The evidence is overwhelming. This baby was dug up by Lubos at the Reference Frame.
Keith,
Thanks for your consideration. Once I get a draft of the central and southern siberian data and talk to Stepan and Eugene I’ll send it to you.
I really wish I could be more positive about the Kyrgyzstan material, but I swear I pulled every trick out of my sleeve trying to milk something out of that. It was pretty funny though – I told Malcolm what you said about my possibly being too Graybill-like in evaluating the response functions – he laughed and said that’s what he thought at first also. The data’s tempting but there’s too much variation even within stands. I don’t think it’d be productive to try and juggle the chronology statistics any more than I already have – they just are what they are (that does sound Graybillian). I think I’ll have to look for an option where I can let this little story go as it is.
Not having seen the sites I can only speculate, but I’d be optimistic if someone could get back there and spend more time collecting samples, particularly at the upper elevations.
Yeah, I doubt I’ll be over your way anytime soon. Too bad, I’d like to get together with you and Ed for a beer or two. Probably someday though.
Cheers, Gary
Gary was honest in the end but it sounds like he looked pretty hard for a hockey stick. Check out Lubos’s blog post. He’s also got a spreadsheet where Phil Jones has been awarded 22 million USD in grants since 1990. BIG OIL MY ASS!!
Follow the money baby.
the Air Vent 
Don’t know if anyone has noticed but there is confidential material from US based authors mixed with this also. It seems that one of the targets at UAE is an editor of a journal and has therefore had these reviews and information in their possession. Does this muddy the waters somewhat from a legal standpoint?
Scientists often use the term “trick” to refer to a “a good way to deal with a problem.” –RealClimate
And it’s also a good way to get rid of one.
I’m not sure this is any more dubious than the publicly known statements about wanting to use data that would “tell a story”.
From today’s Drudge Report if you haven’t seen it yet, an article in UK’s The Guardian about the leaked emails that is largely sympathetic to the team:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2009/nov/20/climate-sceptics-hackers-leaked-emails
So far I’ve seen little that is damning. Most of it can be explained away (maybe even honestly). “Trick” can be used in a way that is not dishonest. And trying to “milk something” may just mean that he is trying to get quality data (say, after removing noise), not data that says something in particular.
The one thing that will probably come out of this, though, is their intentional plans to avoid FOIA requirements. I would expect that the powers-that-be will come down very hard on them for that. And there will be a large movement among those people to make the scientists make all data available.
But we’ll see.
tim
American Power tracked-back with (a BIG roundup), ‘Global Warming Hoax Breaks Wide Open as Hackers Target East Anglia Climate Research Unit!’.
From: Keith
Date: Tue Nov 15 17:47:53 2005
Cc: Phil
Mike
thanks for this. When time allows we will do a response to this poster and simply post it
on our web page. As others have said , the dating of the chronology in the Urals is not
wrong – but the magnitude of the extreme years in the early Urals reconstruction were not
adjusted to account for inflated variance related to low chronology replication – so they
are sort of right that the emphasis on 1032 is probably overdone.
Anyway thanks again
Keith
At 15:29 15/11/2005, Michael wrote:
Thanks Tim, Phil
yes, I never had any doubt he’s wrong. In fact he’s been wrong about just about every
claim he’s ever made. He almost had a point w/ the PCA centering, but as we all know,
that doesn’t matter at all in the end. The issue isn’t whether or not he’s right, as we
all well know by now, but whether his false assertions have enough superficial
plausability to get traction. In this case, they might, so probably good to at least be
prepared.
I was told by a journalist Paul Thacker that his poster got prominent placement,
probably not an accident (see forwarded email). I believe that Mike Schlesinger and
David Karoly were there in the same session, so might be worth checking w/ them. I think
Connie Woodhouse and Tom Wigley were also at the meeting, but not sure…
I suspect that this is the first in a line of attacks (I’m sure Tom C is next in line)
that will ultimately get “published” one way or another. The GRL leak may have been
plugged up now w/ new editorial leadership there, but these guys always have “Climate
Research” and “Energy and Environment”, and will go there if necessary.
They are telegraphing quite clearly where they are going w/ all of this…
Mike
Tim wrote:
Thanks for this Mike. We’d spotted an earlier draft of his poster and were a bit
concerned about this receiving prominence at the meeting.
Did it arouse much discussion, do you know? Keith and Tom Melvin looked into the dating
a while back when McIntyre first raised it and were quite satisfied with the published
dating I think. Not sure what should be done – unless he submits something for
peer-review. Cheers, Tim
At 14:53 15/11/2005, Michael
not sure if you guys are aware, McIntyre presented this poster at the CCSP meeting.
