fast. Jones has another flash of openness in a May 2009 email (#4460):

We could decide to make the station data available that will go into CRUTEM4 (and hence HadCRUT4). My issue about not doing it is when will it stop. They will then want programs. As you know there are two key files (the 61-90 normals and the SD file). The station headers within the station data aren’t that well documented.

If MOHC does release the station data, I’ll let MOHC deal with all the flak. You don’t know what some of the header info is, for example. There are codes that cause some series to only get used from certain dates. I can barely remember some of it.

Again, we learn something totally damning to the IPCC claims. The station data they still have is also crap. Those problems Jones blamed on 1980s storage capacity are still there – and not due to lack of storage, Jones has no idea what makes up the gridded products nor whether it is any good. Again, under the professional standards of the scientific and engineering processes and methods, the fact the data is garbage means all claims derived from it are now invalid.

Another May 2009 email (#2117) shows Jones collating a series of half truths and excuses. Phil is responding to the Met Office as it works to actually meet their FOIA requirements

2. I have signed agreements with some Met Services (European ones) in the 1990s that I would not pass on their data to third parties. The data could be used in the gridding though and gridded products made available. I never kept a list of which stations these were though, as I never thought such problems would arise.

3. Work on the land station data has been funded by the US Dept of Energy, and I have their agreement that the data needn’t be passed on. I got this in 2007.

4. You web site says that anyone requesting the data should apply to me, so tell him that’s what they should do. I think you should remove this sentence, by the way. It is this that has opened up the issue again.

5. The data aren’t yours to release! Maybe there is no formal IPR agreement, but there is an implicit one.

6. We’ve altered the version that you have anyway. We’re also in the process of doing more of this.

7. You’d need to waste your time combining the two parts of the data and removing the stations that don’t get used.

So let’s review. In ’2′ Jones claims he has some old agreements (somewhere), but he cannot connect the agreements to the station identifiers. So he basically is saying he never could protect the date rights. In ’3′ he postulates a complete lie. All US federally funded work is available to anyone as public property. The DoE would never, and could never, make such an assertion (take it from a person who has made a living in federal contracting). At best the contractor (in this case CRU) can make a claim of IPR, but it has to do so at the time and when the data was generated and labeled as such.

In ’5′ Jones admits he does not really have any signed agreements. He has verbal or imagined agreements. In ’6′ he admits that CRU to this day does not retain copies (configuration managed) of the data has it is processed. A serious breach of data auditing and another reason his units work is unrepeatable. And finally in ’7′ he confirms a prime complaints of the skeptics – without knowing which stations to use in developing the gridded data, you cannot replicate CRU results. A major and damning admission.

So the skeptics were right. Jones’ methods are not repeatable, his data is not controlled and maintained and even he cannot replicate his results. In a July 2009 email (#1577) Jones confirms many of these revelations:

Also from looking [at Climate Audit] they will not stop with the data, but will continue to ask for the original unadjusted data (which we don’t have) and then move onto the software used to produce the gridded datasets (the ones we do release). CRU is considered by the climate community as a data centre, but we don’t have any resources to undertake this work. Any work we have done in the past is done on the back of the research grants we get – and has to be well hidden. I’ve discussed this with the main funder (US Dept of Energy) in the past and they are happy about not releasing the original station data.

Phil makes another accidental admission (clearly due to the frustration by him losing the FOIA battle). He states the work is done under research grants and must be hidden. Why? Did they misuse funds? Did thees grants come from US and UK funds – and therefore expose his team to full scrutiny? Note how is latest fear is the code being exposed (which a lot was in Climategate 1 and showed shoddy work). Is there much more here?

In an August 2009 email (#3497) Jones reaches an all time low in rationalizing his actions:

I did send some of the data to a person working with Peter Webster at Georgia Tech. The email wasn’t to PW, but he was in the CC list. I don’t know how McIntyre found out, but I thought this was a personal email. This was one of the first times I’d sent some data to a fellow scientist who wasn’t at the Hadley Centre. As I said I have taken pity on African and Asian PhD students who wanted some temperature and precipitation data for their country.

I also don’t see why I should help people, I don’t want to work with and who spend most of their time critisising me.

The man is clearly losing it, The folks at CRU and UEA are trying to work with him to do the right thing and he whines about it.

The excuse making continues in email #0752. Finally the true picture comes to light in October 2009 as Phil is forced to fess up (see email #1192):

Phil’s comment:

No one, it seems, cares to read what we put up on the CRU web page.

…

If we have lost any data it is the following:

1. Station series for sites that in the 1980s we deemed then to be affected by either urban biases or by numerous site moves, that were either not correctable or not worth doing as there were other series in the region.

2. The original data for sites that we adjusted the temperature data [Phil: for known inhomogeneities, or what?] in the 1980s. We still have our adjusted data, of course, and these along with all other sites that didn’t need adjusting.

3. Since the 1980s as colleagues and NMSs [National Meteorological Services] have produced adjusted series for regions and or countries, then we replaced the data we had with the better series.

This is just stunning. He went from pretending to hide data from a scientific critic to admitting he does not have the data. And now we know more about why.

According to ’1′ he threw out (cherry picked?) data that did not fit their expectations and assumptions. That is clear and obvious. ’2′ is an admission all he has is the output of his calculations – not the inputs. So not only is the data he filtered out loss (and why he filtered it) what he has has been ‘adjusted’. It is this “selection” and “adjustment” process nf raw data that drives the gridded products. This is what everyone wants to confirm.

’3′ again indicates he does not even hold copies of the original data, but lets the NMSs overwrite data without any controls.

What a mess. What a liar. All those people who believed Phil Jones was a qualified man of science with a clear audit trail of his work now know he was a shoddy charlatan.

If this had been data on medical trials for drugs, structural testing for foundations, buildings or bridges, or safety data on cars, trains or planes the man would be fired and possibly charged with some form of criminal negligence.  But this is climate science, where professional rules of conduct are apparently optional.

Update: More revelations at Climate Audit on Jones and FOIA

Under the tried, true and ancient scientific method that framed the work of Newton, Einstein and uncounted others the proposed theory is deemed disproved and the scientists making the claim have to go back to the drawing board. The theory is rejected.

But in the niche realm of climate pseudo-science (an area with little rigor, little quality checking, no independent assessment of methods and result, but tons of money) the answer is change the underpinning claim. Move the goal post and pretend the failure never happened. Even worse, change the conditions of the claim completely. And in the end, when you are totally boxed in by reality and facts, pretend the uncertainty you pretended was never there makes it impossible for you to see the history that is crystal clear. In other words, put the blinders on and pretend this was your story all along.

The Climategate 2 emails, when added to the Climategate 1 set, is a massive amount of dirt to sift through. On any given topic there are up to a hundred emails spanning the time period 1996-2009. Reading and synthesizing the mountain of evidence down to pertinent or representative context and evidence is a lot of work. But it always seems worth the hours of reading and noting when you step back and reveal the mess that is the pseudo-science of global warming.

The big challenge for the alarmists has always been PROVING that the current climate is unique and significant in recent times. If today’s climate is not unique, there is no way to claim what is happening today is primarily a result of human activity. In fact, it would require us to assume today’s climate is primarily driven by the same natural forces that have been at work for thousands if not millions of years. And the single biggest challenge to all of this is the well documented Medieval Warming Period (MWP).

This post will trace how the IPCC alarmists at CRU claimed today is warmer than this period in time (950-1250 AD), but then had to change their story many, many times before finally trying to pretend our lack of definitive data means we cannot say the MWP existed at all (which is the same as saying we cannot claim we are warmer today than then – QED alarmists theories are disproved).

A reasonably good start is email #0963233839 from Ray Bradley in Jul 2000. At this time the Hockey Stick is out, but the MWP is being pointed at by skeptics (rightfully) to observe the current climate is not unique. Ray notes how he is not in the Mann/Jones camp when it comes to the MWP:

Sorry this kept you awake…but I have also found it a rather alarming graph. First, a disclaimer/explanation.

