When the CRU emails first made it into news stories, there was immediate reaction from the head of CRU, Dr. Phil Jones over this passage in an email:
From a yahoo.com news story:
In one leaked e-mail, the research center’s director, Phil Jones, writes to colleagues about graphs showing climate statistics over the last millennium. He alludes to a technique used by a fellow scientist to “hide the decline” in recent global temperatures. Some evidence appears to show a halt in a rise of global temperatures from about 1960, but is contradicted by other evidence which appears to show a rise in temperatures is continuing.
Jones wrote that, in compiling new data, he had “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,” according to a leaked e-mail, which the author confirmed was genuine.
Dr. Jones responded.
However, Jones denied manipulating evidence and insisted his comment had been taken out of context. “The word ‘trick’ was used here colloquially, as in a clever thing to do. It is ludicrous to suggest that it refers to anything untoward,” he said in a statement Saturday.
Ok fine, but how Dr. Jones, do you explain this?
There’s a file of code also in the collection of emails and documents from CRU. A commenter named Neal on climate audit writes:
People are talking about the emails being smoking guns but I find the remarks in the code and the code more of a smoking gun. The code is so hacked around to give predetermined results that it shows the bias of the coder. In other words make the code ignore inconvenient data to show what I want it to show. The code after a quick scan is quite a mess. Anyone with any pride would be to ashamed of to let it out public viewing. As examples [of] bias take a look at the following remarks from the MANN code files:
Here’s the code with the comments left by the programmer:
function mkp2correlation,indts,depts,remts,t,filter=filter,refperiod=refperiod,$
datathresh=datathresh
;
; THIS WORKS WITH REMTS BEING A 2D ARRAY (nseries,ntime) OF MULTIPLE TIMESERIES
; WHOSE INFLUENCE IS TO BE REMOVED. UNFORTUNATELY THE IDL5.4 p_correlate
; FAILS WITH >1 SERIES TO HOLD CONSTANT, SO I HAVE TO REMOVE THEIR INFLUENCE
; FROM BOTH INDTS AND DEPTS USING MULTIPLE LINEAR REGRESSION AND THEN USE THE
; USUAL correlate FUNCTION ON THE RESIDUALS.
;
pro maps12,yrstart,doinfill=doinfill
;
; Plots 24 yearly maps of calibrated (PCR-infilled or not) MXD reconstructions
; of growing season temperatures. Uses “corrected” MXD – but shouldn’t usually
; plot past 1960 because these will be artificially adjusted to look closer to
; the real temperatures.
;
and later the same programming comment again in another routine:
; ; Plots (1 at a time) yearly maps of calibrated (PCR-infilled or not) MXD ; reconstructions ; of growing season temperatures. Uses “corrected” MXD – but shouldn’t usually ; plot past 1960 because these will be artificially adjusted to look closer to ; the real temperatures.
You can claim an email you wrote years ago isn’t accurate saying it was “taken out of context”, but a programmer making notes in the code does so that he/she can document what the code is actually doing at that stage, so that anyone who looks at it later can figure out why this function doesn’t plot past 1960. In this case, it is not allowing all of the temperature data to be plotted. Growing season data (summer months when the new tree rings are formed) past 1960 is thrown out because “these will be artificially adjusted to look closer to the real temperatures”, which implies some post processing routine.
Spin that, spin it to the moon if you want. I’ll believe programmer notes over the word of somebody who stands to gain from suggesting there’s nothing “untowards” about it.
Either the data tells the story of nature or it does not. Data that has been “artificially adjusted to look closer to the real temperatures” is false data, yielding a false result.
For more details, see Mike’s Nature Trick
UPDATE: By way of verification….
The source files with the comments that are the topic of this thread are in this folder of the FOI2009.zip file
/documents/osborn-tree6/mann/oldprog
in the files
maps12.pro
maps15.pro
maps24.pro
These first two files are dated 1/18/2000, and the map24 file on 11/10/1999 so it fits timeline-wise with Dr. Jones email where he mentions “Mike’s Nature trick” which is dated 11/16/1999, six days later.