Apparently, they gave him a very prominent location, so that everyone entering the
meeting would have seen the poster…
mike
can find at:
http://www.climatesc
ience.gov/workshop2005/abstracts/p-gc-1.htm
P-GC1.4
More on Hockey Sticks: The Case of Jones et al. [1998]
Stephen McIntyre, stephen.mcintyre@utoronto.ca
Multiproxy studies purporting to show 20th century uniqueness have been applied by
policymakers, but they have received remarkably little independent critical analysis.
Jones et al. [1998] is a prominent multi-proxy study used by IPCC [2001] and others to
affirm the hockey stick shaped temperature reconstruction of Mann et al. [1998].
However, the reconstruction of Jones et al. [1998] is based on only 3-4 proxies in the
controversial Medieval Warm Period, including non-arms-length studies by Briffa et al.
[1992] and Briffa et al [1995]. We show that the Polar Urals data set in Briffa et al
[1992] fails to meet a variety of quality control standards, both in replication and
crossdating. The conclusion of Briffa et al. [1995] that 1032 was the “coldest year” of
the millennium proves to be based on inadequate replication of only 3 tree ring cores,
of which at least 2 are almost certainly incorrectly crossdated. We show that an ad hoc
adjustment to the Tornetrask data set in Briffa et al [1992] cannot be justified. The
individual and combined impact of defects in the Polar Urals data set and Tornetrask
adjustments on the reconstruction of Jones et al [1998] is substantial and can be seen
to have the effect of modifying what would otherwise indicate a pronounced Medieval Warm
Period in the proxy reconstruction. Inhomogeneity problems in the Polar Urals and
Tornetrask data sets, pertaining to altitude, minimum girth bias and pith centering bias
will also be discussed.
—
Michael
1. http://www.climatescience.gov/workshop2005/abstracts/p-gc-1.htm%3Ehttp://www.climatescience.gov/workshop2005/abstracts/p-gc-1.htm
2. mailto:stephen.mcintyre@utoronto.ca
3. mailto:mann@psu.edu%3Emann@psu.edu
4. http://www.met.psu.edu/dept/faculty/mann.htm
5. http://www.met.psu.edu/dept/faculty/mann.htm
6. http://www.cru.uea.ac.uk/~timo/
7. http://www.cru.uea.ac.uk/~timo/sunclock.htm
8. http://www.met.psu.edu/dept/faculty/mann.htm
9. http://www.cru.uea.ac.uk/cru/people/briffa/
argh, cant edit comments? please cut the emails out of this and ph numbers.
#8, Nice find, It looks like the hinted at nefarious attempts to change editors at GRL may have worked.
It seems like there is something to be concerned about in every file. Take a look at the powerpoint uea-models.ppt – they seem to be collecting big bucks for revealing confidence intervals…
Climate Audit seems to be being overwhelmed following these revelations. Watts has had over 800 posts on his one thread. It’s been reported in papers and on Rush Limbaugh. CRU no longer has any way to keep this quiet, so they might as well be preparing for the “Big Lie” defense. The lie was so big so people would question the size of the lie, not whether it was a lie to begin with.
#5
Interesting closing from an email titled ‘This and that’, dated 5 Jul 2005:
Just thought I’d show my face as one of your unknown readers. I only had the time about a year ago to really start finding out what’s going on, although I knew something was wrong several years ago when I first heard about “consensus” science.
So I’ve had a very thrilling day, as I was one of the very first “ordinary” people to know about this. While I discovered your site, Jeff, through a comment you made on WUWT some months ago, and have returned ever since, you might be interested in how I (as a representative of non-scientist open-minded people out there) became aware of this today. I was at work waiting for something so opened “algorelied” which has a very usable new articles column on the right, so the first article I saw was from Lumo. Naturally, after that I went everywhere as I had already found on my own all the good sites (I do have to congratulate myself on recognizing that). So even though I didn’t find out directly from you (remember, you’d gone hunting), I was very pleased to discover, wow, that was Jeff Id.
I read quite a bit and then made sure to send the links to others, even if only one person pays attention. I guess that’s all people like me can do.
I’ve checked my yahoo alerts and nothing but my husband told me about the Guardian article (he found in Drudge). So the spin has started.
I’ll do my best out here in regular people territory.