…

But there are real questions to be asked of the paleo reconstruction. First, I should point out that we calibrated versus 1902-1980, then “verified” the approach using an independent data set for 1854-1901. The results were good, giving me confidence that if we had a comparable proxy data set for post-1980 (we don’t!) our proxy-based reconstruction would capture that period well. Unfortunately, the proxy network we used has not been updated, and furthermore there are many/some/ tree ring sites where there has been a “decoupling” between the long-term relationship between climate and tree growth, so that things fall apart in recent decades …

As with all things global warming, the ‘divergence’ (here called ‘decoupling’) between tree rings and modern temps means the ring-to-temperature connection has enormous error bars. And it is these modern-era error bars that make comparisons to the MWP 1000 years ago impossible to perform within a couple of degrees accuracy. Ray knows this all too well:

Furthermore, it may be that Mann et al simply don’t have the long-term trend right, due to underestimation of low frequency info. in the (very few) proxies that we used.

…

Whether we have the 1000 year trend right is far less certain (& one reason why I hedge my bets on whether there were any periods in Medieval times that might have been “warm”, to the irritation of my co-authors!).

Bradley’s hidden admission that the science is not settled compared to the public pronouncements will grow and be added to over the coming years.

In Jul 2000 Phil Jones forwards to Keith Briffa an email (#3046) exchange between Richard Courtney and Chick Keller, were Courtney nails the issue of the MWP:

No ! People attack the ‘hockey stick’ because it is uses an improper procedure to assess inadequate data as a method to provide a desired result. I have defended Mann et al. from accusations of scientific “fraud” because I am willing to accept that this was done in naive stupidity, but I am not willing to accept that is good science. As you say, “people like Mann, Briffa, Jones, etc.” have conducted “careful work”, but doing the wrong thing carefully does not make it right.

…

The Medieval Warm Period is documented from places distributed around the globe, and it is not adequate to assert that it was “not global” because it did not happen everywhere at exactly the same time: the claimed present day global warming is not happening everywhere at the exactly the same time. Indeed, you say;

“recent temperature anomalies show that, while the tropics is cooler than usual due to La Niña, the rest of the world is pretty much still as warm as in 1998.”

It is historical revisionism to assert that the Little Ice Age and Medieval Warming did not happen or were not globally significant. It will take much, much more than analyses of sparse and debatable proxy data to achieve such a dramatic overturning of all the historical and archaelogical evidence for the Little Ice Age and the Medieval Warm Period.

So in 2000 the claim was that the MWP (and Little Ice Age (LIA)) were not global. As we shall see that claim did not hold up to scrutiny and scientific investigation.

In 2001 a bomb shell hit the Hockey Team in the form of a study by Wallace Broecker called “Was the Medieval Warm Period Global?”. The study is well captured in email #1353 from Feb 2001.  I will leave it to the reader to wade through the evidence.

The Hockey Team flew into action to challenge Broecker by May 2001, but in fact confirmed many of his claims regarding the MWP, as exposed in email #0466 from Ed Cook explaining their new work to one Thomas Crowley, who inquired:

heard some rumor that you are involved in a non-hockey stick reconstruction of northern hemisphere temperatures. I am very intrigued to learn about this – are these results suggesting the so called Medieval Warm Period may be warmer than the early/mid 20th century?

Cook’s response is priceless in that it is long and full of caveats before he gets to the bottom line answer:

As rumors often are, the one you heard is not entirely accurate. So, I will take some time here to explain for you, Mike, and others exactly what was done and what the motivation was, in an effort to hopefully avoid any misunderstanding.

…

What Jan Esper and I are working on (mostly Jan with me as second author) is a paper that was in response to Broecker’s Science Perspectives piece on the Medieval Warm Period.

…

With the addition of a couple of sites from foxtail pine in California, Jan amassed a collection of 14 tree-ring sites scattered somewhat uniformly over the 30-70 degree NH latitude band, with most extending back 1000-1200 years. All of the sites are from temperature-sensitive locations (i.e. high elevation or high northern latitude. It is, as far as I know, the largest, longest, and most spatially representative set of such temperature-sensitive tree-ring data yet put together for the NH extra-tropics.

At this point Mann and the other alarmists must be salivating at the idea this study encompassing massive new data points across a large geographic foot print will vindicate their claims of only a localized, minor MWP event. Sadly for them …

It has a very well defined Medieval Warm Period – Little Ice Age – 20th Century Warming pattern, punctuated by strong decadal fluctuations of inferred cold that correspond well with known histories of neo-glacial advance in some parts of the NH. The punctuations also appear, in some cases, to be related to known major volcanic eruptions.

…

Of course, Jan also had to compare his record with the hockey stick since that is the most prominent and oft-cited record of NH temperatures covering the past 1000 years. The results were consistent with the differences shown by others, mainly in the century-scale of variability. Again, the Esper series shows a very strong, even canonical, Medieval Warm Period – Little Ice Age – 20th Century Warming pattern, which is largely missing from the hockey stick

…

I do think that the Medieval Warm Period was a far more significant event than has been recognized previously, as much because the high-resolution data to evaluate it had not been available before. That is much less so the case now. It is even showing up strongly now in long SH [Southern Hemisphere] tree-ring series.

Cook tries to soften the blow of these results, but it is clear what happened. Mann and Jones used small samples, dodgy calculations and the ‘hide the decline’ ‘trick’ to bury the true history. This new study annihilated their Hockey Stick.

By February 2002 the schism between the Mann/Jones Hockey Team and others was breaking wide open. The science was definitely not settled, as this email (#1014240346) from Keith Briffa to Jesse Smith shows:

I am attaching my comments on The Esper et al manuscript  … By trying to skate around the real questions that Broecker was implying – i.e. is the methodology removing the true low-frequency variance in the Mann et al curve and is the magnitude of the Medieval warmth understated? – Esper et al are obscuring the real message of their results – namely that Mann et al do most likely loose the low frequency variance in their reconstruction and they may very well be underestimating the Medieval warmth.

OK, so now we know the MWP existed and Mann et al missed it (another ‘hide’ trick?).But it soon gets worse, because it becomes apparent it was also not localized. In a March 2002 email (#1301) Briffa is quoted in a UK Telegraph article with an amazing statement on the MWP:

“The idea that Medieval warmth was restricted to Europe is now looking far less likely as evidence for warmth at about AD 1000 from much farther afield is coming to light” said Professor Briffa , though he warned that “the oldest data , statistically speaking, are prone to large uncertainty”.

OK, not only did the MWP exist it was global (something that will become even more evident in later emails). So the claims the MWP was regional is falling apart. This would have most scientists admitting their claims about the relative climate between the MWP and today were now without foundation. Of course, we heard no such thing at this time.

In fact, what we learn in an April 2002 email (#3978) is that a fight has broken out inside the Hockey Team about who is being honest about the confidence and quality of the MWP discussion. Ed Cook and Hughes are bantering back and forth, but what they expose is fascinating:

Dear Ed and Mike and others,
All of our attempts, so far, to estimate hemisphere-scale temperatures for the period around 1000 years ago are based on far fewer data than any of us would like. None of the datasets used so far has anything like the geographical distribution that experience with recent centuries indicates we need, and no-one has yet found a convincing way of validating the lower-frequency components of them against independent data.

…

ECS, as Ed rightly points out, clearly indicate, in both words and diagrams at several points in their paper and in the supplementary materials, that the number of sites and number of samples they used decreases sharply before 1200.

…

In our letter (Mike and I) we draw attention to a specific problem with this implementation of RCS that has a special bearing on the reconstruction of a period to which ECS have drawn attention. Hence the strong note of caution about the ECS conclusion on the comparison between the 10th/11th and late 20th centuries.

A stunning admission. They don’t have the quantity of data required to make any claims between the MWP climate and today, especially given what they discovered working more complete areas of the record.

By April 2003, a year later, Briffa emails Cook (#1051638938) and admits he is now outside the Mann camp.

Can I just say that I am not in the MBH camp – if that be characterized by an unshakable “belief” one way or the other , regarding the absolute magnitude of the global MWP. I certainly believe the ” medieval” period was warmer than the 18th century – the equivalence of the warmth in the post 1900 period, and the post 1980s ,compared to the circa Medieval times is very much still an area for much better resolution.

