Hadley CRU hacked with release of hundreds of docs and emails

I thought I would go ahead and throw the torrent link in here if you want to be one of the thousands of people downloading the torrent right now.

69.1MB FOI2009.zip

thepiratebay.org... p%29





[edit on 20-11-2009 by wiredamerican]

reply to post by Shirakawa

Of course, this confirms, if nothing more, the house of cards supporting the "datasets" used in the models:

the ‘trick’ is just to plot the instrumental records along with reconstruction so that the context of the recent warming is clear.

As you may know, "the reconstruction" are the made-up temperatures used to fill the gaps in stations, unfavorable or "unreliable" station readings, or the "arctic hole."

While AGW advocates may criticize self-styled "cherry-picked" studies, data and reports, they have no legitimate justification for 'just making stuff up.'

As ever, the truth will out.

jw

I found this on a blog post, can anybody who can read Finnish confirm the story in the link?

According to a Finnish tablod Iltasanomat (in Finnish www.iltasanomat.fi...), Atte Korhola, professor of environmental change at the University of Helsinki says that the mails and documents are real. The text reads, e.g.: “Professor Korhola knows personally the people mentioned in the mails. He has gone through the posts during Friday and says he is shcoked about how intentional the data manipulation seems to have been.”

More coverage from The Guardian:

www.guardian.co.uk...

This climate email-hacking episode is generating more heat than light

Another skirmish has broken out in the long-running battle between climate scientists and so-called sceptics, and this one is likely to lead to more public confusion


* Bob Ward
* guardian.co.uk, Friday 20 November 2009 20.40 GMT

Another skirmish has broken out in the long-running battle between climate scientists and so-called sceptics, with the hacking of email messages between some of the world's leading researchers on global temperature trends. But as usually happens in the blogosphere, this episode is generating more heat than light and is likely to lead to more public confusion over the causes of climate change.

For the past few years, a small group of climate change 'sceptics' have been poring over scientific journal papers that report historical trends in temperatures from around the world, as recorded by directly by thermometers and other instruments, and by 'proxies', such as tree rings. Their primary objective has been to seek out evidence that global warming has been invented by climate researchers who fake their data.

Among their main targets have been papers published by research teams led by Michael Mann at Pennsylvania State University and Phil Jones at the University of East Anglia, and particularly those featuring the famous 'hockey stick' graph, showing that average temperature in the northern hemisphere was relatively stable and constant for most of the last couple of millennia, but rose dramatically upwards in the last 100 years. This graph appeared prominently in the landmark Third Assessment Report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in 2001, which concluded that "most of the observed warming over the last 50 years is likely to have been due to the increase in greenhouse gas concentrations".

The attacks on the hockey stick graph led the United States National Academy of Sciences to carry out an investigation, concluding in 2006 that although there had been no improper conduct by the researchers, they may have expressed higher levels of confidence in their main conclusions than was warranted by the evidence.

The 'sceptics' believe they have been vindicated and have presented the hockey stick graph as proof that global warming is not occurring. In doing so, they have ignored the academy's other conclusion that "surface temperature reconstructions for periods prior to the industrial era are only one of multiple lines of evidence supporting the conclusion that climatic warming is occurring in response to human activities, and they are not the primary evidence".

More importantly, these skeptics have not overturned the well-established basic physics of the greenhouse effect, namely that carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas and increasing its concentration in the atmosphere causes the earth to warm. They also have not managed to make melting glaciers and rising sea levels, or any other evidence of warming, disappear into thin air. But they have managed to confuse some of the public about the causes of climate change.

Over the past five years, Mann and Jones in particular have been subjected not only to legitimate scrutiny by other researchers, but also to a co-ordinated campaign of personal attacks on their reputation by 'sceptics'. If the hacked e-mails are genuine, they only show that climate researchers are human, and that they speak badly in private about 'sceptics' who accuse them of fraud.

It is inevitable as we approach the crucial meeting in conference in Copenhagen in December that the sceptics would try some stunt to try to undermine a global agreement on climate change. There is no smoking gun, but just a lot of smoke without fire.

• Bob Ward is Policy and Communications Director at the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment at the London School of Economics and Political Science

The original source

As you may know, "the reconstruction" are the made-up temperatures used to fill the gaps in stations, unfavorable or "unreliable" station readings, or the "arctic hole."

While AGW advocates may criticize self-styled "cherry-picked" studies, data and reports, they have no legitimate justification for 'just making stuff up.'

