Steve McIntyre has blogged an excellent must read technical explanation about IPCC and the “Trick” on the newly provisioned climateaudit.org now on WordPress.com. He provides the context that CRU says the emails lack. So, I thought this would be a good time to have a look at the word “trick” and how it was used in the leaked CRU emails.
A few days ago, I had an email exchange with NRO’s Planet Gore editor Chris Horner who wondered how often the word “trick” was used in the CRU emails. Of course the instance that everyone remembers is this email from November 16th, 1999:
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) amd from 1961 for Keith’s to hide the decline.
The explanation for that use of the word came quickly from CRU director Dr. Phil Jones in his official announcement on November 23rd:
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.
Well that certainly seems reasonable on the surface. For example, an American colloquialism is “that’ll do the trick”, when a solution to a problem is found. I hadn’t thought much more about it until I was reminded of this again this past week, when Dr. Michael Mann, in an interview with the State College, PA newspaper Centre Daily, defending himself and Dr. Jones about the language used in the emails.
Mann said Jones was using the word “trick” in the sense of “here’s the trick for solving that problem,” not to indicate anything inappropriate.
So if Dr. Jones uses such colloquialisms regularly, it stands to reason that we should find a number of similar instances of the word “trick” in the CRU emails over the decade that the emails spanned. I decided to find out.
I setup a file search program with a simple mission, scan the email folders for all file content with instances of the word “trick” used by itself, excluding other words like “Patrick” that would have “trick” embedded in it. Eight files were returned with that condition:
I was rather surprised that so few files met the condition, so I ran it again to be sure, same result. I took off the quotes to see just how many emails contained some permutation of the letters t r i c k.
The answer was 29 emails out of the 1079 emails in the FOIA2009.zip file:
So that we can all see how often these scientists used the work trick colloquially, and not part of another word, I’m showing the 8 instances of “trick” by itself highlighted in yellow below, plus another instance where “trick” is part of another word “tricky”:
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The CRU emails can be found at http://eastangliaemails.com/ if you care to look at the originals.
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So as you can see, we really have only one instance where Dr. Jones uses the word “trick” in reference to a procedure on data. There are other uses and variations of the word “trick” in other emails, but only this one instance attributed to Jones where he refers to this data issue.
As Dr. Jones put it: The word ‘trick’ was used here colloquially as in a clever thing to do.
Perhaps, but you’d think we’d see it in general use by Dr. Jones in other emails if it was indeed a colloquialism. In the thousand plus emails we have, there’s no other use of the word “trick” by Dr. Jones that I could find related to data truncation or otherwise, though there are other colloquial uses of the word by other authors.
Add the technical proof that Steve McIntyre has done today:
Which shows that CRU did indeed truncate tree ring data, so that the decline is not shown in the IPCC report as shown in the red line above.
And the fact that McIntyre brought this to their attention as an expert reviewer in the IPCC process:
To my knowledge, no one noticed or reported this truncation until my Climate Audit post in 2005 here. The deletion of the decline was repeated in the 2007 Assessment Report First Order and Second Order Drafts, once again without any disclosure. No dendrochronologist recorded any objection in the Review Comments to either draft. As a reviewer of the Second Order Draft, I asked the IPCC in the strongest possible terms to show the decline reported at CA here:
Show the Briffa et al reconstruction through to its end; don’t stop in 1960. Then comment and deal with the “divergence problem” if you need to. Don’t cover up the divergence by truncating this graphic. This was done in IPCC TAR; this was misleading. (Reviewer’s comment ID #: 309-18)]
They refused, stating that this would be “inappropriate”, though a short discussion on the divergence was added – a discussion that was itself never presented to external peer reviewers.
Add all these things up, and I’m ready to say PANTS ON FIRE! regarding Dr. Jones claim of “ It is ludicrous to suggest that it refers to anything untoward.“
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Let’s see what happens if we take Dr Jones interpretation at face value. Dr Jones says his email should be interpreted as “I’ve just completed Mike’s Nature [clever thing] of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years (ie from 1981 onwards) amd from 1961 for Keith’s to hide the decline.”
it doesn’t sound any better now, does it?
Andrew.
As a seasoned and scarred political fighter, (albeit with little scientific background) I have to caution everyone here that having the truth revealed and the facts on your side won’t be enough to stop the move to C02 regulation. I’ve lost that battle before. The truth will just be brushed aside and -to a liar- the facts are whatever anyone says they are.
There’s just too much money in it – for industry and for government. Industry will pass its costs on to the consumers, and government has found a new source of tax income A new thing to tax is hard to find after 2,000 years of government taxation experience. They won’t let it go easily.
The hardest battle to redeem objective scientific method lies ahead, not behind.
This is unbelievable. I am in awe as to the depth of this chicanery. All of us owe you guys a great debt.