The reality should have hit, but some people have trouble letting go of their dreams. Briffa is responding to some pretty damning admissions by Ed Cook, specifically:

It doesn’t take a rocket scientist (or even Bradley after I warned him about small sample size problems) to realize that some of the chronologies are down to only 1 series in their earliest parts. … My suspicion is that most of the pre-1200 divergence is due to low replication and a reduced number of available chronologies. … Of course he and other members of the MBH [Mann] camp have a fundamental dislike for the very concept of the MWP, so I tend to view their evaluations as starting out from a somewhat biased perspective, i.e. the cup is not only “half-empty”; it is demonstrably “broken”. I come more from the “cup half-full” camp when it comes to the MWP, maybe yes, maybe no, but it is too early to say what it is.

Ahh! Another ‘divergence’! It seems the tree ring data for the MWP is basically a mess too, and too small to make any conclusions from. Anyone see news reports on these stunning admissions?

Well – yes there was a minor report in early 2005, at least per email #3674:

Scientists at UEA have also cast doubt on the famous hockey stick graph used to convince us that global warming is a recent phenomena, with no allowance made for the well documented medieval warm period and the later Little Ice Age.

The graph and its scary supporters assume that the climate in northern Europe over the past millennium has been roughly constant, but Timothy Osborn and Keith Briffa conclude that the true variability is likely to be much greater, and if it is, “the extent to which the recent warming can be viewed as ‘unusual’ would need to be reassessed”.

This prompted a “come to Jesus” response from the powers that be at University of East Anglia (home of CRU):

If you support Lenton’s comments then the Unit needs to have a big discussion about them.

In 2005 the blinders start coming on with the decision to drop MWP and LIA and pretend no one knows if they ever existed. Here is another priceless email (#1837) for the history books:

If you can I would omit reference to the MWP and LIA. The jury is still out (and will likely never come to a verdict) on whether the periods existed or how long they were if they did. If you want to say something the 10th and 11th centuries were likely the warmest of the last 3000 years (up to and including the 19th century). The coldest two centuries were the 17th and 19th for the last 2000 years.

…

[Original text] Crowley and Lowery (2000, Ambio 29) writes: “To conclude, a new compilation of evidence for Medieval warmth indicates 3 relatively short-lived warming intervals (10101040, 10701105, and 11551190) that are comparable to the mid-20th century warm period.

The 10-11th century (the one now deemed the warmest in the last 3000 years) are within the MWP. Just like the 17th is in the LIA. But there can be no mention that these earlier centuries out rank the current climate and therefore there is no valid claim of unique modern warming driven by human activity.  Talk about your 1984 rewrite of history! Who do these people think they are fooling?

It seems the IPCC alarmist claims of unique modern climate have ZERO basis, and this has been known for years in many circles of the community. But it is all a horrible secret that must not be uttered in public (sort of like saying “Valdemort”) for fear of retaliation (and probably lack of future funding).

What started out as a claim the MWP was only regional and not equivalent to today’s climate went on to be a claim the MWP did not even exist. But new investigations where coming in it at the same time clearly showing the early claims were simply bogus. So I will end this way too long post with Micheal Mann from March 2006 (#0071):

I pointed out to him that we certainly don’t know the GLOBAL mean temperature anomaly very well, and nobody has ever claimed we do (this is the question he asked everyone). There is very little information at all in the Southern Hemisphere on which to base any conclusion. So I told him that of course the answer to that question is *no* and it would be surprising if anyone answered otherwise.

The truth is we know that we don’t have the data to know enough to draw any grand conclusions comparing the current GLOBAL climate to the GLOBAL climate of the MWP time period. We do see the LIA and MWP across the globe in proxies, but relative comparison is impossible.

And this is what the niche climate pseudo-scientists called settled science?

Climategates I and II have done enormous damage to the ‘science’ underpinning the alarmist view of man-made CO2 driven global warming. From the exposure of the ‘hide the decline’ trick which destroys the hockey stick graph, to the realization that the unaltered, clearly represented data and results from the CRU actually cannot prove today’s climate is any warmer or cooler than previous period, to the shoddy code exposed in Climategate I, the mathematical confidence underlying the alarmists claims has been rotting away. See here for many, many posts over two years on where the math does not meet the claims.

I am here to attempt to uncover the final straw that should (in any other scientific field) provide the final nail in the coffin of alarmists claims. As I have said many times, if the claim that today’s climate cannot be accurately compared to the well documented Medieval, Roman and Bronze age warming periods, then there is no way to claim the Earth is experiencing runaway warming due to anything (let alone human generated CO2).

The entire proxy and tree ring paleoclimate effort (historic climate derived indirectly from geological, chemical or biological indicators) is founded on the assumption that the Uniformitarian Principle used in geology can be applied to biological and global climate systems. This is patently absurd!

Here is what the Uniformitarian Principle requires in order for the paleoclimate results to have a shred of confidence:

The theory that all geologic phenomena may be explained as the result of existing forces having operated uniformly from the origin of the earth to the present time.

In terms of plate tectonics, mountain building, erosion, etc this is a valid assumption. It means the complete set of physical interactions that drive a geological system today are EXACTLY the same in past periods, so we can compare today and infer the past. This is why we can measure erosion in rivers or in ancient mountain ranges and infer how Niagara Falls was created and migrated to its current location, or how The Great Lakes formed from the last glacial retreat, etc.

But it makes NO SENSE when talking about biological systems and how they respond annually to the local environment (which is NOT local climate). When searching the Climategate II emails I discovered this statement (email #2836) from Keith Briffa in July of 2009 referring to a NERC project that was/is addressing the ‘decline’ seen in tree rings so sinisterly hidden by Mann and Jones circa 2000:

Palaeoclimate reconstructions extend our knowledge of how climate varied in times before expansive networks of measuring instruments became available. …

Inferences about variations in past climate, based on this understanding, necessarily assume that the associations we observe now hold true throughout the period for which reconstructions are made. This is the essence of the uniformitarian principle. …

The existence of divergence casts doubt on the uniformitarian assumption that underpins a number of important tree-ring based (dendroclimatic) reconstructions.

The divergence of modern tree rings in the cherry picked proxies of some areas of the Northern Hemisphere (NH) with present day temperatures (1960-2010, the most accurate portion of the record) used to compare past and present tenps really shook the alarmist camp. It is no surprise why this disconnect between proxy and local temperature had to be hidden in the Hockey Stick graphs. This would undercut the entire alarmist case.

And we know from work by Jeff Condon at Air Vent that Briffa, Mann, et al cherry picked tree rings for proxies since there is no real clear temperature signal in the rings anyway. It must have been a shock to have the divergence show up after filtering for any signal they could pretend existed. This cherry picking in itself is a violation of the Uniformitarian Principle, because if the forces or indicators are IDENTICAL in all cases, then all tree rings should have a clear and unambiguous temperature signal of the same order. Since they had to cherry pick to find rings with a signal, then it is obvious rings do not respond to temp in an identical fashion (over time, space, altitude or whatever).

An October 1999 email (#1731) from Jones in response to some comments makes it clear how foundational this assumption is to IPCC:

His two points are basically wrong !

1) ‘Patterns during the 20th century are applicable to earlier epochs’. This assumption applies to all paleo reconstruction papers ever written. OK, it is an assumption called the ‘Principal of Uniformitarianism’ and we could have stated it clearer, but it is one that has been made by countless thousands before us. If it is not valid we might as well give up.

So, is the long held assumption that identical processes are in place over 1000 years for a stand of trees in a large region valid? Of course not. As many have pointed out tree rings are influenced by numerous factors that would overpower any temperature impact. These include amount of water available, amount of nutrients (which in turn can be influenced by fire, wind damage, migration paths of animals that deposit fertilizer, pestilence, etc), sunny days, canopy, early warm or late warm starts for spring, etc.

Each year over the centuries that these dynamic ‘eco systems’ existed around  trees measured for temperatures, the Uniformitarian Principle was violated in so many ways it is absurd to make the argument it could ever apply. As Phil Jones said: they should just give up and start over.

Even worse, the biological proxy itself is not unchanged over this time. Genetically each species has evolved since the Medieval Warm Period. Therefore its response to the widely fluctuating local climate has also changed. It’s response to pestilence is different. Its efficiencies in nutrient or solar processing has evolved. Everything has changed as a species to some degree.