As ever, the truth will out.

lol, you have no idea what you're on about.

The reconstruction being mentioned is historical proxy data. They use the modern observations to give context.

You wouldn't know the truth if it bonked you on the noggin.



Historical proxies with modern HadCRUT observations (from IPCC report).

Keep digging guys, there must be something of note in there.

[edit on 20-11-2009 by melatonin]

For late-comers, here's a summary of the most "embarrassing" emails made by blogger Bishop Hill:

bishophill.squarespace.com...

Climate cuttings 33

General reaction seems to be that the CRUgate emails are genuine, but with the caveat that there could be some less reliable stuff slipped in.

In the circumstances, here are some summaries of the CRUgate files. I'll update these as and when I can. The refs are the email number.

• Phil Jones writes to University of Hull to try to stop sceptic Sonia Boehmer Christiansen using her Hull affiliation. Graham F Haughton of Hull University says its easier to push greenery there now SB-C has retired.(1256765544)
  
  
• Michael Mann discusses how to destroy a journal that has published sceptic papers.(1047388489)
  
  
• Tim Osborn discusses how data are truncated to stop an apparent cooling trend showing up in the results (0939154709)
  
  
• Phil Jones describes the death of sceptic, John Daly, as "cheering news".
  
  
• Phil Jones encourages colleagues to delete information subject to FoI request.(1212063122)
  
  
• Phil Jones says he has use Mann's "Nature trick of adding in the real temps to each series"...to hide the decline". Real Climate says "hiding" was an unfortunate turn of phrase.(0942777075)
  
  
• Letter to The Times from climate scientists was drafted with the help of Greenpeace.(0872202064)
  
  
• Mann thinks he will contact BBC's Richard Black to find out why another BBC journalist was allowed to publish a vaguely sceptical article.(1255352257)
  
  
• Kevin Trenberth says they can't account for the lack of recent warming and that it is a travesty that they can't.(1255352257)
  
  
• Tom Wigley says that Lindzen and Choi's paper is crap.(1257532857)
  
  
• Tom Wigley says that von Storch is partly to blame for sceptic papers getting published at Climate Research. Says he encourages the publication of crap science. Says they should tell publisher that the journal is being used for misinformation. Says that whether this is true or not doesn't matter. Says they need to get editorial board to resign. Says they need to get rid of von Storch too. (1051190249)
  
  
• Ben Santer says (presumably jokingly!) he's "tempted, very tempted, to beat the crap" out of sceptic Pat Michaels. (1255100876)
  
  
• Mann tells Jones that it would be nice to '"contain" the putative Medieval Warm Period'. (1054736277)
  
  
• Tom Wigley tells Jones that the land warming since 1980 has been twice the ocean warming and that this might be used by sceptics as evidence for urban heat islands.(1257546975)
  
  
• Tom Wigley say that Keith Briffa has got himself into a mess over the Yamal chronology (although also says it's insignificant. Wonders how Briffa explains McIntyre's sensitivity test on Yamal and how he explains the use of a less-well replicated chronology over a better one. Wonders if he can. Says data withholding issue is hot potato, since many "good" scientists condemn it.(1254756944)
  
  
• Briffa is funding Russian dendro Shiyatov, who asks him to send money to personal bank account so as to avoid tax, thereby retaining money for research.(0826209667)
  
  
• Kevin Trenberth says climatologists are nowhere near knowing where the energy goes or what the effect of clouds is. Says nowhere balancing the energy budget. Geoengineering is not possible.(1255523796)
  
  
• Mann discusses tactics for screening and delaying postings at Real Climate.(1139521913)
  
  
• Tom Wigley discusses how to deal with the advent of FoI law in UK. Jones says use IPR argument to hold onto code. Says data is covered by agreements with outsiders and that CRU will be "hiding behind them".(1106338806)
  
  
• Overpeck has no recollection of saying that he wanted to "get rid of the Medieval Warm Period". Thinks he may have been quoted out of context.(1206628118)
  
  
• Mann launches RealClimate to the scientific community.(1102687002)
  
  
• Santer complaining about FoI requests from McIntyre. Says he expects support of Lawrence Livermore Lab management. Jones says that once support staff at CRU realised the kind of people the scientists were dealing with they became very supportive. Says the VC [vice chancellor] knows what is going on (in one case).(1228330629)
  
  
• Rob Wilson concerned about upsetting Mann in a manuscript. Says he needs to word things diplomatically.(1140554230)
  
  
• Briffa says he is sick to death of Mann claiming his reconstruction is tropical because it has a few poorly temp sensitive tropical proxies. Says he should regress these against something else like the "increasing trend of self-opinionated verbiage" he produces. Ed Cook agrees with problems.(1024334440)

Source, will probably be updated later

reply to post by SunnyDee


From the BBC: news.bbc.co.uk...