UPDATE2: Commenter Eric at the Climate Audit Mirror site writes:
================
From documents\harris-tree\recon_esper.pro:
; 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
;
Note the wording here “avoid the decline” versus “hide the decline” in the famous email.
===============
I’ll give Dr. Jones and CRU the benefit of the doubt, maybe these are not “untowards” issues, but these things scream for rational explanations. Having transparency and being able to replicate all this years ago would have gone a long way towards either correcting problems and/or assuaging concerns.
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Plato Says (09:00:10) :
This UK lobbying organisation has just reported the CRU to our Information Commissioner
If I remember well, Jones consulted how to avoid FOIA directly with the Information commissioner.
http://www.taxpayersalliance.com/campaign/2009/11/cru-emails-reveal-inconvenient-truths-about-foi.html
Indeed very damning indeed. Aside from the issue of whether they massaged the Climate data, I see someone going to jail over this. UEA need to distance themselves from these people immediately by suspension purely on the evidence of the FOI deletions.
For UEA to get embroiled is a wider cover-up by protecting them would indeed damage the reputation of the institution beyond repair. It’s either 2 or 3 heads now, or lots of heads later…….
Right…. the killer phrase here seems to be “real temperatures”. Adjustments are being made to give the most accurate assessment. It doesn’t even need ‘spinning’ – that’s what’s written down.
I see a striking corollary in supervision for contract maintenance of floors, where shortcuts in process can lead to less than useless results. A manager that is indifferent, corrupt, or otherwise incompetent can sign off on an eight-hour task accomplished in four hours, provided they overlook the cloud of pulverized wax particulates coating every object in the room. (too high buffing speed). Then there’s shoddy prep work or poor, perhaps non-existent maintenance between crew visits, again with bad results.
There are unwise selections of waxes, cleaners, and pads, that no amount of elbow grease can ameliorate, and greed or laziness eased by too few eyeballs on duty at the right time. Sound familiar?
I’ve had employees range from HS-dropout ghetto kids, to moonlighting academics (soft sciences, invariably) whose day jobs were only about adding more acronyms after their surnames. And everything in between. Exit Questions: Which group was the most trainable; reliable; took most pride in work? Bonus Question: Who most often needed to be counseled regarding personal hygiene?
I know the e-mails are so yesterday, but here’s more (from Briffa) on the Yamal larches, jiggering for “growth signals” and the nature of the Nature trick (bold). If this is too long snip away.
>On Mon, 3 Nov 1997, Keith Briffa wrote:
>
>>
>> Tom
>> thanks for the info. Actually this is a chance for me to to mention that
>> we have for the last few months at least, been reworking the idea of
>> looking in the Schweingruber network data for evidence of increasing tree
>> growth and hence ,potentially at least, evidence of changing tree(read
>> biomass) uptake of carbon.
>> The results are dramatic – not to say earth shattering because they
>> demonstrate major time-dependent changes – but changes that are consistent
>> in different areas of the network. We have regionalised over 350 site
>> collections , each with ring width and density data , age-banded the data
>> so that we look only at relative growth in similar ages of trees through
>> time and recombined the standardisd curves to produce growth changes in
>> each region. Basically growth is roughly constant (except for relatively
>> small climate variablity forcing) from 1700 to about 1850. It then
>> increases linearly by about up until about 1950 after which time young ( up
>> to 50 year old) basal area explodes but older trees remain constant . The
>> implication is a major increase in carbon uptake before the mid 20th
>> century – temperatue no doubt partly to blame but much more likely to be
>> nitrate/Co2 . Equally important though is the levelling off of carbon
>> uptake in the later 20th century. This levelling is coincident with the
>> start of a density decline – we have a paper coming out in Nature
>> documenting the decline . In relative terms (i.e. by comparison with
>> increasing summer temperatures) the decline is represented in the ring
>> width and basal area data as a levelling off in the long-timescale inrease
>> ( which you only see when you process the data as we have). The density
>> data do not show the increase over and above what you expect from
>> temperature forcing.