In email #4454 there is a great debate on when one cannot apply the Uniformitarian Principle to paleoclimate factors. Here is a snippet:

>David M. Lawrence wrote:
> > Uniformitarianism is perfectly appropriate here.  Just because there are individual variations in a process,
> > whether in stomatal response to water stress or in erosion and deposition rates of sandbars, doesn’t mean
> > that one cannot make generalizations of how the process works for all from observations of how the
> > process works in some.

…

>Nope, I don’t think so.  You have found yourself forced to resort to generalisations: stomata respond.
>Uniformatarianism is exact.  Not “nearly the same” but “the same”.  If you could guarantee that the
>biochemistry and the genetics of the plant species were exactly the same, then I would agree.  But you can’t
>assert that.  Quartz sand IS exactly the same over time – no genetic variation.
>
>Hil

…

Water availability is not the only regulatory factor and is  not directly responsible for the turgor of guard cells.  The turgor pressure of the guard cells is regulated by alteration of the osmotic potential of the cytoplasm (H and Ca ion transport across the plasma membrane) in response to stimuli including ABA in terms of drought stress or the internal CO2 concentration, resulting in the changes in Water Use Efficiency, which is increased in elevated CO2 environments.  Even mechanical stress, such as that induced by wind sway, can result in a short term closure of stomata.  Mutants in the production of ABA or sensitivity to ABA have very altered stomatal responses.  This implies a genetic component to stomatal function, so I’d be hard pressed to generalize that “all guard cells work in the same way” with out really investigating each tree one samples to verify that ‘hypothesis’.

Frank

What this exposes is the foundational fault in ALL Alarmist AGW claims. Without unambiguous proof today is significantly warmer than prior periods, there is no fire for the alarm bells. There is no runaway global warming.

And if this logical, scientific argument is not enough, then let me allow one Keith Briffa to communicate his until now hidden views (email #2999; July 2007):

Subsequentlty other researchers have reported “divergence” phenomena , but again associated with high latitudes only. There is as yet, no definitive answer or even concensus that these studies represent the same phenomenon. Most suggested “solutions” (see Rob’s comments)to the cause are problematic and it is important to study the nature and possible causes further. At present such studies are hampered by a lack of recent tree-ring and tree-density data (especially post 1980). The answer may lie in a mixture of methodological and biological factors.

…

Tree-ring based and virtually all proxy reconstructions (including of the NH) are subject to large statistical uncertainty, arising out of diminishing quality and coverage of predictors back in time. The methods used to translate these data into quantitative estimates of past temperatures also assume uniformitarianism in the relationships between predictors and predictand. This is hard if not impossible to prove.

Briffa goes on to point out humankind has changed the environment, so the principle will not hold for that reason as well. But even if humankind did not have an impact, the forces of evolution and the dynmnics of annual diversity for any ecosystem nullifies the use of this foundational assumption.

Therefore, the house of cards that is the AGW theory of human produced CO2 in the atmosphere has NO scientific or mathematical basis. None.

Update: Jeff Id at Air Vent wanted something pithy to summarize this post.. So since I am watching endless Harry Potters today I have decided to preview this post with a summary of the problem and trick covered at the end. Here was the challenge facing the IPCC team in 2006:

It is not right to ignore uncertainty, but expressing this merely in an arbitrary way (and as a total range as before) allows the uncertainty to swamp the magnitude of the changes through time.

Without doing something, the IPCC claims of historic warming would sink into the noise of the measurements and be forever determined a fraud. So Briffa comes up with a plan:

the comparison of past and recent temperature levels is not as influenced by the outlier estimates.

Mischief Managed! - end update

I have been reading the Climategate  2 emails, repeatedly stunned at how bad it really is in the climate ‘science’ backwater. Talk about your amateur scientific method!

Just this morning though I tripped over an email from Keith Briffa at CRU that likely is another smoking gun that will completely up-end the Hockey Stick and all similar claims of unprecedented warming in the last half century.

Before we get to the email (and I request assistance from people more skilled in the use of time series), I want to reiterate my primary case against the IPCC claims of historic warming. The actual temperature measurements from 1850-1960 are sparse and uneven (to be kind). Apparently for the entire southern hemisphere there are only a handful of continuous records to cover this HALF of the world. From 1960 to 1990 the sample size fills in globally and the consistency increases, but it really is only in the satellite era (1990 onward for good temps)  that we get consistent global measurements of decent precision. 20 years is a very short time to make claims  covering centuries of time – even if we were using this data.

The IPCC is not using this data it turns out. The modern (and most accurate) global temperature record (1960 to present) diverges from the primary temperature proxies used to assess current temps against historic temps (i.e., tree rings). Tree rings show “a decline” in temperature in many parts of the Northern Hemisphere in the last 50 years.. Therefore we do not see in the Hockey Stick calibrated tree ring temperature signals from the last 50 years compared to previous ages like the Medieval and Roman Warming periods.

The reason we do not see this is because if they did compare the modern era to the past using tree rings calibrated to the modern record there would be no historic warming today.

This is known as hiding the decline.

My beef all along is how no one has defined the integrated error in the IPCC global temperature value. Starting from the errors of the temperature reading itself, to the errors that combine (i.e., expand)  by averaging and smearing these local measurements to 500×500 km grids over weeks, months and seasons, which then combine at the hemispheric and global level, we are looking at what has to be an error/precision level at the global values of +/- 2-5°C. And from this we find a 0.8° C warming???

The IPCC charts don’t show this formal error analysis. And now we might know why.

In email #3468 from 2006, Keith Briffa makes an astounding admission. He explains how he combined errors from multiple time series to ensure the modern temp numbers (already fudged by covering up the tree ring numbers with thermometer numbers the tree rings don’t agree with) do not fall inside the precision of the historic numbers. First he admits why he must fudge the data:

we are having trouble to express the real message of the reconstructions – being scientifically sound in representing uncertainty , while still getting the crux of the information across clearly. It is not right to ignore uncertainty, but expressing this merely in an arbitrary way (and as a total range as before) allows the uncertainty to swamp the magnitude of the changes through time.

Let this settle in for a moment. If the Team has to represent uncertainty as a total range (which is not just arbitrary, but the professional and scientific norm), then the uncertainty would swamp their claims and destroy the IPCC’s alarmist message.  As I predicted, the uncertainty in the measurements combined with the uncertainty of deriving a temperature value from tree rings results in an error bar so wide we don’t know if we warmer or colder than the Medieval Period.

Briffa admits this behind the scenes in this email. But how to salvage the Hockey Stick? Briffa creates his own new math (in total violation of all professional rules of applied statistics):

By overlapping all reconstructions and giving a score of 2 to all areas within the 1 standard error range of the estimates for each reconstruction , and a score of 1 for the area between 1 and 2 standard errors, you build up a composite picture of the most likely or “concensus”  path that temperatures took over the last 1200 years (note – now with a linear time axis).

This is kludge is arbitrary and a completely nonsensical way to combine uncertainties. Basically he throws out uncertainty that is unique to a time series. The only uncertainty that is allowed to be shown is where it overlaps with another series. So if one series has huge error bars (like tree rings) that portion that is outside the others is lost. Another way it falsifies the integrated picture is if one series is showing cool temps while 2 others are showing warm. The cool side of the error is now lost, only the overlap between the cool one and warm two shows up. Basically, he is filtering data AGAIN to select only what he wishes was reality. And he freely admits it:

This still shows the outlier ranges, preserving all the information, but you see the central most likely area well, and the comparison of past and recent temperature levels is not as influenced by the outlier estimates.

Good Lord, if you are not going to integrate the data that disagrees with your expectations, why even pretend to be doing statistics or science? Just pick your data and plot it and get it over with!

I leave it to those who do know statistics to describe how bad this really is, but it looks to be a complete crock.

Addendum: To be clear here, I am not sure what Briffa did (I do not have the picture) or if it made it into any report. I assume it did. Maybe not a defensible assumption – but it seems everything else in these emails has a tangible product out there so I will stick with it. And while I am not sure what Briffa did mechanically, I know why he did it since he says it himself. He could not use standard error ranges, so he concocted something else. I’ll leave it to others to determine the severity of this action – but in my mind it simply was another way to hide the mathematical truth that the hockey stick is all smoke and mirrors.