The CRU has been repeatedly asked to publish the entire data set from which it compiled an important grid-based record of global temperatures.

It says it will publish full details when it has clearance from all the world's meteorological offices whose permission is needed.

But speaking to my source at the CRU, it is also clear that the unit has been dragged down by what it considers to be nit-picking and unreasonable demands for data - and that there is personal animus against their intellectual rivals.

Now this sort of hostility is nothing new in academia - but the revelations come at a sensitive time as the world's nations gather for the climate meeting in Copenhagen.

My CRU source points out that its unpublished full data set is almost identical to the ones at the National Climatic Data Center and the Goddard Institute of Space Studies.

Both of these are in the US, where there are no restrictions on publication. The CRU view is that when the sceptics see the full data in due course they will be very disappointed.

As I've said previously, you have to read into these more than taking the emails literally. The context is unknown from the emails alone.

As the source states from the bbc, there's lots of reasons why the FOI has been delayed, just like I said there would be a few posts back.

There's still a few more unanswered quesions about this matter, although I'm still confident they'll be answered adequately in due course.


[edit on 20-11-2009 by john124]

Originally posted by Shirakawa
I found this on a blog post, can anybody who can read Finnish confirm the story in the link?

According to a Finnish tablod Iltasanomat (in Finnish www.iltasanomat.fi...), Atte Korhola, professor of environmental change at the University of Helsinki says that the mails and documents are real. The text reads, e.g.: “Professor Korhola knows personally the people mentioned in the mails. He has gone through the posts during Friday and says he is shcoked about how intentional the data manipulation seems to have been.”

here ya go

Helsinki University professor of environmental change, Atte Korhola's shock news that the climate scientists of the alleged distortion of the coordinated based on genuine emails.

Tietokonehakkerit have today announced their world's leading climate research centers belonging to East Anglia climate research unit (CRU) exported by e-mail system messages.

Great deal of commotion on the Internet at the moment violently that the messages refer to tamper with extensive research. It would have been scientific results appear to show that the Earth has warmed.

Professor of Korhola has known personally messages to the people. He has had emails from Friday through time and is shocked by the turning of the data seems to have been so informed.

CRU investigators have been an integral part of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change IPCC reports.

BBC interviews with security experts suspect that there may be information warfare prior to the escalation of the Copenhagen Climate Conference.

Originally posted by Shirakawa
I found this on a blog post, can anybody who can read Finnish confirm the story in the link?

According to a Finnish tablod Iltasanomat (in Finnish www.iltasanomat.fi...), Atte Korhola, professor of environmental change at the University of Helsinki says that the mails and documents are real. The text reads, e.g.: “Professor Korhola knows personally the people mentioned in the mails. He has gone through the posts during Friday and says he is shcoked about how intentional the data manipulation seems to have been.”

Confirmed! The above translation is indeed correct. I want to also add that the University of Helsinki is well respected university so this news is to be taken seriously.

I cant eat that post. Iltasanomat is as far as I know a gossip magazine.

But Atte Korhola is high repute scientist.
www.helsinki.fi...

Hmm...this could be big. IF we can trust what the Iltasanomat wrotes.


[edit on 20-11-2009 by northwoods]

reply to post by john124


"As the source states from the bbc, there's lots of reasons why the FOI has been delayed, just like I said there would be a few posts back.

There's still a few more unanswered quesions about this matter, although I'm still confident they'll be answered adequately in due course" -john124

You seem very confident indeed. Are you one of the players? Well, time will tell. I need some popcorn.

[edit on 20-11-2009 by SunnyDee]

Don't put too much stock in it yet, it could very easily be a trick to discredit people critical of AGW. With the Dopenhagen pep rally coming up the timing on this is interesting. This is an awesome coup against the rise of the scientific dictatorship, if it's not a ploy.

NEED LINK TO TORRENT WITH FILES OF DOCUMENTS/EMAILS, QUICK!

NEED LINK TO TORRENT OF DOCUMENTS/EMAILS, QUICK

reply to post by Deus Ex Machina 42


It's easy to find, it's everywhere:
Google search for FOI2009.ZIP

Direct torrent link: www.mininova.org...