>> I have been agonising for months that these results are not some
>> statistical artifact of the analysis method but we can’t see how. For just
>> two species (spruce in the western U.S. Great Basin area and larch in
>> eastern Siberia) we can push the method far enough to get an indication of
>> much longer term growth changes ( from about 1400) and the results confirm
>> a late 20th century apparent fertilization! The method requires
>> standardizing (localized mean subtraction and standard deviation division)
>> by species/age band so we reconstruct relative (e.g. per cent change) only .
>> We have experimented with integrating the different signals in basal area
>> and density(after extracting intra ring ring width and density data where
>> available) within a ‘flat mass’ measure which shows a general late 20th
>> century increase – but whether this incorporates a defensible relative
>> waiting on the different components (and what the relative carbon
>> components are) is debatable. We now need to make some horrible simplistic
>> assumptions about absolute carbon in these (relatively small) components of
>> the total biomass carbon pool and imlpications for terrestrial and total
>> carbon fluxes over the last few hundred years – and beyond! Without these
>> implications we will have difficulty convincing Nature that this work is
>> mega important.
>> There are problems with explaining and interpreting these data but they are
>> by far the best produced for assessing large scale carbon-cycle-relevant
>> vegetation changes – at least as regards well-dated continous trends. I
>> will send you a couple of Figures ( a tiny sample of the literally hundreds
>> we have) which illustrate some of this. I would appreciate your reaction.
>> Obviously this stuff is very hush hush till I get a couple of papers
>> written up on this. We are looking at a moisture sensive network of data at
>> the moment to see if any similar results are produced when
>> non-temperature-sensitive data are used. You would expect perhaps a greater
>> effect in such data if Co2 acts on the water use efficiency .
The thing I look at is the big picture. I’ve been reading WUWT for several months now and have been following the reports of people attempting to get data and having their requests shoved where the sun don’t shine. The individual emails or documents are suspicious on their own merits, but when you consider that we’ve been speculating these things for a long time and not getting the cooperation we’ve been trying to get, we tend to resolve any ambiguity along the lines of what we already know about these people. If the emails or documents were really innocent, the stonewalling and lack of cooperation has pretty much vaporized any sympathy we might have otherwise had.
Add to that the fact that these people were pressuring peer reviewed publications not to publish opposing views and then claiming these views weren’t published as evidence that they weren’t credible is mind boggling.
If the science is settled, then it should be easy to show. That it isn’t, is a humongous red flag. If it is science, given the same data and methods, then others can replicate the experiment and see if it works. Or they can take issue with the methods applied to the data or challenge assumptions. The resistance to letting the full cycle of scientific processes take their course indicates that it is not science that is occurring. If a scientist is confident of his results, he should be happy to share. In fact, he should be really happy. When you put out data and methods for critique, you get tons of free review which would otherwise be expensive.
Resistance, to me, means that they are not so confident. They may even know that the result they are trying to prove is false. The underhanded way in which they’ve tried to stifle opposition seems to support that. They imagine that someone will find something wrong with it. Why would they imagine that? Do they know something we don’t? Instead, I think they should put it out hoping that somebody will find something wrong with it. Particularly if they think the evidence really points to what they really believe to be a serious situation. If a large asteroid is found that appears to be heading for collision with the earth, one hopes that their finding is wrong and that someone, anyone, will be able to show that it isn’t. Each time I’ve seen a report of a possibility of an asteroid there is first the initial worry that it will hit earth, then later findings have usually been that the reported objects will miss and the first person to have found it will be very, very happy he was wrong. Why aren’t the AGW people trying to prove it isn’t happening? Wouldn’t they be glad to find out they are wrong?