The Climategate 2 email drop is quite a daunting body of evidence. There is so much damning information it sometimes is hard to figure out what to post on and what emails to use to build a case of malfeasance.

My constant argument against the so called science underpinning the IPCC global warming claims is that it was pretty  shoddy stuff. If someone attempted to use similar levels of mathematical techniques and data/software quality controls  on any space program it would be borderline criminal. The so called scientists don’t even know what data is run behind any results! They throw out data that does not fit their theories and then claim to have discovered historic warming. And when this per-filtering does not work, they hide the bad data (known as hiding the decline or hiding the divergence).

To me the smoke and mirrors applied by the IPCC team to hide the severe problems behind their theories and results is the reason this entire area of science should be sent back to the quasi-science, backwater niche from whence it came. And for those not steeped in math or science let me explain why.

Humankind only has temperature records going back to about 1850. The farther back in time you go, the less accurate the record is due to a myriad of limitations:

• From 1850-1960 there is very little global coverage. Only a small fraction of the land mass has records that far back, and land only represents 30% of the surface of Earth. There is nothing ‘global’ in land based measurements from this period.
• Measurements are inconsistent and full of error. To get a daily temperature (high, low, median) you need to take regular measurements at the same time of day at each site, using the same measuring device. If you don’t repeat the measurement regularly you could miss the true high or low (as a front moves through). If you don’t do the measurement the same time of day you are cannot compare days (temps are not the same at 0700 and 0800 on any single day). Therefore the record from this period is not very precise.
• No continuous record really exists. This is because the temperature sensors was changed out from time to time, the procedures updated, the site moved and urbanization crept outward as humanity expanded and explored the world.

This means the only truly solid temperature record of MODEST consistency runs from 1960 to today. You could argue this tipping point may be 1950 or some other year, but the period of the cold war is when global sensing for military and aviation purposes really kicked in, as did electronic measurement systems, quality time keeping, etc. Since this time, precision in temperature at a regional level as only increased. Prior to it, it was a crap shoot.

Now, how do we know if the EARTH today is warmer, cooler or about the same (the Goldilocks test) than say the last 1500 years? The modern global record is only 50 or so years old. So how do we know now the world is experiencing unprecedented warming? Because if we aren’t experiencing unprecedented warming today, then the IPCC Chicken Littles cried “Wolf!” (or “Fire”) without good cause. That is THE crux of the AGW, CO2 driven alarmists case. Stop carbon-dioxide production from energy sources or we will perish because of runaway warming.The problem is they have to PROVE today is unprecedented, instead of another phase in a centuries long cycle that produces warm periods as have been seen in the Roman and Medieval times. So how did they do it and was it sound?

The scientist decided to use proxies to indirectly measure prior temperatures. A proxy is something we can measure today and then infer a past temperature. There are many proposed proxies being analyzed today, but the only way to prove a proxy does reflect local temperature is to show it follows the modern temperature record. This is how the IPCC scientists TRIED and FAILED to make their case.

The dominant proxy in all the IPCC alarmist science is tree rings (denoted as TR in many emails). Tree rings can be used in various ways, but the two dominant measurements in the IPCC science is tree ring width (TRW) and tree ring maximum latewood density (MXD). It turns out the MXD supposedly is more sensitive to temperature than TRW. But the fact is neither apparently is good enough.

So what happened when the IPCC scientist compare their prime proxies (TRW and MXD) to the modern temperature? The tree rings diverged from the thermometers. This is the big smoking gun behind Climategate 2. While the 1960-2011 temperatures rose to a peak in 1998 (and then went flat or cooled slightly since), the TR proxies in many areas showed a decline in temperature from 1960 on. CO2 was rising, temperatures were rising, but the TR data gave mixed signals and clear cooling in complete opposition to local temperature records.

Clearly this science is settled then. You cannot use TR data to infer past warming levels if you can’t use them to infer today’s!

So how did the IPCC scientists respond to this divergence, where tree rings shows a large temperature decline in complete opposition to what the thermometers were saying? They tried to cover it up and pretend it did not exist.

When they ran the tree ring only data, it showed modern cooling and the world not as warm as the Medieval and Roman warm periods. This has been shown many times and is not even challenged by the IPCC Scientists. They openly admit they truncated the tree ring data at the point it diverged, and then spliced in the thermometer data to pretend this was the result they got.

One of the more dogged skeptics, who knows statistics better than any of the alarmists, has exposed the true depth of this cover up [click to enlarge picture):

At the time, no one knew about “hide the decline”. Mann et al do not mention anything about deleting adverse data. The Briffa reconstruction labeled in the legend as “Briffa et al scaled 1856-1980?, giving no clue to readers of hide-the-decline. Let’s now look at a magnified version of this graphic, blown up so that we can see how they handled the Briffa (orange) reconstruction. As sharp-eyed CA readers FergalR and haroldw observed, if you squint closely, you can see that the Briffa reconstruction was chopped off before its end.

Indeed, they did not simply “hide the decline”, their “hide the decline” was worse than we thought. Mann et al did not merely delete data after 1960, they deleted data from 1940 on, You can see the last point of the Briffa reconstruction (located at ~1940) peeking from behind the spaghetti in the graphic below [click to enlarge):

The alarmist lied. They lied when they claimed the data showed unprecedented warming. They lied when they claimed the Briffa data was through 1980 or 1960. If they were going to be honest, their graph would have looked like this:

Note the yellow/orange line dropping way down at the end - that is the full data. The IPCC hockey stick has a false blade stuck on the end. It is a complete disinformation.This is a cover up of epic proportions.

I posted this critique about tree rings in a prior post, but the overall assessment of tree rings as global climate indicators is spot on and bears repeating:

A tree only grows on land. That excludes 70% of the earth covered by water. A tree does no grow on ice. A tree does not grow in a desert. A tree does not grow on grassland-savannahs. A tree does not grow in alpine areas. A tree does not grow in the tundra We are left with perhaps 15% of the planet upon which forests grow/grew. That does not make any studies from tree rings global, or even hemispheric.

The width and density of tree rings is dependent upon the following variables which cannot be reliably separated from each other. sunlight – if the sun varies, the ring will vary. But not at night of course.

cloudiness – more clouds, less sun, less ring.

pests/disease – a caterpillar or locust plague will reduce photosynthesis

access to sunlight – competition within a forest can disadvantage or advantage some trees.

moisture/rainfall – a key variable. Trees do not prosper in a droughteven if there’s a heat wave.

snow packing in spring around the base of the trees retards growth temperature – finally!

The tree ring is a composite of all these variables, not merely of temperature. Therefore on the 15% of the planet covered by trees, their rings do not and cannot accurately record temperature in isolation from the other environmental variables.

The proof that this was all lies is in the emails just released. Here we have numerous examples of the IPCC scientists openly discussing the divergence problem and their realization it was going to undermine the entire alarmists' case.

Jeff Condon of Air Vent produced a tour de force post on how the climate scientists fell into this trap of seeing past temperatures in noisy tree ring data. It is a long and detailed post, but it hits the nail on the head. The most important ting to  know is that tree ring data is first selected based on how it tracks with temperature. All those tree rings that don't track are thrown out. This comes under the fancy name "detrending", but is known to the layman as 'cherry picking':

Now that is quite a bombshell of an email. It is more serious than the ‘hide the decline’ situation because it gets to the heart of all of the paleo-hockeystick plots.  If you consider that they are saying any change in temps greater than 100 years in length are a complete unknown, how is it that we “know” that recent years are the warmest in history?  The very clear answer is – we don’t.

...

After all, just because we don’t really know historic temperature well, doesn’t necessarily mean we don’t know anything at all.  The big problem for paleoscience is that it might mean exactly – We don’t know! What’s more is that any closer examination of the math of the typical papers proves out the worst of the science.