Andy:
Excellent analysis, but it doesn’t go quite far enough. I critically examined each of the e-mails you found. Mann uses “trick” twice; other authors use it once each. And in five out of eight instances (including Jones), “trick” means one of two things:
1. A proposal for more deceptive data manipulation, or
2. An accusation of deception directed against an opponent or opponents.
Here’s my contribution to the “word study”:
Brilliant analysis, as always.
TAH
It looks like McIntyre has show it took two tries at ‘tricks’ in 1999 to appease the IPCC:
http://strata-sphere.com/blog/index.php/archives/11844
Is it now clear why the IPCC cannot investigate this? They probably instigated the whole mess.
Oh, I see–should’t have put the link between angle brackets.
Here’s my link, so that you can see my word study:
http://www.examiner.com/x-28973-Essex-County-Conservative-Examiner~y2009m12d11-What-trick-meant-to-climategate-players
TAH
OT – looking for help finding historic data. I’m looking for daily low temp measurements for a desert environment such as Death Valley or some rural area in the desert Soutwest US. Most of the data records I’ve found are averages or high temps but I’m looking for the nightime lows, daily if possible.
Please lets remember:
1) “hide the decline” is hiding the decline in the proxy, NOT hide the decline in temperature.
2) The conclusion to draw is that the proxy has been used in an invalid way, NOT that earth is on a cooling trend since 1960.
3) Briffa’s data probably does have some temperature data in it, just with more noise and less confidence.
Errors in the instrumental temperature series are surfacing from other lines of inquiry, not the trick e-mail.
Lokki,
The battle between modernism and post modernism will continue until people born before 1970 are extinct, unless we happen upon a cultural revolution.
“the hockey team say that trees grow larger with elevated warming”
Funny isn’t it? Because the average gardener would say they need lots of water, sunshine and um CO2?
Jeff L (05:47:52) :
“Has anyone re-hung the historical temp data off the red curve? It seems that would be very worthwhile to do & start that plot circulating in cyber space so people start to understand the significance of “hide the decline”
Ok, I just did a quick look following up on my own advice. I compared the Nasa GISS instrument record to the the McIntyre plot above. 3 very interesting observations.
1) If you hang the GISS data at the end the McIntyre red curve (“Climategate version”), you find that our current temps are only between 0.2 & 0.3 deg C warmer than the 1400’s – nothing too spectacular there & nothing unexpected based on my previous post – but certainly suggesting that current temps are nothing special & certainly saying that the increase in Co2 over the last 100 years is not significant to current global temps (is AGW is dead)
2) MORE INTERESTING OBSERVATION : In comparing the Briffa tree temps to the GISS temps prior to the 1960 (prior to “the trick”), there is a substantial difference in slope. In quickly doing a linear least squares fit, it looks like the GISS is about 0.2 deg C/100 yrs steeper. IS THIS A GISS TRICK ????
This difference in slope could actually be the “corrections” applied to the raw data which make it appear as if it is warming faster than it is. What irony it would be if the tree ring data could be used to demonstrate that the raw data GISS has been improperly “corrected”. This is a topic worth serious follow-up
3) On face value, the “hidden” tree ring decline that was “removed” is far greater than the GISS decline from 1960 into the 70’s. At the very least, there looks like there is a serious mis-calibration issue between the two data sets that needs to be resolved before any thing can be said about present day temps compared to the far past temps – and since the AGW argument largely hangs on the notion that we are seeing temps completely out of the realm of the norm, this is issue has to be resolved.
I have to go to work – but if anyone wants to run with these ideas – please do. I might do some more work on this over the weekend & try to quantify further.
The author Eric Hoffer (True Believer, etc) and winner of the Presidential Medal of Freedom from Reagan wrote: “Creativity is the ability to introduce order into the randomness of nature. “
Georgegr (04:49:24) :
““Jim Steele (00:27:30) :
Who is Keenan?”
My guess is Anna Keenan, seemingly an over the-top-die-hard irrational AGW activist:
http://www.acfonline.org.au/articles/news.asp?news_id=1586”
My guess is Douglas J Keenan who alleged Wang (the author of the email in question) had committed fraud – see THE FRAUD ALLEGATION AGAINST SOME CLIMATIC
RESEARCH OF WEI-CHYUNG WANG.
As I rember it Wang had been coauthor of a paper with Jones. The alleged fraud concerned evidence over the unimportance of UHI and related to the existence/non-existence of station histories in China.
Onion,
What a great BBC debate! Very intelligent anti-AGW consensus comments from the hosts and one of the guests. It’s marvellous to see that the AGW propagandists are not going unchallenged, and the interview “gang-up” going the other way for a change.
“For me the most damning part of the “trick” saga is the words which follow it “…. to hide the decline.””
Exactly. “Trick” is irrelevant. What if Jones had actually written, “I tried the clever thing Mike does to hide the decline…”? Read any better than “trick” does? Trick, clever idea, really cool methods, statistical fraudulance… What really matters is he was admittedly trying to hide the decline in the tree ring data that didnt correspond to temp readings and their accepted theory of what ‘should’ be happening. So we’re expected to believe that tree ring data that can’t properly resolve known temperatures accurately and temperature stations two thirds of which have error of 2C or more can resolve a definitive increase in temperature due to the activity of man to a certainty of tenths of a degree C.