At this point, I think it would be good to have an investigation of these people and let the chips fall where they may.
I would like to see all the communications compared with backups to establish authenticity. I would like to see if the data that was “lost” is actually still there. If they don’t allow the data out, or lose it, any papers based on that data are worthless. The science can’t be settled if it hasn’t been corroborated with full transparency. The science can’t be settled if the models based on that “settled science” don’t actually predict what is happening. And of course, losing the data seems too convenient at this point. The cool thing is that if the data is missing, the claims based on it have to disappear too. Science demands all claims to be backed by observations, and if the observations disappear, the claims have no support and must also disappear. For the CRU it is a lose lose proposition.
I’m hoping that now this stuff is out in the open, that others will throw their oars in too. I am glad this debate has opened up with the release of these documents. Let the games begin.
Juraj V. (09:26:39) :
The Info Commissioner here takes no prisoners, he HATES being dicked about – try this one:
http://www.out-law.com/page-8896
“The Information Commissioner has ordered the Government to release minutes of cabinet meetings at which the decision to invade Iraq was made. The order has been made under the Freedom of Information (FOI) Act.
The decision comes despite the fact that the FOI provides qualified exemptions which mean that documents about the formulation of Government policy and ministerial communications do not always have to be released.
The Cabinet Office has refused to release the documents because of these exemptions, but the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) has said that the exemptions, contained in section 35 of the FOI Act, are qualified, and are subject to a public interest test.
“As section 35 is a qualified exemption, a blanket approach cannot be taken to justify the withholding of all information to which the exemption is engaged,” said the decision notice produced by the ICO. “Rather, the analysis of the public interest must focus on the circumstances and context of the information in each case.”
“In order for the section 35 exemption to be maintained, in all the circumstances of the case, the public interest in maintaining the exemption must outweigh that in the disclosure of the information,” said the notice.
The FOI request relates to two cabinet meetings held between 7 and 17 March 2003 during which the opinion of the Attorney General on the legality of an invasion was discussed. The ICO said that the importance of such a decision and the need for transparency must take precedence.
“The Commissioner considers that a decision on whether to take military action against another country is so important, that accountability for such decision making is paramount,” said the decision notice. “In this case, in respect of the public debate and controversy surrounding the decision to take military action in Iraq, the process by which the government reached its decision adds to the public interest in maximum transparency.”
“This is reflected by, among other matters, the controversy surrounding the Attorney General’s legal advice on the legality of military action and the ministerial resignations which took place at that time,” it said.
The Cabinet Office argued that the release of the minutes would undermine the confidentiality of Cabinet discussions and the concept of Cabinet collective responsibility, by which all members of Cabinet stand by its decision even if they had disagreed with it in discussions.
“In the Information Commissioner’s view the public interest in disclosing the Cabinet minutes in this particular case outweighs the public interest in withholding the information. He believes that disclosure of the information would allow the public to more fully understand this particular decision of the Cabinet,” said an ICO statement.
The ICO said it had considered “the gravity and controversial nature of the subject matter; accountability of government decisions; transparency of decision making, [and] public participation in government decisions,” the statement said…”
I first saw this as a breaking story on Twitter and starting following. The search engine for the e-mails is a gem. Thanks!!
You published snippets of the code. If any reader wants to see all the e-mails AND all the data and code, etc, Wikileaks (http://wikileaks.org/) has a link for it. Follow it and click on a download link which has five or six mirrors. Be patient. The servers are busy. I eventually managed to snag a copy (it’s a 61.9mb zip file. Extract it and it will create two folders, one for the documents and one for the e-mails).
There’s a LOT of stuff here. what we need is for someone with the necessary web and database skills to build another search engine for the documents stuff. Any takers?
Finally, huge thanks to this website and others for providing a necessary counter weight to the avalanche of dysfunctional peer review “science” coming out of the IPCC, the CRU and the European Union.