They actually have come to believe as a group that deleting data which doesn’t fit temperature and keeping data that does, results in a “true” temperature series.   The problem is that there are internal and external inconsistencies in what is an obviously insane approach. Non-scientific critics of this blog have often written, “Why would you keep data which doesn’t show correlation to temperature?”. This situation is a common problem in science where data is not good.  Normally you hypothesize that X is related to Y and then use stats to prove it does i.e. does cholesterol relate to heart disease. Imagine deleting the cholesterol data which didn’t agree!

In paleoclimate, the data is of such poor quality that the standard approach of using ALL of the data doesn’t work. At least it doesn’t show that there is a measurable response. Unfortunately, what has happened in paleocliamte has been a decades long process of selecting particular series by hand and over time sorting the non-similar data such that you can average all the noise to get a reasonably temperature-looking curve in recent years. This sorting though is an unscientific nightmare caused somewhat inadvertently by the sheer mass of the government funded science.

If you only select the data that proves your theory, of course your going to get the results you want. Jeff has numerous emails exposing this fiasco, but #3622 is a true bomb shell given the explanation comes straight from the alarmists themselves:

We decided, therefore, to make use of as many of the individual records used in almost all the previously published NH temperature reconstructions, excluding any records for which an indication of at least partial temperature sensitivity was lacking.

...

We excluded records that did not show a *positive* correlation with their local temperatures.

...

As stated above, we did not actually use strongly selective criteria, preferring to use those records that  others had previously used and only eliminating those that were  clearly lacking in temperature sensitivity.

This is just a small sample of what Jeff uncovered. These emails alone could form the basis for a real interesting congressional committee.

What really shocked the IPCC team is that even after this cherry picking, the divergence showed up anyway! They clung to the idea that there unrepresentative cherry sample was still reflective of the overall climate prior to 1960. In these emails the so called scientists cling to the pre-1960 thermometer data to claim one can infer sub-degree temperature differences over centuries from tree rings. Sadly for them, this argument is circular and wrong.

In email #2999 Keith Briffa attempts to claim the lack of correlation to the modern precise temperature record is not important since there is a connection to the much less precise older record - which defies even basic logic as arguments go:

... there is no reconstruction from these data after 1960 to show. The authors did not include this as their exploration of the tree-ring density data used clearly showed a low-frequency divergence between the chronologies being used and the regional summer temperature against which they were being compared. There were sufficient overlaps between the available pre-1960 data to demonstrate strong associations at high (inter-annual) and medium (decadal scale) timescales to provide support for the value of presenting the reconstruction based on these data.

... and the strong warming seen in the northern instrumental records between 1920 and 1940 is generally well matched even in the density data. It is for this reason that we suspect the divergence might be a problem only associated with recent decades. In such a situation it would be wrong to ignore this and calibrate using all the modern data - risking serious biasing of the calibration relationship used to infer past temperatures.

Briffa has his blinders firmly in place here. The most accurate temperature record is the one from 1960 to present, and it is here the tree rings fail miserably. Which means those associations with prior years are just ghosts created by the errors in both temperature records and tree ring temperature signal.

This was a well known problem inside the IPCC circles, as this 2005 email shows. It is email #0922 from  Stefan Rahmstorf in Germany to Johnathan Overpeck:

 - the main conclusion we draw is that recent warmth is unprecedented - if you want to see this, you must show the curves relative to the recent  times
- it makes no sense if the proxy curves diverge strongly in the 20th  Century, since this is only period where we really know what the climate  was like.

This is the  standard these people set for themselves by selecting their approach. You have to PROVE tree rings reflect temperatures and you have to succeed with the most precise period of the modern temperature record.

In email #3234 the point is hammered home by Richard Alley in 2006:

The NRC committee is looking at a number of issues, but the one that is most publicly noted is to determine whether, and with what confidence, we can say that recent temperatures have emerged from the band of natural variability over the last millennium or two.  Millennial reconstructions with high time resolution are mostly tree-ring based, mostly northern hemisphere, and as I understand it, some are correlated to mean-annual  temperatures and others to seasonal temperatures. The performance of  the tree-ring paleothermometry is central.  Taking the recent instrumental record and the tree-ring record and joining them yields a dramatic picture, with rather high confidence that recent times are anomalously warm [1].  Taking  strictly the tree-ring record and omitting the instrumental record yields  a less-dramatic picture and a lower confidence that the recent temperatures are anomalous [2].

Before I go further I want to note the what is being sad here in sentences [1] and [2]. Sentence [1] is the ‘hide the decline’ hockey stick where temperature data is spliced on the tree ring data to give the impression current temps are historically high. This is a huge lie, since it is supposedly the tree ring data that connects the past to the present (as shown by the charts above). Sentence [2] admits that when you remove the dodgy temp data and just use rings, then there is no historic recent warming.

Unless the “divergence problem” can be confidently ascribed to some cause that was not active a millennium ago, then the comparison between tree rings from a millennium ago and instrumental records from the last decades does not seem to be justified, and the confidence level in the anomalous nature of the recent warmth is lowered.

…

If some of the records, or some other records such as Rosanne’s new ones, show “divergence”,  then I believe it casts doubt on the use of joined tree-ring/instrumental  records, and I don’t believe that I have yet heard why this interpretation is wrong.

The fact is there are huge error/precision issues between the measurements, proxies and claims of the alarmists. One email that struck me as news worthy was Richard Alley’s initial impressions of how the IPCC fared in NRC hearings in the US in 2006. This is from email #3733 to the IPCC team:

I would also note that one of the committee members was asking each presenter whether the presenter believed that temperatures could be reconstructed for 1000 years ago within 0.5 C, and that the presenters were answering with some qualified version of “no”.

If the consensus answer is ‘no’, then there is no way to claim today’s warming is anywhere near historic. Alley summarizes the entire issue down to this:

These considerations do somewhat affect the confidence that can be attached to the best estimate of recent warmth versus that of a millennium ago.  If the paleoclimatic data could be confidently be interpreted as paleotemperatures,  then joining the paleoclimatic and instrumental records would be appropriate [1],  and the recent warmth would clearly be anomalous over the last millennium and  beyond. By demonstrating that some tree-ring series chosen for temperature sensitivity are not fully reflecting temperature changes, the divergence issue widens the error bars and so reduces confidence in the comparison between  recent and earlier warmth [2].

Sentence [1] sets the criteria for the games Jones and Mann played with graphs to hide the decline would be mathematically legit. Sadly, the record shows the data and the team never met this criteria. Sentence [2] accurately provides the only option if [1] fails – the IPCC alarmists were wrong and we have no proof of historic (let alone runaway) warming. Surprisingly enough, the one and only Hockey Stick Mann himself agrees in email #0071, circa 2006:

I rebuked Cuffey for asking the wrong question. I pointed out to him that we certainly don’t know the GLOBAL mean temperature anomaly very well, and nobody has ever claimed we do (this is the question he asked everyone). There is very little information at all in the Southern Hemisphere on which to base any conclusion.

The truth is pretty clear now. There is no way to conclude with any semblance of minimal confidence that today’s climate is dramatically different from the Medieval and Roman periods. The tree ring data, which is the link between today and Earth’s past is proven to be incapable of such a comparative conclusion. It cannot reflect the modern temp record in the Northern Hemisphere and there is almost no data at all in Southern Hemisphere. And even if rings could track temps, they only measure a small fraction of the Earth’s surface (my guesstimate is the cherry picked tree rings at most represent 5% of the Earth’s surface).

The IPCC alarmists knew this for a decade – did everything they could to hide this disaster from the world. Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me …

Ain’t going to happen twice.

Addendum: I had about 30 emails to distill down into this one long post, and realized there were a few I needed to add. The first is short, sweet and to the point. It is email #3986 and is one of the oldest in the cache, dating from March 2001. It proves how far back the ‘hide the decline’ went. It is from Scott Rutherford, Michael Mann’s presumed graduate student assistant, to Tim Osborne (at the time working for UAE):

>
>Is the reference period 1961-90?
>

For the verification run the reference period is 1961-1990, but for
the 1400 reconstruction it’s 1900-1960 (mxd-temp divergenced problem
after 1960).

-Scott

Pretty clear what happened here. For the long term reconstruction linking the past 1400 years (or going back to 1400, not clear) Mann’s shop truncated the data due to the MXD divergence problem after 1960.  This is why Phil Jones referred as this kind of bait and switch “Mike’s Nature Trick”.