Thanks very much to all of you.
ooooh 1254517566 is juicy:
{i edited the names}
Keith W. said
November 20, 2009 at 4:18 pm
The Chewbacca defense.
Mark
The defense is denia, obfuscation and “it doesn’t matter since everyone else agrees”.
About the only outcome I see is some support for getting responses to FOIA requests.
The MSM will yawn and forget about this and be perfectly happy to publish the next scary prediction of what climate change will do to screw up the world 50 years from now.
Thanks
William
get your own copy: http://www.mininova.org/tor/3168330
Reading the comments at RC; is it just me or has the moderation policy there just become much more liberal ? Even relatively impolite “sceptic” posts are getting through. It’s almost more like a real blog suddenly, where you no longer get the feeling you’re listening to one side attacking carefully accepted soft targets.
My dear Mr Id
I hope you are as happy today as I am.
Of course many of the emails are patently innocent or capable of a wholly innocent interpretation, my inclination is to give them such an interpretation. However strongly anyone might feel about a particular issue, it is wrong to attribute bad motives to others without very strong evidence.
Many others, however, are entirely unequivocal in exhibiting: (i) an intention to interpret data to prove a case rather than examining it to see what case it supports, (ii) a desire to keep methodology secret and (iii) a pitiful bunker mentality.
There is, I have no doubt, much more to come on this subject. For now I sit at my desk with a merry grin across my portly chops and a glass in hand to toast the brave soul who set the ball rolling.
With my best wishes as always
FB
Wow, what a bunch of libertarian turds you must be… Even if on the extremely off-chance that global climate change predictions were wrong or overstated, the benefits of acting — of being safe rather than sorry — are uniformly good for the future of both humanity and this little planet we’re all trashing. Boo hoo on your short-term stock loss — hardly abig deal in the scheme of things.
Dear Mr FatBigot,
I largely agree with your interpretation, however after reading several pages of emails I have concluded that these people are not deserving of the title or respect as scientists. While such behaviour is not unknown in other scientific fields, this subset continuously whined about contrarian views not being published – they themselves hid behind scientific ideals which they are now clearly shown to have breached for their own purposes.
There are principled characters revealed by the emails, but the main protagonists allow their own words to paint unflattering self-portraits.
kind regards,
Verity
@Brad-
Thanks for taking the time to straighten us ‘turds’ out. Don’t know when I’ve read such brilliant commentary. I humbly await further enlightenment.
Jeff,
IMHO, the person who got this stuff had root rights and probably took it all. 60Mb only takes a couple of minutes to download. If I had done this I would have taken the entire drive and every other one I could get my permission to. I think this person has a lot more. I hope he has covered his trail, because I am sure there are a lot of folks searching for him.
There isn’t anything wrong with this email. Scientists go to great pains to make measurements. Sometimes, the data is a mess. We do our best to pull any valuable information we can from it, as we don’t like to have wasted a lot of time and money making worthless measurements. It is clear that Gary is saying that there is little or nothing he can extract from this data set while staying within the bounds of honesty and statistical relevance…exactly as it should be.
Now if deniers would return the favor, we could just get down to business.
Hey,
If there was any conspiracy then it is insanity to hope that any reasonable person would leave an e-mail trail containing it. There is never a guarantee of privacy of e-mail communications. US government employees are reminded about ti every time they logon to their account on government owned computers.
So if anything the stolen documents will strengthen public opinion in favor of the researchers. They only stand to win from this incident.
“He’s also got a spreadsheet where Phil Jones has been awarded 22 million USD in grants since 1990. BIG OIL MY ASS!!”
This works out to a little over $1M per year, pocket change to an oil company. $1M would support some travel, computer time, PI salary, and probably 3-4 helpers and students when you factor in indirect costs and fringe benefits. This is hardly cashing in on climate change.
We clearly have evidence of crime here. Of course, Obama won’t go after anyone. He’s Chicago politics all the way. But there is clear conspiracy regarding the FOIA requests and likely fraud involved in grant requests based on what is revealed by the e-mails. Doubt the UK will go after anyone either.
To anyone using the strawman of “conspiracy”:
It’s instructive to see the team don’t seem to appreciate the irony of actively preventing the publication of alternative views as peers in the peer review process, while complaining that “these people” don’t publish in the peer-reviewed literature. Of course there are a few names for this, none of which is necessarily conspiracy. Towit; groupthink, cognitive dissonance, confirmation bias, circular reasoning, hypocrisy. Take your pick! You might also remove all accusations of Big Oil conspiracy to avoid falling into the same mind-traps.