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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Hello any “oldtimers”:
Over 30 years ago I received an email from somebody on the Internet (way before Gore “took the initiative in creating” it) about a Unix program that could be used to list all the words of a text document in alphabetical order, in bold font, down the centre of the pages of a new text document. On each side of the word (in bold) were the preceding and following words to show the local context. I had used this program often but now cannot recall its name, and my backup tapes are long gone. One day I shall take the time to look through more recent (1982ish) Atari floppy backups, just in case something useful is there.
Such a program would be ideal to look at the CRU dog-regurgitation.
If someone can recall the program name or knows of a recent incarnation, please let us know. Gold-diggers do use various means on mother-lodes.
“Oh what a tangled web we weave, when first we practice to deceive.”
No doubt there will be more revealing instances of fraud before this climate-alarmist “bandwagon” plays its last tune. For those who require direct, printed evidence of such “bandwagons” please do look up the indirect evidence (concerning herd-instinct, etc.) as listed on countless Internet sites.
As a retired scientist of 42 years I have been VERY well acquainted with various “bandwagon” ideas over those years. Obtaining direct written evidence, now or then, would be next to impossible; archiving direct deceit is not the way “herds” work. Only, after the fact can we look back, and apply some “statistical” or other indirect searching methods.
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This may come as a surprise – or not.
“De Rode Willem” = “Red” Willem
As in Marxist-Leninist-Stalinist “Red.”
In mathematics, “trick” always means “clever and non-obvious thing to do to solve a problem” as in “here we can’t use [blah technique] directly, so we’ll need to use a trick to transform it to something in that form.”
Some common phrases for “getting people to think that an argument is a correct proof when in fact it has huge gaps” are “cheating” and “hand-waving” as in “In fact I cheated a bit here in that I didn’t show…” or “Some of the details in his proof from class today were very hand-wavy.”
EB:
“In mathematics, ‘trick’ always means ‘clever and non-obvious thing to do to solve a problem.'”
Always? Got a cite for that?
Also, would this fit your definition of “cheating”? :
From Harry_Read_Me:
“Here, the expected 1990 – 2003 period is missing – so the correlations aren’t so hot!
Yet, the WMO codes and station names/dates are identical (or close).
What the hell is supposed to happen here?
Oh, yeah – there is no ‘supposed’, I can make it up. So I have.”
“In mathematics, ‘trick’ always means ‘clever and non-obvious thing to do to solve a problem.’”
OK, let’s stipulate to that. Let’s reword/rephrase that entire sentence, substituting words and phrases, including your definition, and even try to make it mean what he claims it meant (while elucidating). I’ll go first, and let’s see how it sounds, shall we?
“I’ve just completed Mike’s clever and and non-obvious way to solve the problem of hiding the decline. And by “decline”, I mean, of course, the tree-ring divergence problem, wherein we accept what the tree-ring temperature reconstructions for the past two thousand years, but cannot accept what the tree-rings tell us about the past 60 years, given that the data diverge so badly (disagree with) actual temperature readings. And by “hide”, I mean of course…well…not show it so much…kind of…blend-it-in-like with the rest.”
Your turn! If you don’t like my rephrasing, offer one of your own — with one proviso: that you don’t leave out direct substitutions for the words “trick”, ‘hide” and “decline”.
Try it!
JonesII (11:36:59) : and Sean Peake (11:23:05) :
But retreating glaciers are meant to be evidence of anthropic global warming. So is that a trick or a lie. Because if as you both suggest global cooling causes the retreat of glaciers then we must be cooling . I always understoodl that glaciers moved downhill because of the increasing weight of ice above from extra snow pushing them down. And the snow came from evaporation of water from the land and sea, which as you say would increase with warming.
Here’s another. I was told that the tropical tropospheric hot spot predicted by AGW theory models could not be found because temperature measurements by radiosonde and satellites could not be trusted. Instead I was told I should rely on the calculation of temperature from measuring windspeeds at those altitudes. Is that a trick?
son of mulder (16:27:03) : That hot spot nobody can find it because there no such spot but the in the feverish imagination of Mann et. al. conveniently fed with positive green feedbacks (cash)….and, of course, in all that “Hollywood Science”
Exactly what was “Mike’s Nature trick” ?
This should help reveal whether the trickery is real.
Exactly what was “Mike’s Nature trick” ? That is, what did Mann do in what Nature paper that is similar to this “trick” ?
The second-to-last “trick” (from Lanzante) is exactly the same usage of the word as Jones’: “…using a “trick” used with precipitation data is to apply a square root transformation to the rejection rates, average these, then reverse transform the average. The square root transformation should yield data that is more nearly Gaussian than the untransformed data.”
That point aside, I think it’s a bit of a non sequitur to say that this set of emails should conclusively demonstrate the colloquial use of the word “trick” or it is a lie. The problem isn’t that he is lying about the use of the word; the problem is that he thinks you should be able to use arbitrary “tricks” when preparing data.
Dr A Burns (17:34:24) :
‘Exactly what was “Mike’s Nature trick” ? That is, what did Mann do in what Nature paper that is similar to this “trick” ?’
Good Question. It may have something to do with him being a “Texas Sharp Shooter”.