The second email I wanted to draw attention to is from July 29. 2009 and written by Keith Briffa. He is proposing a project to NERC to understand if the divergence is a real problem or not (seems a bit late to me!). Let me start with the end which is a summary of the project:

This project will seek to systematically reassess and quantify the evidence for divergence in many tree-ring data sets around the Northern Hemisphere. It will establish a much clearer understanding of the nature of the divergence phenomenon, characterising the spatial patterns and temporal evolution.

Clearly the science is not settled if this is a new project just being proposed 2.5 short years ago. What this email also does is a good job of explaining the background and why this project is necessary (to try and salvage the IPCC AGW theory):

Palaeoclimate reconstructions extend our knowledge of how climate varied in times before expansive networks of measuring instruments became available. These reconstructions are founded on an understanding of theoretical and statistically-derived associations acquired by comparing the parallel behaviour of palaeoclimate proxies and measurements of varying climate. Inferences about variations in past climate, based on this understanding, necessarily assume that the associations we observe now hold true throughout the period for which reconstructions are made. This is the essence of the uniformitarian principle.

I plan to return this foundational theory built upon the shaky assumptions contained in the uniformitarian principle. It is important to understand what this principle requires in order to apply it, and why tree ring constructions fail the tenants of this theory. For this I go to email #4454 dated March 2007 – arguments from on Hilary Stuart-Williams:

Uniformatarianism is exact.  Not “nearly the same” but “the same”.  If you could guarantee that the biochemistry and the genetics of the plant species were exactly the same, then I would agree.  But you can’t assert that.  Quartz sand IS exactly the same over time – no genetic variation.

…

I’m not sure that I agree with the use of uniformatarianism here.  As a geologist (in a plant physiology group) I take it to mean that the same physical and chemical systems will react in the same way in the past as in the present.  This is fine for sand bars and rivers, or even for speleothem isotopes, but I am not so sure about organic systems.  You have to start by making the pure assumption that the systems are identical.  We know that two wheats that look identical when growing, and certainly would look the same as fossils, have genetic differences causing variation in their stomatal response and water use efficiency. They are NOT the same and you cannot extrapolate the precise responses of one from the other.

I tend to agree very much here. 1400 years is a lot of time to assume THE SYSTEM is identical. In fact, given the range of global climate in any given year, and the multiple factors effecting rings, it is impossible to assume the uniformitarian principle for tree rings. Temperature is only one of numerous system (i.e., local climate and environmental) factors that are not going to be identical. So here again we find Briffa and the IPCC scientists establishing their claims on completely bogus grounds.

Back to Briffa:

In some northern areas of the world, recent observations of tree growth and measured temperature trends appear to have diverged in recent decades, the so called “divergence” phenomenon. There has been much speculation, and numerous theories proposed, to explain why the previous temperature sensitivity of tree growth in these areas is apparently breaking down. The existence of divergence casts doubt on the uniformitarian assumption that underpins a number of important tree-ring based (dendroclimatic) reconstructions.

If Briffa would take his blinders off (hard to do since it would negate his life’s work) he would realize that the divergence, and the need to select data that actually correlates to temperature records in the first place, are both evidence that this foundational assumption about the uniformitarian principle is wrong. I have a BS and biology and I can tell you this principle fails in all ecosystems every year. Some years there is drought, some years pestilence and disease, others fire could open up the canopy, or floods could provide a rush of nutrients to the roots. The day of the year these events happen can help a tree, or do nothing if it is dormant. MXD is notoriously only a summer time measurement – has nothing to do with winters or night.

By definition, this avenue of math and logic underpinning the IPCC science is completely and fatally flawed. And what does that mean? I’ll let Briffa answer that:

It suggests that the degree of warmth in certain periods in the past, particularly in medieval times, may be underestimated or at least subject to greater uncertainty than is currently accepted.

In other words, we were completely and totally wrong about our claims that today’s Earth is historically warmer than any other period in man’s past.

Climategate 1 hit two years ago with the release of damning emails and documentation that exposed really shoddy code and unmaintained data, not to mention the efforts by alarmists to hide their own data that completely destroyed their own claims of man-made, CO2-driven, warming. The most damning of these was the ‘hide the decline’ ‘trick’ that covered up how tree rings diverged from temperatures in the modern era. This realization, that this prime temperature proxy for temperatures before 1880 (when temp records began) was no damn good against the modern record (1950 onward), means all hockey stick graphs are  pure fiction. When your measurement stick is broken (as apparently was known for tree rings, thus the need to hide that part of the data) then the results are broken.

End of the math 101 story.

It took many weeks for Climategate 1 to gain traction in the media, and it was then followed by white-wash investigations that avoided the one issues the media now claims it settled. The truth is the  science was never investigated and was never confirmed. So people with minimal math skills (just enough to get by public school) now claim the science is settled. Laughable.

This new round of emails is more damning than the first because of the white-wash by the media and pols who have no clue how to interpret the data, algorithms, graphs, nor have a clue how the scientific process works (being published in niche journals by like minded alarmists is not the scientific process). With the fiction that CRU and IPCC were vindicated having been played, the more damning second round of emails puts us in the “fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me’ state. The alarmists’ credibility is toast given the new revelations, as is their media and political cheer leaders. There is no pretending the science is sound now.

For example, on tree rings there is this great riff from email 3826:

A tree only grows on land. That excludes 70% of the earth covered by water. A tree does no grow on ice. A tree does not grow in a desert. A tree does not grow on grassland-savannahs. A tree does not grow in alpine areas. A tree does not grow in the tundra We are left with perhaps 15% of the planet upon which forests grow/grew. That does not make any studies from tree rings global, or even hemispheric.

The width and density of tree rings is dependent upon the following variables which cannot be reliably separated from each other. sunlight – if the sun varies, the ring will vary. But not at night of course.

cloudiness – more clouds, less sun, less ring.

pests/disease – a caterpillar or locust plague will reduce photosynthesis

access to sunlight – competition within a forest can disadvantage or advantage some trees.

moisture/rainfall – a key variable. Trees do not prosper in a droughteven if there’s a heat wave.

snow packing in spring around the base of the trees retards growth temperature – finally!

The tree ring is a composite of all these variables, not merely of temperature. Therefore on the 15% of the planet covered by trees, their rings do not and cannot accurately record temperature in isolation from the other environmental variables.

If there is a temperature record in tree rings, it has error bars (i.e., precision) on the order of +/- 5-10° C – or worse. Which means there is now way to tell if today’s temperatures really are unique or unprecedented. Other scientific studies show that is clearly not the case ( i.e., there was a warmer period around Roman and Medieval times). Tree rings do not have the fidelity to disprove these other scientifically sound results.

The new emails expose a group of thin-skinned PhDs that are polar opposites to the careful and capable paragons of science past, such as Albert Einstein:

Thanks for the added info. If Mike said that my calibration procedure is “flawed”, I will be extremely pissed off …

In all candor now, I think that Mike is becoming a serious enemy in the way that he bends the ears of people like Tom with words like “flawed” when describing my work and probably your and Keith’s as well. This is in part a vindictive response to the Esper et al. paper. He also went crazy over my recent NZ paper describing evidence for a MWP there because he sees it as another attack on him. Maybe I am over-reacting to this, but I don’t think so.

Emphasis in original post. Mike Mann is the 800 lb buffoon in the whole tragic play. His methods have been proven wanting, he is the architect of hiding the tree ring divergence by using the modern temps to ‘hide the decline’  – or massive cooling indicated by tree rings. He is emotionally volatile and sometimes infantile. I would not hire him do a damn thing on any of our work for NASA. PhDs don’t mean capable – trust me on this.

The worst aspect of Climategate II exposes how the media and politicians literally connived with alarmists to perform  white-wash reviews of skeptic concerns. Reviews that would provide cover for all the alarmist mistakes, misinformati0n and  lack of minimal professionalism:

This is pretty ugly. In 2007 the NRC was setup to review the state of climate science. The usual players were involved …

We didn’t discuss the email evidence (as you put it) nor Pielke’s dissent. We shouldn’t and we won’t if the NRC people have their way …

The panel is solid. Gerry North should do a good job in chairing this, and the other members are all solid. Chris[t]y is the token skeptic, but there are many others to keep him in check …

More here. One of many damning new details that clearly provide evidence of collusion and misrepresentation. This article is particularly damning to the alarmists and their political allies:

And not only do the emails paint a picture of scientists manipulating data, government employees at the Department for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) are also implicated.