[edit on 2009-11-20 by Shirakawa]

reply to post by melatonin

This should be a funny few days. Noise>signal

Agreed, wholeheartedly.

And agree with the the truth of the statement: "Noise>signal,"

where "Noise" = post by melatonin; and,

"signal" = disproven AGW hyperbole.

Guess we'll be hearing a bit more from you on this.

jw

The story is now featured on Wired News:

www.wired.com...

Hacked E-Mails Fuel Global Warming Debate

* By Kim Zetter Email Author
* November 20, 2009 |
* 2:05 pm |
* Categories: Breaches, Hacks and Cracks

An online debate over global warming science has broken out after an unknown hacker broke into the e-mail server at a prominent, British climate-research center, stole more than a thousand e-mails about global warming research and posted them online.

Global warming skeptics are seizing on portions of the messages as evidence that scientists are colluding and warping data to fit the theory of global warming, but researchers say the e-mails are being taken out of context and just show scientists engaged in frank discussion.

The Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia is one of the United Kingdom’s leading climate research centers and has been a strong proponent of the position that global warming is real and has human causes. The center confirmed the hack occurred in an e-mail statement to Threat Level.

“We are aware that information from a server in one area of the university has been made available on public websites,” the statement read. “We are extremely concerned that personal information about individuals may have been compromised. Because of the volume of this information we cannot currently confirm what proportion of this material is genuine.”

The stolen cache includes more than 1,000 e-mails and more than 3,000 documents, some containing code. They were posted anonymously to an FTP server in Russia. The hacker then posted a link to the 61-MB file on the blog Air Vent.

The hacker’s message that accompanied the link read: “We feel that climate science is, in the current situation, too important to be kept under wraps. We hereby release a random selection of correspondence, code and documents.”

The e-mails, which cover a decade of correspondence, are getting a lot of attention among bloggers who point to statements in them that they say suggest the scientists colluded and manipulated data to support their global warming viewpoints. The bloggers highlight a statement in one 1999 e-mail from Phil Jones, director of the research center:

I’ve just completed Mike’s Nature trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years (i.e., from 1981 onwards) and from 1961 for Keith’s to hide the decline.

The comment refers to Michael Mann, director of the Earth System Science Center at the University of Pennsylvania. Mann told Threat Level the “Nature trick” refers to a solution for displaying data that he and others used in a paper they published to get around a problem in the way that temperature data is traditionally displayed. The solution allows for better viewing and understanding of the data, Mann said, and pointed to a post that his colleagues have made to explain the reference.

Another e-mail from Jones dated last year with the subject line “IPCC and FOI” is a request to Michael Mann, asking him to delete certain e-mails. Bloggers allege that Jones was trying to destroy data that had been requested under the Freedom of Information Act.

Jones wasn’t available for comment. Mann told Threat Level that he never deleted any e-mails and doesn’t know the context under which Jones made the request.

Bloggers allege that an e-mail from Kevin Trenberth, head of the Climate Analysis Section at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado, suggests that reality contradicts scientific claims about global warming:

Well I have my own article on where the heck is global warming ? We are asking that here in Boulder where we have broken records the past two days for the coldest days on record. We had 4 inches of snow. The high the last 2 days was below 30F and the normal is 69F, and it smashed the previous records for these days by 10F. The low was about 18F and also a record low, well below the previous record low….

The fact is that we can’t account for the lack of warming at the moment, and it is a travesty that we can’t. The CERES data published in the August BAMS 09 supplement on 2008 shows there should be even more warming: but the data are surely wrong. Our observing system is inadequate.

But Trenberth, who acknowledged the e-mail is genuine, says bloggers are missing the point he’s making in the e-mail by not reading the article cited in it. That article – An Imperative for Climate Change Planning (.pdf) — actually says that global warming is continuing, despite random temperature variations that would seem to suggest otherwise.

“It says we don’t have an observing system adequate to track it, but there are all other kinds of signs aside from global mean temperatures — including melting of Arctic sea ice and rising sea levels and a lot of other indicators — that global warming is continuing,” he says.

Gavin Schmidt, a research scientist with NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, says the e-mails offer no damning indictment of climate researchers, and that bloggers are reading information in them out of context.

“There’s nothing in the e-mails that shows that global warming is a hoax,” he told Threat Level. “There’s no funding by nefarious groups. There’s no politics in any of these things; nobody from the [United Nations] telling people what to do. There’s nothing hidden, no manipulation.

