Understanding Climategate’s Hidden Decline
By Marc Sheppard The American Thinker
Close followers of the Climategate controversy know that much of the mêlée surrounds an email in which Climate Research Unit (CRU) chief Phil Jones wrote about using “Mike’s Nature Trick” (MNT) to “hide the decline.” And yet, 17 days and thousands of almost exclusively on-line op-eds into this scandal, it still seems very few understand exactly which “decline” was being hidden, what “trick” was used to do so, and why Jones’s words have become the slogan for the greatest scientific fraud in history.
As the mainstream media move from abject denial to dismissive whitewashing, CRU co-conspirators move to Copenhagen for tomorrow’s UN climate meeting, intent on changing the world as we know it based primarily on their now exposed trickery. Add yesterday’s announcement of a UN investigation into the matter, which will no doubt be no less corrupt than those being investigated, and public awareness of how and why that trick was performed is now more vital than ever.
So please allow me to explain in what I hope are easily digestible terms.
First and foremost — contrary to what you’ve likely read elsewhere in the blogosphere or heard from the few policymakers and pundits actually addressing the issue, it was not the temperature decline the planet has been experiencing since 1998 that Jones and friends conspired to hide. Certainly, the simple fact that the email was sent in November of 1999 should have allayed any such confusion.
In fact, the decline Jones so urgently sought to hide was not one of measured temperatures at all, but rather figures infinitely more important to climate alarmists – those determined by proxy reconstructions. As this scandal has attracted new readers to the subject, I ask climate savvy readers to indulge me while I briefly explain climate proxies, as they are an essential ingredient of this contemptible conspiracy. Read the rest of this entry »
September 29, 2009 
For those that don’t read a lot of the WUWT comments closely, there has been a scholarly argument going on between Tom P of the UK and several WUWT commentators over the methodology Steve McIntyre used to illustrate the “breathtaking difference” between the plot of the hand picked set of 12 Yamal trees and the larger Schweingruber tree ring data set also from Yamal. Tom P. reworked Steve’s R-code script (which he posted on WUWT) to include both the 12 excluded and the Schweingruber and thought he found “insensitivity to additional data”, saying “There is no broken hockeystick”.
By Jennifer Marohasy
Since there has been a huge amount of interest in 
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