I do wish these ivory hacks would speak to a logger in torn pants with a hardhat on. Tree rings depict degree of growth stress. They do not depict temperature. The “trick” is to study the area around and in the stand to determine all the possible factors leading to degree of growth stress (air and ground temperature being only one of many). That includes the species under study. There is a lower and upper limit unique to each species regarding yearly growth and each species responds to stress in different ways. Those who plant trees for a living in hopes of harvesting a second crop within their career lifetime, or their business’ lifetime, know these parameters to a far greater degree than ivory hacks (and I used o be a ivory hack). If they get it wrong, they don’t bring home a paycheck. Say. That’s not a bad idea.
Stupid in, stupid out.
I’ve been using the Jedi mind trick metaphor since the climategate scandal broke! Good call!
The meaning of ‘trick’ depends on the context, as Jones et al correctly assert. It’s either a way of solving a problem, or a way of deceiving. In the emails above, it’s used both ways.
However, the context of the ‘hide the decline’ email shows that it’s used to deceive. The only problem being solved there is how to hide the fact that the proxies aren’t on board with the agenda.
I don’t think anyone should take issue with the word “trick.” Trick certainly can mean technique.
We should be focused on what the trick or technique was used to do.
I think the email would be just as condemning if it stated, “I used the technique to hide the decline.”
More “tricky”.
“all the climategate talk has created a “tricky” problem of public perception.”
“But one person’s distraction is another person’s tool.”
“Robert Watt, the head of communications for the Stockholm EnvironmentInstitute and a former policy adviser in the British government, said environmental leaders should “relish the opportunity to explain the science” behind global warming.
Still, he acknowledged that all the climategate talk has created a “tricky” problem of public perception.
“People do come up and say, ‘I see so many different things in the media,’” Watt said. He blamed the press for creating a “fake equivalence” between climate change believers and climate change skeptics. “It’s not that sort of debateabout opinion but, rather, a debate about facts, about observations and science,” he said.
“I think this is a completely annoying distraction,” added Kim Carstensen, leader of the World Wildlife Fund’s Global Climate Initiative. “It’s very clear that this has been done to discredit climate research. … It’s a bluff. There’s nothing in it; it’s just a huge distraction.”
But one person’s distraction is another person’s tool.”
“Climategate distracts at Copenhagen”
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/2405403/posts
Alan the Brit (02:20:42) :
Actually Alan, my dad, (who died in ’79), had been saying for some time that the BBC in particular had been left leaning.
DaveE.
You know, I’m not sure how great the Team’s defense of their “trick” language is. Saying that people misunderstand when they say “hide the decline” because they were really just referring to a published divergence problem doesn’t change that much. Saying “hide the divergence” or “hide the decline” amounts to about the same thing. Like McIntyre says, lets have some engineering quality analysis. It’s not really that comforting to hear people who are entrusted with a pretty responsible task to defend themselves saying that most everybody talks that way in private. Sure a lot of organizations probably do operate with a lot of loose talk, but I hope that my banker, or my accountant or the people that designed the apartment building I live in don’t talk about hiding things. There is way too much at stake to be hiding anything.
1. Jef, please don’t blame Michael Mann on U Penn (they have enough problems with President Amy Guttman reviving the old moribund Sheldon Hackney PC policies), he’s a Penn Stater.
2. I can accept the CRU explanation of Jones’ use of “trick” (I think some of the readers here are reading too much into some of these e-mails) but it just reinforces my perception that Mann, Jones et al have some combination of self-delusion and global deception going on. They used a neat academic “trick” to throw out data and replace it with numbers that conform more to their world view. My biggest issue is that’s Propaganda not Science.
3. Many of the e-mails I’ve read so far show a lot of the correspondents suffer from group think and therefore it’s no surprise to me this (coupled with their self-delusions and religious-style zealotry) resulted in manipulation of the data. Briffa and Jones saw they could manipulate their growth ring numbers to conform to their preconceived notions (including those about MWE and LIA) regardless of the discrepancies so they have convinced themselves that the tree data IS the truth data and everything else is garbage. I sorely wish they really would practice science.
Given the amount of grant money obtained by adding the words ‘global warming’ to every possible study, maybe Mann should be transferred. May I suggest Penn State to Sate Pen. He should at least be awarded the title ‘un indicted co-conspirator’.
All this hullabaloo over using the word “trick” seems like splitting hairs to me. I think it all boils down to this:
They say the quote has to do with replacing tree ring data with actual temperature measurements once the tree ring data stopped correlating with actual temperature measurements. So if it stopped correlating ~1960 and we have no idea why, then how do we know we can use tree ring data to reconstruct temps way back into the past? WHY ARE WE USING TREE RING DATA AT ALL?