History in a hurry: the first book about Climategate is published

UPDATE: This book is now available for purchase online at Amazon.com click here

UPDATE 2: Kindle version now available for purchase online at Amazon.com click here

Electronic publishing has revolutionized the art of writing, now less than two months since it happened, we have the very first book about Climategate. My first story on Climategate appeared on November 19th, 2009: Breaking News Story: CRU has apparently been hacked – hundreds of files released

I’ve read the book, and it appears to be an accurate and detailed portrayal of the history not only of the Climategate events and the players, but also of the events leading up to it. I’m flattered that this book mentions me and my surfacestations project several times. I was interviewed for the book, and this website is featured prominently–and they borrowed liberally from both the posts and the comments.

For those of you that want to follow a detective story, this one has as the twists and turns of Mickey Spillane with a Hardy Boys approach to a matter of fact story line. I highly recommend it.

This book is being published in electronic downloadable form, and is available for purchase online. You’ll recognize the authors as regulars here and at Climate Audit. Please consider purchasing this book, as it will provide funds to get Mosh out of the flat in San Francisco he shares with Charles The Moderator, who are becoming the climatic odd couple of our time.

Here are excerpts of the book:

In October of 2004 McIntyre and his criticism was on the radar of climate scientists. Tom Wigley writes Phil Jones about McIntyre’s and McKitrick’s work ( MM03) which is making its way around the internet. Wigley is not as dismissive of McIntyre’s and McKitrick’s work as is Michael Mann. In fact, Wigley calls Mann’s paper a very sloppy piece of work…

At 20:46 21/10/2004, [Tom Wigley]

Phil,

I have just read the M&M stuff critcizing MBH. A lot of it seems valid to me.  At the very least MBH is a very sloppy piece of work — an opinion I have held for some time. Presumably what you have done with Keith is better? — or is it? I get asked about this a lot. Can you give me a brief heads up? Mike is too deep into this to be helpful.

Tom.

As Wigley notes M & M (McIntyre and McKitrick) have some valid points in their criticism of MBH ( Mann and his co authors 1998 paper). What Mann viewed as a stunt others found merit in. Wigley asks Jones about his reconstruction work with colleague Keith Briffa. Briffa, as the Climategate mails show and as his studies show was less certain about reconstructions of the MWP than Mann was. Jones, of course, is stuck between supporting Briffa or Mann, both co-authors. Most importantly Wigley recognizes that Mann is too deep in this to be helpful. Mann has too much at stake to be objective. Jones replies, by this time taking on some of Mann’s attitudes toward McIntyre and McKitrick:

From: Phil Jones p.jones@xxxxxx

To: Tom Wigley wigley@xxxxxx

Tom,

The attached is a complete distortion of the facts. M&M are completely wrong in virtually everything they say or do. I have sent them countless data series that were used in the Jones/Mann Reviews of Geophysics papers. I got scant thanks from them for doing this –  only an email saying I had some of the data series wrong, associated with the wrong year/decade.  I wasted a few hours checking what I’d done and got no thanks for pointing their mistake out to them. If you think M&M are correct and believable then go to this web site

Point I’m trying to make is you cannot trust anything that M&M write. ….

Bottom line – there is no way the MWP (whenever it was) was as warm globally as the  last 20 years. There is also no way a whole decade in the LIA period was more than 1 deg C on a global basis cooler than the 1961-90 mean.  This is all gut feeling, no science, but years of experience of dealing with global scales and varaibility.

Cheers

Phil

Jones’ “gut feeling” is at stake and he is clearly agitated by his encounters with McIntyre, a marked difference from their exchange in 2002. In 2002, McIntyre was merely a researcher asking for data, but by 2003 McIntyre was a published author leveling criticisms at Jones’ co author Michael Mann. Jones also refers Wigley to a web site that discussed M&M. The fight over MM03 was largely taking place on the web as McIntyre had started to write about his findings on a blog called www.climate2003.com.  For independent researchers like McIntyre, posting articles on the internet was far more expedient than publishing in page limited journals. And just as citizen-journalists had transformed print journalism with the advent of blogs, climate science looked ripe to be transformed by the internet. McIntyre and McKitrick also adopted a publication model used by econometricians: they posted their data and their code so that anyone could check their work, find errors and suggest improvements. This gave them the moral high ground of transparency as opposed to Mann’s and Bradley’s shadowy world of “independent scientists,” although Mann and Bradley would certainly argue with some legitimacy that they were only following a century-old practice.”

…

Steve McIntyre struggle for years to get accurate data out of the hands of an elite team of scientists in England and the U.S., only to be stymied by continued refusals and runarounds.   At the beginning the data concerned work highlighted by your host, Anthony Watts, about the fidelity of the temperature records here in the United States. Later, it revolved around the data used in construction of proxy temperature records, such as the Hockey Stick Chart, now infamous for shoddy analysis and poor sample selection.   Climategate, written by Steve Mosher and Tom Fuller, is an account of the events leading up to the leaking of over 1,000 emails and assorted files that exposes the unethical and perhaps illegal practices used by the Hockey Stick Team to protect their turf as well as their information.   These rock star scientists dined with the elite and feasted on government grants, but it was all predicated on ‘hiding the decline:’ Making sure no-one saw how shaky their data, analysis and conclusions actually were.   Hide the decline didn’t refer to temperatures–it was worse. It was a decline in the quality of their data  they were trying to hide. This book puts it all into context–and in context it is worse.   Mosher actually played a small part in bringing the details to light (although your zany moderator Charles the First was more instrumental), and Fuller covered the story for examiner.com from day one of the scandal.   Here’s an excerpt: “In Chapter 6 we introduce the Army of Davids that will start the laborious process of documenting all the surface stations in the US. McIntyre starts dissecting the Jones 1990 paper and his intense focus on individual cases finds a sympathetic ear in Anthony Watts, who launches an even more detailed look at individual cases in the US. Discussions about UHI and data and code turn from a focus on Jones 1990 to a focus on NASA and their GISSTEMP code, which is eventually released.

At the start of May, McIntyre links to a blogger named Anthony Watts, a former TV meteorologist who was convinced that temperature monitoring stations in the United States were in dire shape and could not be trusted to create a temperature record, especially one that the world would use as a reference point for dealing with climate change. During the summer, Watts would launch a nationwide volunteer effort to document the weather collection stations used by NOAA, NASA, CRU and Jones. The effort that Trenberth thought too large for any one individual would be handled under Watts’ generalship by a true army of Davids across the nation, using the tools of the internet. The goal very simply was to document the status of the temperature collection stations. Many hands made light work of the job scientists thought too large to attempt.

Tom Karl of NOAA takes notice of Watts but is not sure how it will turn out.

From: “Thomas.R.Karl” <Thomas.R.Karl@xxxxx>

To: Phil Jones <p.jones@xxxxxx>

Subject: Re: FW: retraction request

Date: Tue, 19 Jun 2007 08:21:57 -0400

Thanks Phil,  We R now responding to a former TV weather forecaster who has got press, He has a web site  of 40 of the USHCN stations  showing less than ideal exposure.  He claims he can show urban biases and exposure biases.  We are writing a response for our Public Affairs.  Not sure how it will play out.    Regards, Tom

That effort, ridiculed at first by bloggers in the warmist faction, would in the end garner Watts a visit to NCDC to discuss his work. Moreover, in the end NOAA would engage in an effort to bring the climate network up to better quality standards. As of July 2009 the volunteer effort, hosted at www.surfacestations.org. had surveyed 1,003 of the 1,221 stations used by NOAA and corrected mistakes in the official metadata.:

Readers from this site can finish that part of the story.

Buy the book here