“It’s just scientists talking about science, and they’re talking relatively openly as people in private e-mails generally are freer with their thoughts than they would be in a public forum. The few quotes that are being pulled out [are out] of context. People are using language used in science and interpreting it in a completely different way.”

Trenberth agrees.

“If you read all of these e-mails, you will be surprised at the integrity of these scientists,” he says. “The unfortunate thing about this is that people can cherry pick and take things out of context.”

This post was updated with comments from the Climate Research Unit and Michael Mann.

Also on New York Times
Now I assume this will be picked up by most news media around the globe.

www.nytimes.com...

Hacked e-Mails Fuel Climate Change Skeptics

By ANDREW C. REVKIN
Published: November 20, 2009

Hundreds of private e-mails and documents hacked from a computer server at a British university are causing a stir among global warming skeptics, who say they show that climate scientists conspired to overstate the case for a human influence on climate change.

The e-mails, attributed to prominent American and British climate researchers, include discussions of scientific data and whether it should be released, exchanges about how best to combat the arguments of skeptics, and casual comments — in some cases derisive — about specific people known for their skeptical views. Drafts of scientific papers and a photo collage that portrays climate skeptics on an ice floe were also among the hacked data, some of which dates back 13 years.

In one e-mail exchange, a scientist writes of using a statistical “trick” in a chart illustrating a recent sharp warming trend. In another, a scientist refers to climate skeptics as “idiots.”

Some skeptics asserted Friday that the correspondence revealed an effort to withhold scientific information. “This is not a smoking gun, this is a mushroom cloud,” said Patrick J. Michaels, a climatologist who has long faulted evidence pointing to human-driven warming and is criticized in the documents.

Portions of the correspondence portrays the scientists as feeling under siege by the skeptics’ camp and worried that any stray comment or data glitch could be turned against them.

The cache of e-mails also includes references to journalists, including this reporter, and queries from journalists related to articles they were reporting.

Officials at the University of East Anglia confirmed in a statement on Friday that files had been stolen from a university server and that the police had been brought in to investigate the breach. They added, however, that they could not confirm that all the material circulating on the Internet was authentic.

But several scientists and others contacted by the Times confirmed that they were the authors or recipients of specific e-mails included in the file.

The revelations are bound to inflame the public debate as hundreds of negotiators prepare to hammer out an international climate accord at meetings in Copenhagen next month, and at least one scientist speculated that the timing was not coincidental.

The documents will undoubtedly raise questions about the quality of research on some specific questions and the actions of some scientists. But the evidence pointing to a growing human contribution to global warming is so broad and deep that the hacked material is unlikely to erode the overall argument.

In several e-mail exchanges, Kevin Trenberth, a climatologist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research, and other scientists discussed whether a string of recent years of relatively stable temperatures undermined scientific models that predict long-term warming.

“The fact is that we can’t account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can’t,” Dr. Trenberth wrote.

Other scientists went on to rebut him, saying that the fluctuations were not inconsistent with a continuing warming trend.

Dr. Trenberth said Friday that he was appalled at the release of the e-mails, which he said were private discussions.

But he added that he thought the revelations might backfire against climate skeptics. If anything, he said, he thought that the messages showed “the integrity of scientists.”

Still, some of the comments might lend themselves to sinister interpretations.

In a 1999 e-mail exchange about charts showing climate patterns over the last two millennia, Phil Jones, a longtime climate researcher at the East Anglia Climate Research Unit, said he had used a “trick” employed by another scientist, Michael Mann, to “hide a decline” in temperatures.

Dr. Mann, a professor at Pennsylvania State, confirmed in an interview that the e-mail was real but said the choice of words was poor. The term “trick” referred to a technical adjustment that was standard procedure and did not affect the results, he said.

“It sounds incriminating, but when you look at what you’re talking about, there’s nothing there,” Dr. Mann said.

Dr. Jones, writing in an e-mail, declined to be interviewed and pasted in the university’s statement.

Stephen McIntyre, a blogger who has for years been using his Web site, climateaudit.org, to challenge data used to chart climate patterns and came in for heated criticism in some e-mails, called the revelations “quite breathtaking.”

But several scientists whose names appear repeatedly in the e-mails said they merely revealed that scientists are human beings, and did nothing to undercut the body of research on global warming.

