Joe Romm would call this a “head exploding moment“. If this were a skeptic, Tamino aka Grant Foster, would sharpen his invective ginsu knives and launch a fusillade of cutlery in a blog post claiming how stupid and inept skeptics are for not being able to work a simple program like Excel.
But this is professional climate science, so none of that will happen.
Over at Climate Audit, Steve McIntyre writes:
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Phil Jones spends much of his time looking down his nose at the heathen, but then confesses to Bob Ward that he is unable to calculate a trend on his own, as in this hilarious exchange at Bishop Hill:
I’m not adept enough (totally inept) with excel to do this now as no-one who knows how to is here.
Nor it seems in Matlab, R, ODL, Fortran or any other language. No wonder that he regarded someone who could calculate principal components (like Mann) as a sort of computational prodigy.
Last year, Phil was ranked one of England’s top 100 scientists. Just imagine the ranking that he could have achieved if he knew how to calculate a trend by himself.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
This is from FOIA2011 email 1885.txt
Don’t worry Dr. Phil, help is on the way!
I’d like to suggest to our readers that they purchase copies of this book and send them to Phil as a Christmas gift. Click image to order a copy. For UK residents, use the Amazon UK Link.
Here’s Dr. Phil’s address below. Amazon allows Christmas gift giving, and you can send a nice note along too. I suggest we fill his messy office (From Climategate1) with these books.
Maybe if gets so many he’ll give them to students, and he’ll actually be doing something useful. As for Romm and Foster, send them coal.
Prof. Phil Jones
Climatic Research Unit
School of Environmental Sciences
University of East Anglia
Norwich
NR4 7TJ
UK
Here’s the full email, note what Bob Ward concludes at the end (my bold):
From: Phil Jones
Sent: 20 December 2007 13:58
To: Bob Ward
Subject: Re: More nonsense on climate change
Bob,
Quickly re-reading this it sounds as though I’m getting at you. I’m not – just at the idiots who continue to spout this nonsense. It isn’t an issue with climatologists. All understand. If I tried to publish this I would be told by my peers it was obvious and banal. I will try and hide it in a paper at some point. I could put it on the CRU web site. I’ll see how I feel after the Christmas Pud.
I would have thought that this writer would have know better! I keep on seeing people saying this same stupid thing. I’m not adept enough (totally inept) with excel to do this now as no-one who knows how to is here.
What you have to do is to take the numbers in column C (the years) and then those in D (the anomalies for each year), plot them and then work out the linear trend. The slope is upwards. I had someone do this in early 2006, and the trend was upwards then. It will be now. Trend won’t be statistically significant, but the trend is up.
This is a linear trend – least squares. This is how statisticians work out trends. They don’t just look at the series. The simpler way is to just look at the data. The warmest year is 1998 with 0.526. All years since 2001 have been above 0.4. The only year before 2001 that was above this level was 1998. So 2cnd to 8th warmest years are 2001-2007
The reason 1998 was the warmest year was that it resulted from the largest El Nino event of the 20th century in 1997/8. We’ve not had anything resembling a major El Nino event since – they have all been minor.
Using regression, it is possible to take the El Nino event into account (with a regression based on the Southern Oscillation Index). This accounts for about 0.15 deg C of 1998’s warmth. Without that 1998 would have been at about 0.38.
There is a lot of variability from year-to-year in global temperatures – even more in ones like CET. No-one should expect each year to be warmer than the previous. The 2000s will be warmer than the 1990s though. This is another way of pointing out what’s wrong with their poor argument. The last comment about CET is wrong. 2007 will be among the top 10 warmest CET years – it will likely be 2cnd or 3rd.
Cheers
Phil
Ward responds:
Dear Phil,
Thanks for responding so comprehensively. I have plotted the data before, and as you observe, the trend is up but the result isn’t statistically significant, which I think makes it open to attack. I think the problem is that NOAA made the following statement in its report on the 2006 data:
“However, uncertainties in the global calculations due largely to gaps in data coverage make 2006 statistically indistinguishable from 2005 and several other recent warm years as shown by the error bars on the [1]global time series.”