One message appeared to show a member of Defra staff telling colleagues working on climate science to give the government a ‘strong message’.

The emails paint a clear picture of scientists selectively using data, and colluding with politicians to misuse scientific information.

[H/T reader Frogg1] 

What is important to remember here is that alarmists want to stop humanity’s evolution and industrial progress. The long for a Luddite-like world where humanity has no modern conveniences (conveniences which protect nature from our consumption, trash and biowaste). Alarmists want to pick the pockets of the world to fund their naive fictions.

Skeptics actually promote a balanced and sane approach to continuing the industrial evolution in a manner that support humanity but protects nature. And they do not do it for $$$. Most of us skeptics do this on our own and without compensation or promise of compensation. So if the average person wants to decide who is truly on their side, remember skeptics don’t want to stop modernizing food production, waste treatment, medicine, housing, transportation, standard of living, etc. It is the alarmists’ who want to limit, stop or undo these things.

Update: More damning of the Mann:

The new emails show that Bradley thought that this series was, to use the technical term preferred by climate scientists, “crap” and should not be used in multiproxy studies – an issue raised by Bradley in connection with Mann et al (EOS 2003) – their attack on Soon and Baliunas 2003.

Needless to say, Bradley did not publish a comment criticizing the use of this series. It has subsequently been used over and over again in IPCC multiproxy studies, commencing with Mann and Jones 2003. In my post a few years ago, I observed that it was, in fact, “the most heavily-weighted contributor to Mann and Jones [2003] … The Yang composite and the North American PC1 (bristlecones) dominate the Mann and Jones [2003] reconstruction, making other series essentially irrelevant.”

Crap in, crap out.

Update: BBC and CRU censored skeptics so the Green Message could not be discovered to be based on shoddy science, shoddy code, lost data, lousy statistics, hyped results (0.8° C warming in a century, when each day we experience 10-20 times that from morning to noon):, etc:

The emails – part of a trove of more than 5,200 messages that appear to have been stolen from computers at the University of East Anglia – shed light for the first time on an incestuous web of interlocking relationships between BBC journalists and the university’s scientists, which goes back more than a decade.

They show that University staff vetted BBC scripts, used their contacts at the Corporation to stop sceptics being interviewed and were consulted about how the broadcaster should alter its programme output.

Like I said, after the white washes, this is even more damning because clearly all those investigations FAILED!

Update: About that crappy code and unmaintained data the purports to detect warming, we have this gem:

Here’s my problem with all of this, Dr. Jones. You tried out a variety of claimed reasons for not responding to a request for your data. None of them were even remotely true. They were all intended to hide the fact that you didn’t know where the data was. Dave clearly spelled out the problem: “we don’t know which data belongs to which stations, right?”

You claimed that the data was out there on the web somewhere. You claimed you couldn’t send any of it because of restrictions on a few datasets. You claimed it came from GHCN, then you said from NCAR, but you couldn’t say exactly where.

You gave lots and lots of explanations to me, everything except the truth—that your records were in such disarray that you could not fulfill my request. It is clear now from the Climategate emails that some records were there, some were missing, the lists were not up to date, there was orphan data, some stations had multiple sets of data, some data was only identified by folder not by filename, you didn’t know which data might have been covered by confidentiality agreements, and the provenance of some datasets could not be established.

The alamrists’ theory about the end of civilization as we know is based on this lost data? Really?

[Make sure to checkout the link behind the image above for the back story here]

Phil Jones of CRU is one cocky SOB. He freely admits to avoiding FOIA request by deleting emails in at least one email just released in Climategate II. In email <0021>, which is a response from one Manola Brunet to something Jones sent previously, we have this Jones statement at the end:

Hola Manola,
I’ve saved emails at CRU and then deleted them from the server. Now I’m at home I just have some hard copies.

Dated Sept 12, 2009 this emails is unambiguous evidence (and admission) that Jones deleted emails in response to FOIA actions. A crime, clear and simple.

Then there is this bold admission in <0344>

The inadvertent email I sent last month has led to a Data Protection Act request sent by  a certain Canadian, saying  that the email maligned his scientific credibility with his peers! If he pays 10 pounds (which he hasn’t yet) I am supposed to go through my emails  and he can get anything I’ve written about him. About 2 months ago I deleted loads of emails, so have very little – if anything at all.

Update: Willis Eschenbach at WUWT has more background and a good statement of what this means – in the case of one Phil Jones:

[Phil Jones:] I do not want to make the raw data available, as it will involve more and more requests. We make the gridded data available and that should be enough.

In is own words, Jones schemes to flaunt the code of ethics and the law. Jones’ as ego issues, as Mr. Eschenbach notes:

My conclusion after all this time is that Phil truly didn’t get it. He actually didn’t understand. He was not the owner of private data. He was the curator of public data. He didn’t understand that FOI requests are legal documents. Throughout the whole episode he treated them as some kind of optional request to grant or not as he saw fit.

There is a part of me that believes this resistance was part ego, part realization down deep their methods and processes  were unprofessionally poor (face it, their code and results are crap as noted in the post and in numerous posts from two years ago and the original release).

Hard to believe this much angst was generated from this much shoddy work.

 As noted earlier we have another round of Cimategate emails (though not so useful documents) out this fall – just in time to consume my Thanksgiving weekend. I just ran across one that has a very interesting (if unclear) statement by one Phil Jones. It is in email file <0031> dated March 2003, and is a chain of responses to a paper [by Baliunas and Soon] that shook up the alarmist camp. Near the beginning of the chain (end of the file) Phil Jones writes this:

The phrasing of the questions at the start of the paper determine the answer they get. They have no idea what multiproxy averaging does. By their logic, I could argue 1998 wasn’t the warmest year globally, because it wasn’t the warmest everywhere.

With their LIA being 1300-1900 and their MWP 800-1300, there appears (at my quick first reading) no discussion of  synchroneity of the cool/warm periods. Even with the instrumental record, the early and late 20th century warming periods are only significant locally at between 10-20% of grid boxes.

Writing this I am becoming more convinced we should do something – even if this is just  to state once and for all what we mean by the LIA and MWP. I think the skeptics will use  this paper to their own ends and it will set paleo back a number of years if it goes  unchallenged.

This is a pretty damning admission – though I have to admit it is hard to parse Jones’ writing at times. If you look at any variant of the infamous Hockey Stick graph you see two sets of data. One is the instrument record (which is NOT raw data but raw data that has been processed and cleaned by alarmists) and then the paleo-record from proxies such as tree rings (see below from Wikipedia).

The black line is the so called modern warming, the thing everyone claims is runaway warming from human generated CO2. But what Jones is admitting is that at the grid (i.e. local level) there is no warming at 80% of the grids. This black line summary hides a lot of important details. You only see warming only at the regional, hemispheric and global levels – where the data has been rinsed and massaged with so many unproven assumptions its error bars are massive (see here for my latest post on error and precision). Locally (e.g., America) there has been no warming, and none is expected to show up for decades (according to CRU, GISS, etc).

This is quite damning if true. We know that many areas of the Earth are NOT showing warming, and in fact are showing cooling. Even CRU agrees (email <0003> from Briffa to Bradly on Nov 13, 2000):

The bottom line is that if you show the annual map in the Synthesis paper, there are quite a few areas that have not warmed. Incidentally, the significant trends are indicated as areas enclosed in black lines, and southern Greenland and the oceans to the east of it have clearly cooled (though most boxes are NOT significant. Other cooling areas are extreme south east USA; west central South America; east central Africa and south east China. Probably 95 per cent of the area with data has warmed though.  If you just plug in all areas with at least 25 years coverage , very large areas of the map cool.

Good lord, even the data was not ‘settled’ – just spun by snake oil salesmen like Mann, et al. Clearly Congress should investigate, and the EPA should be suspended from any action (new or old) until this gets sorted out.