“Science doesn’t work because we’re all nice,” said Gavin A. Schmidt, a climatologist at NASA whose e-mail exchanges with colleagues over a variety of recent climate studies were included in the cache. “Newton may have been an ass, but the theory of gravity still works.”

He said the breach at the University of East Anglia was discovered after hackers who had gained access to the correspondence sought Tuesday to hack into a different server supporting realclimate.org, a blog unrelated to NASA that he runs with several other scientists pressing the case for global warming.

The intruders sought to create a mock blog post there and to upload the full batch of files from Britain – nearly 200 megabytes’ worth.

That effort was thwarted, Dr. Schmidt said, and scientists immediately notified colleagues at the University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit. Nearly all the material in the hacked files, which quickly spread to a variety of Web sites, originated with or was sent to climate scientists at the school.

The first posts that revealed details from the files appeared on Thursday at The Air Vent, a Web site devoted to skeptics’ arguments. Almost instantly readers there and elsewhere began posting excerpts that they felt illustrated scientific bias or dishonesty.

At first, said Dr. Michaels, the climatologist who has faulted some of the science undergirding the global warming consensus, his instinct was to ignore the correspondence as “just the way scientists talk.”

But on Friday, he said, after reading more deeply, he felt that some exchanges reflected a concerted effort to block the release of data for independent review.

He said that some e-mails mused about a way to discredit him by challenging the veracity of his doctoral dissertation at the University of Wisconsin by claiming he knew his research was wrong.

“This shows these are people willing to bend rules and go after other people’s reputations in very serious ways,” he said.

The original source

I can certainly see how many of these emails are taken out of context.

That being said, I'm not really sure what context "remove the data from 1961 so that the pattern remains" would have to be in to be considered appropriate.

Unless, of course, he was joking. But since they still use their perfect little diagrams to show us how the world is warmer, I can't imagine that all of the data was actually included.

Because, according to their own words, had they used all of the data -- the diagram would look differently.

I can't really see how they are going to get out of this -- but I'm sure they will.

Not sure if this has been posted yet, but here is Real Climate's take:

As many of you will be aware, a large number of emails from the University of East Anglia webmail server were hacked recently (Despite some confusion generated by Anthony Watts, this has absolutely nothing to do with the Hadley Centre which is a completely separate institution). As people are also no doubt aware the breaking into of computers and releasing private information is illegal, and regardless of how they were obtained, posting private correspondence without permission is unethical. We therefore aren’t going to post any of the emails here. We were made aware of the existence of this archive last Tuesday morning when the hackers attempted to upload it to RealClimate, and we notified CRU of their possible security breach later that day.

Nonetheless, these emails (a presumably careful selection of (possibly edited?) correspondence dating back to 1996 and as recently as Nov 12) are being widely circulated, and therefore require some comment. Some of them involve people here (and the archive includes the first RealClimate email we ever sent out to colleagues) and include discussions we’ve had with the CRU folk on topics related to the surface temperature record and some paleo-related issues, mainly to ensure that posting were accurate.

Link: www.realclimate.org...

The hacker apparently had the information from at least last Tuesday. That's way too much time. I have a feeling this is going to become "emails were hacked, edited, and then distributed to the Internet".

And the spin to explain "trick" and "removed data":

No doubt, instances of cherry-picked and poorly-worded “gotcha” phrases will be pulled out of context. One example is worth mentioning quickly. Phil Jones in discussing the presentation of temperature reconstructions stated that “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) and from 1961 for Keith’s to hide the decline.” The paper in question is the Mann, Bradley and Hughes (1998) Nature paper on the original multiproxy temperature reconstruction, and the ‘trick’ is just to plot the instrumental records along with reconstruction so that the context of the recent warming is clear. Scientists often use the term “trick” to refer to a “a good way to deal with a problem”, rather than something that is “secret”, and so there is nothing problematic in this at all. As for the ‘decline’, it is well known that Keith Briffa’s maximum latewood tree ring density proxy diverges from the temperature records after 1960 (this is more commonly known as the “divergence problem”–see e.g. the recent discussion in this paper) and has been discussed in the literature since Briffa et al in Nature in 1998 (Nature, 391, 678-682). Those authors have always recommend not using the post 1960 part of their reconstruction, and so while ‘hiding’ is probably a poor choice of words (since it is ‘hidden’ in plain sight), not using the data in the plot is completely appropriate, as is further research to understand why this happens.

Link: www.realclimate.org...-1853

[edit on 20-11-2009 by lpowell0627]