I’m not sure how to argue against this point – it appears to imply that there is no statistically significant trend in the global temperature record over the past few years.
Best wishes,
Bob
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Ring ring ring
Mann; uh, hello?
Jones; Mike? its Phil….
Mann; Phil, its uhm… 3 AM here…is it important?
Jones; Yeah. Real important. I need to do a graph. Look there’s nobody in the office to do it for me and I have to have it ready for tomorrow morning. Do you know how to run Excel?
Mann; Yeah.
Jones; OK, good. How do I do a trend line?
Mann; You’re kidding….
Jones; No! I need to draw a trend line and I need to do it fast.
Mann; OK, calm down. Have you got Excel running?
Jones; Yes.
Mann; OK then, right click on the data plot you want to trend and choose add trend line from the drop down menu.
Jones; I did that already. Doesn’t work.
Mann; Uhm… doesn’t work?
Jones; No. It just draws a straight line. I want one of those curvy ones.
Mann; Uhm…linear is the default.
Jones; Well I don’t want lin… liny… whatever you said, I don’t want that one I want a curvy one.
Mann; Well which curvy one? You mean polynomial? Moving average? What?
Jones; Yeah, yeah, yeah, I saw all those choices on the menu. Linear, polynomial…hey what’s this bullsh*t with logarithmic? How’d that get in here? Didn’t we get rid of the notion that CO2 is logaruthmic? Who wrote this thing? How do we get them fired?
Mann; Its a statistical analysis method Phil, it has nothing to do with CO2.
Jones; We should get rid of it anyway. Optics you know.
Mann; Look, just tell me what method you want to use Phil…
Jones: Hockey stick.
Mann; Huh?
Jones; I want a hockey stick. Like the ones you draw all the time.
Mann; Uhm Phil, that wasn’t done with Excel, I wrote my own code.
Jones; Cool. Can I import it into Excel?
Mann; Uhm…no.
Jones; Well, there must be some way to do it in Excel.
Mann; Well…you could use moving average but you might have to adjust your data…
Jones; Well that won’t work. Hansen’s the adjustment guy and no way he’ll answer the phone at this hour.
Mann; Actually he’s here….
Jones; At your place? What’s he doing there?
Mann; Well, we had some stuff we had to burn. Notebooks, computer backup tapes and such…I’ll put him on the line.
Hansen; Hey there Jonesey, so ya need some adjustments huh?
Jones; Yeah.
Hansen; OK, here’s what you do. Get a felt marker and draw the line on the screen shaped like a hockey stick. Then you fiddle with the numbers until they match the line.
Jones; Hey! It’s working.
Hansen; OK, call back if you need anymore help. Bye.
Click. Bzzzzzzzzzz…..
Mann; You didn’t….
Hansen; Yup, I did.
Mann; Felt marker?
Hansen; Giggle. He’ll be trying to figure out why all his data has the same curve for the next week….
Mann; Too good. Hey, the fire is really going now. Think its hot enough to melt these hard drives yet?
The aptly described Lazy Teenager said:
“And the rant about Eucalyptus trees is 75% bad story telling. Exploding trees. Sheesh! Nothing grows near them. Sheesh! And a whole bunch of other sheesh. To much crazy greenie alarmism around here.”
Well, LT, take it from an Aussie, from the continent where they are the predominant tree species, Gail knows of what she speaks. You can fly for hundreds of miles along the east and south east coast of Australia, and see vast forests of eucalypts which are pretty much monocultural, like conifer forests in the high latitudes of the NH. Different species and sub-species of eucalypts, but many, many millions of the things and not much else growing. There are a few plants that have evolved to co-exist with them, but they are pretty much unique to Australia. Eucalypts drop resinous bark and oily leaves which leave a dead circle around the tree, rather as the pine needles in the aforementioned NH forests do.
That is why they are the predominant species of tree here – they killed off and outlasted the competition a long time ago. (I hasten to add that there is plenty of non-forest land with other plant species thriving).
And until you have seen a massive bushfire involving trees with a high oil content, such as eucalypts or certain conifers with similar properties, best not to comment on the exploding trees thing. It’s a sensitive subject in this country, where many people have perished in precisely those sorts of fires.