Juraj V. (09:26:39) :
Plato Says (09:00:10) :
This UK lobbying organisation has just reported the CRU to our Information Commissioner
If I remember well, Jones consulted how to avoid FOIA directly with the Information commissioner.
——————————————–
I’ve wondered about this , I think he said FOI officer who may well be an employee of CRU or UEA
You say false data, I say desired data. Can’t we all just get along?
The smoking gun is comments in code that specifically state, “adjusted to look closer to
the real temperatures.” 0.o
Yes sir, they must be really pulling the wool over people’s eyes by adjusting things to reflect real temperatures.
Social scientists are missing an opportunity to study irrational human behavior here.
It seems reasonable, on the one hand, to toss out proxy data which does not agree with actual measurements. The thing I find disturbing is, doesn’t that invalidate the proxy data prior to 1960, which is being used to argue unprecedented warming?
.
The option (like all the anomdtb options) is totally undocumented so we’ll never know what we lost.
.
—I have an idea—-
Imagine that one day in the Louvre it is found that some highly respected curators of historic art (Rembrandts, etc.) have swapped out fakes and burned the originals.
From the BBC Environment correspondant
“At 5:57pm on 23 Nov 2009, kh1234567890 wrote:
“I was forwarded the chain of e-mails on the 12th October”
And you just sat on it for a month, hoping that it will go away ?”
http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/paulhudson/2009/11/climategate-cru-hacked-into-an.shtml#comments
!!!!!!!
I had a post rejected at RC. It was in response to a snide comment by a regular saying “Since when is Steme McIntyre a scientist?” (in response to making data available to scientists).. to which I responded:
“Well then, since when is Michale Mann a statistician, if we’re picking nits?”
It’s been clear for over a decade that climatologists believe themselves to be experts in all things so long as they are to further the cause of AGW. They are statisticians, geologists, physicists… forget the objections from the real statisticians, geologists and physicists about how they apply these disciplines!
Frank Lansner (04:26:49) :
It’s really quite simple, Frank. Just go to the sites:
MESOWEST
http://mesowest.utah.edu/index.html
or
http://climate.usurf.usu.edu/products/download.php
and start looking at the data on the early ends of records.
Then compare with the record starts in HARRY_READ_ME.txt
Then examine things like old newspaper archives (in historical societies, museums, etc) as I have done.
I conclude that data has been altered in the records to totally destroyed.
I have to stop here, or I’ll be seeing red and say very bad things that will make the mods snip me.
I am so angry at what these monsters have done.
My favorite Nostradamus moment:
Wonder what he was thinking, there?
Jesse (21:24:11) :
“This is what happens when a bunch of uninformed amateurs try and “debunk” real scientists. Leave the science to the scientists and go back to your day jobs as custodians, wal-mart employees and laborers.”
“George E. Smith”
George Elwood Smith (born May 10, 1930) is an American scientist, applied physicist, and co-inventor of the charge-coupled device. He was awarded a one-quarter share in the 2009 Nobel Prize in Physics for “the invention of an imaging semiconductor circuit—the CCD sensor”.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_E._Smith
While the emails provide a voyeristic interlude, the real damage will come from the data.
Avoid the decline, indeed.
Hey, try avoiding your career swirling around the commode bowl…..
Google “Tim Mitchell cru”
Not odd that http://www.cru.uea.ac.uk/~timm/index.html gives…
Page temporarily unavailable
The main CRU webserver is currently down.
These pages are being served from the CRU Emergency Webserver.
Not all pages from the main server are available, and what pages are available may be out of date.
Odd that the cached page from Nov 9 is blank (except for /head – see source)
Info on CRU TS 2.0:
http://www.cgd.ucar.edu/cas/guide/Data/cruts20.html
(Tim M’s program that Mr. Ian (Harry) Harris is trying to figure out)
Curious for someone processing historical temps…
Tim M is apparently a young earth creationist:
http://www.arthurhu.com/99/12/noice.txt
Hmm, interesting fellow.