Slightly OT but I find the following trends interesting (I wish I had logged numbers daily):
1) After climategate was coined (sorry bout that 🙂 it was auto-suggested on Google.
2) Hits rose to thousands on Google within days, but after a week or two they sky-rocketed into the millions and then 10s of millions.
3) Google autosuggest for climategate disappeared after a week or so.
4) Last week climategate hit 32 million plus on Google and over 50 million hits on Bing.
5) today Google reports only 25.8 million hits… clearly peaked and declining as far as Google is concerned. Strangely Bing is still reporting 50 million plus.
What is wrong with these search engines? Is the trend in Google hits (I wish they were traceable like the google trrend meta data) being tampered with? or does it reflect daily blogs disappearing or the like?
Meanwhile Google is in total denial about the autosuggest issue:
http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Web+Search/thread?tid=25112ee0c29cbd01&hl=en#all
Smells like a duck, quacks like a duck…
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OK, with reference to [noel (13:12:51)] I’ve found a neat little program for Windows called “KWIC Concordance” for Windows. Likely, there is a better Unix version somewhere out there.
It will do about what I had remembered. Not as nice as in Unix but it can deliver all the words of a text document in alphabetical order in their immediate context, a line for each word. I tried it on some relative small files, and figure it likely will work for a much larger concatenated text file of the CRU emails.
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noel (13:12:51) :
I’m not quite ready for the Home for Retired Hackers (got a kid in college….)
We called that a “permuted index” at CMU. I vaguely remember the Unix program you describe, I think it was used in part of the documentation. I have no idea where it might be now.
I’m thinking of writing one for my WUWT Tables of Contents pages (see http://home.comcast.net/~ewerme/wuwt/ ), but it won’t be for a little while.
Jim Steele (00:27:30) :
Who is Keenan?
Look here
http://climaterealists.com/index.php?tid=413
“In 2007, I published a peer-reviewed paper alleging that some important research relied upon by the IPCC (for the treatment of urbanization effects) was fraudulent”
noel:
The Unix program that you are thinking of is “KWIC” – Key Word in Context
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Key_Word_in_Context
Just the emails shown above are pretty damning, to say nothing of the others I have read. Taken as a sample, they show that quite a bit of energy is going into the whole business of supporting their hypothesis and fending off criticism rather than into TESTING their hypothesis.
I’m a psychologist. It is well known that if you want to increase the probability that a behavior will reoccur, you reinforce the behavior. These guys have been reinforced (through their funding) to produce results that confirm the AGW theory. It is also well known that if people behave in ways that are contrary to (or dissonant with) their basic beliefs, they will “rationalize” their behavior, even to the extent that it becomes ingrained in their value system or belief set. True objectivity is thrown out the window. It is entirely possible that Michael Mann, Jones, et. al., may be no more aware of how they are influenced by their reinforcement than gamblers or fishermen are aware of how THEY are influenced.
The scientists have been manipulated. While this does not excuse their behavior, it seems to me that we should be taking a hard look at government and private funding, what people have been approving this funding and what their agenda is. Considering the amount of money that has gone into funding climate science that supports AGW, there clearly needs to be some major reform in the near future.
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Thx, guys. Well, I tried the KWIC program in Windows but after 36 Gbytes of concordancing things sort of bogged down. I’ll look at it in Unix.
But now that AP figures there’s no faking, I guess we can all just “move along”. What a _sic_ bunch.:-(
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Hangtime
“Since 1990 , it was revealed in the ‘ leaked ‘ emails from the University of East Anglia’s Hadley Climate Research Unit that Phil Jones had collected a staggering 13.7 million British pounds ($22.6 million) in grants and in return , the world had gotten in return ‘ tricked ‘ data from the CRU , IPCC and the UNEP .”
I don’t suppose he’d have got the money if he hadn’t supplied that sort of data. A tricky position to be in… 🙂
There is a “trick” I use when I normalize my trace element data…
It really is a pretty common colloquialism.
Hansen was on Letterman the other night. While he said a lot of things WUWT regulars would find eye-roll worthy, he also called on CRU to release their data. . .
As I’ve mentioned on ClimateAudit, it looks like Briffa’s data was reprocessed until it looked most sharply like an upside-down “hockey stick”, and then the descending blade part was removed. This method ensures the greatest (visible) rise at the end.
You can do this with any data, process it so that the peaks and valleys are maximized (although the midline remains the same), and then cut off the last big slope. The remaining data has a false final trend and a false midline. Looks like they did this.
“Hansen was on Letterman the other night. While he said a lot of things WUWT regulars would find eye-roll worthy, he also called on CRU to release their data.”
Oh, how very principled of him. And HOW DARE HANSEN, given that he now appears to be the one HIDING DATA, MAKING IT NO LONGER AVAILABLE.
http://www.examples.com/giss/marysville_phased.gif (330k .gif – tip of the iceberg – click to see how hockey stick “shafts” aren’t only [RE]constructed from spliced tree-rings)
Just watched the Hansen clip on Youtube. The man ought to run for politics… how he can say some of the things he does with a straight face amazes me. That takes some talent. He has well and truly stepped out of the field of science into full-blown advocacy.
PS> The Youtube link: