The Dog Ate my Data

Don’t fall for the MSM trick of trying to say the emails are harmless or insignificant or for Al Gore’s “misstatement” that they are ten years old. These emails discuss amongst other things, alteration of scientific data, and illegal deletion of data to avoid FOI demands. The most recent emails are dated October 2009. Just for a taste let us look at the notorious statement by Prof Phil Jones above on Dr Costella’s site. Commentary is by Dr Costella. Remember these people produced the data and graphs that fed straight into the IPCC reports. The IPCC was aware of what was going on or at least that there was a problem with the data because they wanted it fixed.

“September 22, 1999: email 0938018124

...In other words, tree rings had been proved to be completely unreliable thermometers.

It is with this scandal in mind that Keith Briffa writes to writes to Mike Mann, Phil Jones, Tom Karl, and Chris Folland, expression severe reservations about their contribution to the next Report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, at that time in the revision stages:

“I know there is pressure to present a nice tidy story as regards ‘apparent unprecedented warming in a thousand years or more in the [temperature] proxy data’ but in reality the situation is not quite so simple. We don’t have a lot of [temperature] proxies that come right up to [today] and those that do (at least a significant number of tree proxies) [have] some unexpected changes in response that do not match the recent warming. I do not think it wise that this issue be ignored in the chapter.”

That is an understatement! Indeed, Briffa states his key opinion even more clearly:

“I believe that the recent warmth was probably matched about 1000 years ago.”

This is a remarkable statement, which undermines the entire argument propounded by Briffa and his colleagues that global warming was “unprecedented”.

Mike Mann responds to this catastrophic development:

“[I w]alked into this hornet’s nest this morning! Keith and Phil [Jones] have both raised some very good points. And I should point out that Chris [Folland], through no fault of his own, but probably through me not conveying my thoughts very clearly to the others, definitely overstates any singular confidence I have in my own (Mann [and coworkers]) [results].”

In other words, Mann has no confidence in his own results!

Mann now engineers what became the infamous “green graph”—the green tree-ring line in the graph in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Report that mysteriously passes behind the other lines at the year 1961—and never emerges on the other side. First, he needs to fiddle the data, to make sure that the lines all cross at right place:

“I am perfectly amenable to keeping Keith’s series in the [graph], and can ask Ian Macadam (Chris?) to add it to the [graph] he has been preparing (nobody liked my own color [and] [graph]ing conventions so I’ve given up doing this myself). The key thing is making sure the [lines] are vertically aligned in a reasonable way. I had been using the entire 20th century, but in the case of Keith’s, we need to align the first half of the 20th century w[ith] the corresponding [average] values of the other [lines], due to the late 20th century decline.”

Satisfied with that solution, he then turns to the problem of that bothersome “late 20th century decline”:

“So if Chris and Tom (?) are ok with this, I would be happy to add Keith’s [line] [to the graph]. That having been said, it does raise a conundrum: We demonstrate […] that the major discrepancies between Phil’s and our [line] can be explained in terms of [statistical excuses]. But that explanation certainly can’t rectify why Keith’s [data], which has similar [properties] to Phil’s [data], differs in large part in exactly the opposite direction that Phil’s does from ours. This is the problem we all picked up on[—]everyone in the room at [the] I[ntergovernmental] P[anel on] C[limate] C[hange] was in agreement that this was a problem and a potential distraction/detraction from the reasonably con[s]ensus viewpoint we’d like to show w[ith] the Jones [and coworkers] and Mann [and coworkers] [results].”

In other words, there was no consensus at all at the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change—other than the participants’ universal agreement that there was a problem. Mann is here telling us, in his own words, that there was an agenda to present a “consensus viewpoint”, that simply didn’t exist in reality.

Mann now buries himself, by explaining what they should have done:

“So, if we show Keith’s [line] in this plot, we have to comment that “something else” is responsible for the discrepancies in this case. Perhaps Keith can help us out a bit by explaining the processing that went into the [data] and the potential factors that might lead to it being “warmer” than the Jones [and coworkers] and Mann [and coworkers] series? We would need to put in a few words in this regard. Otherwise, the skeptics [would] have a[] field day casting doubt on our ability to understand the factors that influence these estimates and, thus, can undermine faith in the []estimates [from paleological data]. I don’t think that doubt is scientifically justified, and I’d hate to be the one to have to give it fodder!”

In other words, Mann believes that all the lines should agree, but the actual data says otherwise; and he is loathe to give that “fodder” to the critics. He tries to pressure Briffa to come up with excuses why his data might not agree with the others.

Of course, we know that, ultimately, he gave up on this impossible task, and the troublesome “decline” was removed by an amazing technique, heretofore unknown in the history of science: white-out!

November 16, 1999: email 0942777075

That background now paves the way to our understanding the historic email that generations of schoolchildren to come will study as the catchphrase of the greatest scientific fraud in the history of mankind:

Phil Jones to Ray Bradley, Mike Mann, Malcolm Hughes, Keith Briffa, and Tim Osborn, regarding a diagram for a World Meteorological Organization Statement:

“I’ve just completed Mike’s Nature trick of adding in the real temp[erature]s to each series for the last 20 years (ie from 1981 onwards) a[n]d from 1961 for Keith’s to hide the decline.”

Those thirty-three words summarize the hoax so magnificently succinctly that the Nobel Committee should consider retrieving their Peace Prize from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and Al Gore, and re-issuing it as a Literature Prize to Phil Jones.

This email was sent less than two months after the one analyzed above. Clearly, Mike Mann’s problems with Keith Briffa’s data—that it didn’t agree with the real temperature measurements from 1961 onwards—had by this time spread to the data for the other “temperature proxies”, albeit only from 1981 onwards. Jones reveals that Mann did not address this problem by making honest note of it in the paper that he and his co-authors pubished in Nature, but rather by fraudulently substituting the real temperature data into the graphs, for the past twenty or forty years as required.
That Mann did so would, in and of itself, disqualify him and all of his research from any future consideration in the annals of science; but here we have the other leader of the field, Phil Jones, bragging that he admired the “trick” so much that he adopted it himself. Moreover, his email was sent to the major players who dominated this field. It is the silence of these conspirators over the intervening decade that has forever damned the field of “climate science” to a state of irreversible ignominy...”

Now that you have read and understood that, go to another very thorough analysis of these few emails (there are a thousand more to deal with in total) found here by Steve McIntyre.

I hope you enjoy Dr Costella’s resource as much as I have as well as Steve McIntyre's analysis. Steve was aware of this problem well before the Climategate emails came to light and wrote tot he IPCC asking them to correct it - they did not of course correct it. Just out of interest is there anyone that would trust any reports or "consensus science" that these “scientists” produce? If so please contact me I some expired options I need to dump.