Regards,
Bob
Plato Says and bernie
There is an e-mail that specifically states their FOI people sought and received advice from the Information Minister on how to block the FOI requests.
Can you imagine the activity at CRU at this moment? I mean ppö are not going to the job doing their normal things today, drinking some coffe and then go home at the end of the day.
The activity must be high, checking waht data is available. Internal meetings and strategies to face this situation officially.
Instructions to delete any information and mails that could in any way show that data are intentionally adjusted to show what they want it to show.
Delete any mail that could cast any doubt on their so called science and so on…
I am quite sure alot of information and data have undergone som housework cleaning to hide any traces of what has been said or done the last days.
Has anyone mentioned yet that Tom P. of CA fame is likely non other than NOAA’s Thomas Peterson..
Expertise: Convening lead author of Chpt. 1 – Assessment of changes in extremes using daily in situ data
http://www.agci.org/programs/past_workshop_participants/about_the_scientist/participant_details.php?recordID=25
Now we get to see what “denial” really is. Scott Mandia, RR Kampen, Nick Stokes, kdkd, Jesse … yes, all of you and more. (BTW, where is Mary Hinge?) Sorry if I left anyone out but you folks are looking foolish. You are doing exactly what people do when they find out a loved one is sick. You start grasping at any little straw and saying, “see, it can’t be that bad”. But, it is that bad.
Think of a someone on trial. Sure, a couple of these items may be circumstantial, but we’re looking at literally 100s of pieces of evidence. Anyone reasonable person with an open mind will see this clearly. Time for you climategate “deniers” to suck it up and admit you’ve been conned.
“”” vukcevic (11:03:57) :
Jesse (21:24:11) :
“This is what happens when a bunch of uninformed amateurs try and “debunk” real scientists. Leave the science to the scientists and go back to your day jobs as custodians, wal-mart employees and laborers.”
“George E. Smith”
George Elwood Smith (born May 10, 1930) is an American scientist, applied physicist, and co-inventor of the charge-coupled device. He was awarded a one-quarter share in the 2009 Nobel Prize in Physics for “the invention of an imaging semiconductor circuit—the CCD sensor”.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_E._Smith “””
But vukcevic; as I have reported several times already, I AM NOT George Elwood Smith; and received no part of any Nobel Prize.
My middle name is Edward; and no it has no connection with any British Royalty. Actually it relates more to a British family who emigrated to New Zealand, and became very prominent in the shoe business; a shoe business, that I actually worked for while working my way through University.
Like my namesake, I also am a Physicist; and a mathematician, and can work competently in the solid state Physics of the semiconductor Technology; not only in Silicon; but also in the III-V compounds of the LED business. Those fields can benefit, from my University background in Optics, and Electronics. Back in my Academia stint, I actually taught Optics, and Atomic Physics at my alma mater; and no I was NOT a professor; merely a junior lecturer.
Also I have never actually designed or used a CCD; well except in some early P&S camera I may have owned once. All my digital camera sensor interests are now CMOS rather than CCD (which requires its own bastard bipolar like transistor process), whereas CMOS sensors use exactly the same process, as microprocessor or memory chips use, so can be integrated with processing electronics.
It also happens that I had lunch last week with a retired Solid State Physicist, (German) who is quite familiar personally with both the Smith CCD guy, and the other parties to that invention; as well as knowing just who did what.
My guess is there’s a George E. Smith on a street corner in just about any town; but most of them aren’t physicists. There was also one very famous one who survived the Pearl Harbor attack, by diving off his sinking ship, and swimming under the burning fuel to safety; although he got seriously burned in the incident; ending his Naval career. I doubt, you’ll find me on Wikianything; but sometimes Google does turn over a rock I may be under; and as I pointed out to Jesse, I don’t do any deck swabbing; I’m far too old for that.