I’m left puzzled… If Phil Jones can’t do an Excel spreadsheet, what tools did he use to massage his data? And was it lazy (or non-existent) computer backup on his part that caused him to lose his data?
Or are his claims that he’s lost his methodology and that all-important data just a big cover so people won’t find out about his inept mathematical and computer abilities and dismiss him for incompetence?
Speaking of Phil, he’s got some explanations up on the web about the context of some of those emails. He comes up with some very nice explanations that I have some questions about. Oddly, comments aren’t allowed, so, with the permission of the mods, I’m posting my questions here in the hopes that Phil sees them and answers.
Professor Phil Jones explains the context of some of the phrases cherry-picked from the thousands of emails (from 1995 to 2009) posted on the web on November 22, 2011.
Email 3062:
“We don’t really want the bullsh*t and optimistic stuff that Michael has written […] We’ll have to cut out some of his stuff.”
Phil;
What has been cut out of this quote is the explanation that we wanted the science to reflect the limits of scientific knowledge ‘warts and all’: “We don’t really want the bullshit and optimistic stuff that Michael has written that sounds as though it could have been written by a coral person 25 years ago. We’ll have to cut out some of his stuff. What we want is good honest stuff, warts and all, dubious dating, interpretation marginally better etc.”
REPLY:
Well Phil, how about you publish the stuff you cut out and let us decide for ourselves? BTW, was it the “optimistic” part that made it “bullsh*t”? Could you also identify for us the good honest stuff you did use that had the “dubious dating” and other warts? If you knowingly used “stuff” that you knew had “warts”, perhaps you could point out exactly which “stuff” that was do we can cross it off our list of things that need to be discredited?
Email 2775:
“I too don’t see why the schemes should be symmetrical. The temperature ones certainly will not as we’re choosing the periods to show the warming.”
Phil;
The full email exchange reveals that we were choosing colours for a chart covering periods that showed warming. The periods chosen were 1901 to 2005 (the long record) and 1979 to 2005 (the satellite record).
REPLY:
So prehaps Phil, you could explain what the advantage of having an asymmetrical color scheme over a symmetrical color scheme would be? What was so important about the color scheme of data plots that it required several PhD’s to figure it out? Isn’t that what grad students are for? What effect did an asymmetrical color scheme have on the graphs and how they appeared that was so important to you? Was this before or after you learned Michael’s “Nature Trick”?
Email 0714:
“Getting people we know and trust [into IPCC] is vital – hence my comment about the tornadoes group.”
Phil;
This was related to the selection of contributing authors, not IPCC-appointed chapter authors over which I have no influence. It means scientists we could trust to write succinct and clear text.
REPLY:
Phil, Phil, Phil. Poor Phil, you have no influence over chapter authors? Well, the implication isn’t that you did, is it? The implication is that you were part of a concerted effort to stack the writing team with like minded individuals to ensure there were no dissenting view points for the chapter to deal with. That sounds reminiscent of one of your emails from ClimateGate 1 about keeping certain papers out even if you had to redefine the meening of peer review, does it not?
Email 1788:
“There shouldn’t be someone else at UEA with different views [from “recent extreme weather is due to global warming”] – at least not a climatologist.”
Phil;
This was in response to a request from a TV programme (via the university press office) which wanted to find two climatologists from UEA with differing views to debate on air. It was my view that I doubted if we could find anyone of that opposing view among my colleagues.
REPLY:
Odd that in an organization of your size, everyone agrees on the main points of everything, is it not? Was your certainty based on the assumption that as their boss no one would dare contradict you? Or was your certainty based in the knowledge that you had gotten all your detractors fired already? After all, wouldn’t getting people with contrary opinions fired be a real good way to keep them from writing anything you didn’t want the chapter authors to deal with?
Email 0896:
“I think the urban-related warming should be smaller than this, but I can’t think of a good way to argue this. I am hopeful of finding something in the data that makes by their Figure 3.”
Phil;
These were discussions between me and two Chinese scientists and they were resolved, as evidenced by the paper in Journal of Geophysical Research. It was about confusion over different regions of China.
REPLY:
Gee Phil, if you were confused, one would think that you would ask them for clarification. Instead you said you were looking for a way to argue that their results were wrong and couldn’t think of a way to do it. Yes, that sounds like confusion to me. Facts you don’t want to believe often have that effect do they not?
Email 4443:
“Basic problem is that all models are wrong – not got enough middle and low level clouds.”
Phil;
This is a discussion that referred to climate models of the late 1990s vintage. These issues were well-known and they have improved in more recent modelling. This related to model differences in development of a multi-model average for the future. The work was not published in the peer-reviewed literature.
REPLY:
But Phil… you said “all models”. Now you say it was in reference to the models of the late 1990’s. That would be like… say….1998? 1999? When was AR4 published again? What models from what time period were used in the publication just a few years later? Were they a year newer? Two years newer? Did they go from all being wrong to all being right in two or three years?
Email 2440:
“I’ve been told that IPCC is above national FOI Acts. One way to cover yourself and all those working in AR5 would be to delete all emails at the end of the process”
Phil;
At the end of the IPCC process, chapters, formal comments and responses are all published and that is the appropriate place for this information. It is important that scientists should be allowed free and frank discussion during the writing process. I might also point out that I am not part of AR5.
REPLY:
Well Phil, I can certainly understand the difficulty of having detailed discussions in the public eye, but wouldn’t the record of how you drew your conclusions be of value? You know, sort of like “show your work”? Now I know that Nixon set a precedent by erasing some of his work, but he only erased bits here and there, you’re going to a whole new level and saying erase it all. I’m not sure what you not being a part of AR5 has to do with telling people to erase everything to “cover” themselves? What could they possibly say about scientific facts that wouls need to be erased to “cover” themselves?
Email 1577:
“Any work we have done in the past is done on the back of the research grants we get – and has to be well hidden. I’ve discussed this with the main funder…in the past and they are happy about not releasing the original station data.”
Phil;
‘Hidden’ refers here to some of the work on data collection and management. This is a common issue in some areas of climate research and refers to issues of an operational nature and research aspects. An obvious example is updating earlier data sets within a new project. Most funders are fully aware that this is common practice.
REPLY:
Well Phil, after the whole “hide the decline” think by using “Mike’s Nature trick” which was to cut and past temperature records over top of tree ring records, but only for those parts of the graph where the tree rings didn’t show what they were “supposed to”, I’m sure you can understand that some of us are a bit sensitive to words like “hidden”. You see, when someone with a track record like yours says things have to be “well hidden” and that people should “cover” themselves by deleting all their work, well, we just get a but suspiscious Phil. Tell you what, let’s give you the benefit of the doubt. How about you specify exactly which data you were referring to, and exactly how it was “hidden” and we’ll double check with the “funder”. Of course we’ll need to know exactly who the funder was, which, since this is evidently fresh in your mind given your ability to recall the obscure details the email was in reference to, I’m sure you will be able to remember.
Looking forward to your answers Phil. I’m sure you can clear up the issues I’ve raised in nothing flat.
I am not a scientist but did statistics as an undergrad. This cannot be possibly be true. A lead scientist in a field almost entirely based on statistical analysis cannot plot a linear trend in Excel. This has to be a wind up doesn’t it?
Also Lazy T, re gum trees; I have stood on the back of a fire tender and had my eyebrows removed by the detonation (and yes that is the correct word) of a gum tree canopy some 50 metres away. I suggest you know little of that topic. What do think happens when you vapourise a few hundred litres of flammable fluid into a cloud and then apply flame?
Oh gawd, Phil Jones has had WAY too much money thrown at him already – and who knows what he’ll do with the books. Throw them away or burn ’em out of anger or embarrassment? Please, don’t waste the $$ sending him books – far better to find better uses for it. Give the book to a kid who could really use it, but perhaps print out a copy of the cover, then send THAT to Phil Jones with a note along the lines of ‘donated this to a child in the hopes that he/she will wind up a far better scientist than you!’
reply to: Pj says: November 24, 2011 at 2:11 pm
This sort of lack of logic never ceases to blow my mind. Pj, I hate to break it to you, but by definition mankind, and everything we do, is a ‘part of nature’ that has occurred naturally. Or are anthills, beehives, termite mounds/dens (or dens created by any creature for that matter, bears, wolves, etc), shells used by shellfish & hermit crabs, etc., bird nests, and so on, all unnatural too?
As to some utopian magical planet being in balance with nature – gee, would you please explain that to the dinosaurs? They existed for a vastly greater time frame than man. Did they also become unnatural, doing unnatural things to the planet, thus leading to their extinction?
Just how “in balance with nature” was the planet during each of the glacial periods? Were those all “extremely negative states” between the planet and nature where nature got miffed or something and was just giving our planet the cold shoulder?
And, speaking of cold shoulders…. how did you manage to divorce planets from nature to begin with? Is the moon not in balance with nature, since it has no atmosphere or life? Did the planet Mercury REALLY tick nature off, thereby resulting in such a volatile red hot situation between the two of them? If so, let’s not even talk about the relationship of the Sun with Nature!! Is Nature giving Neptune the cold shoulder? Are gas giants just planets where nature has a bad case of indigestion causing super excessive gas?
Just when and how did planets and nature become two separate entities, entities that are somehow magically in balance now and forever, until, of course, the advent of modern man’s unnatural behavior? Inquiring minds want to know.
Well you can call me an old fussbudget, but Excel is a spreadsheet and I’m sure Jones knows how to use it for the budgets, anyone using it for serious graphs needs a brain transplant. Love your work Anthony, some great contributions to humour here and I will attribute correctly!
“I’m not adept enough (totally inept) with excel to do this now as no-one who knows how to is here.”
So what? Neither can I. I can do it by hand, though, as well as in other software, and so can Phil.
“I’m not sure how to argue against this point – it appears to imply that there is no statistically significant trend in the global temperature record over the past few years.”
So what? A few years is just that — a few. Add one more year and you get a statistically significant trend. [snip]
DavidmHoffer wrote…..”Ring ring……”
Absolutely Monty Python pricelessness!!!
There has been no significant warming trend since 1998 because that is when Excel was installed on ‘what me?’ Phil’s computer.
They’ve always said that the entire amount of warming was directly attributed to man – IIRC, Gavin said that man was responsible for up to 110 percent of the current warming. If I’m wrong, then someone can correct me.
Forgive a humble Chartered Structural Engineer, but can we have 110% of warming? Surely he meant 100% of current warming? I appreciate that one can have an “increase in excess of 100%”, but I despair when peolpe keep using this ridiculous expression of “I am a million percent certain ” or whatever. It shows complete ignorance, but then again I expect that is what the dumbing down exercise was all about in the first place, to ahcieve the ignorance of the populace!
I have an old HP-45 calculator from the mid 1970’s that makes calculation of trend lines almost trivial. The only trick is learning RPN (“reverse Polish notation”), which should not be difficult for someone who can extract ‘raw’ data from a predetermined ‘conclusion.’
When I was going through school 20 years ago first semester engineering and science students had to learn C on Sunsparc stations. Before that, I believe students had to learn FORTRAN (either on mainframes or midrange). Programs like Mathematica were also the rage.Most science and engineering grad students I knew back then were well versed in both FORTRAN and C. The really serious ones also very good at diff equations, numerical analysis, and many statistical techniques. I even met a couple of PHD candidates in engineering who had 2 semesters of Assembly language under thier belts. The point is, Phil Jones isn’t so old that he wouldn’t have been exposed to some programming language or tools to do advanced statistics. Heck, Minitab has been around for years, and I’ve met many quality techs with no college who can do advanced SPC analysis on mini-tab. Granted, using SPC is not exactly doing PCA. But, I would think after reading Phil Jone’s CV, Excel would be child’s play for him.
The lesson here is that narcissism trumps competence.
It is shocking and distressing to see how incompetent the people who convinced the world there was disastrous man-made global warming are. So, I can appreciate the anger. But, if any of you are thinking of following the suggestion of sending him a Christmas “present”, PLEASE think twice.
The guy considered suicide after Climategate 1: http://www.nature.com/news/2010/101115/full/468362a.html
One of the things the e-mails reveal to me is that he genuinely believes he’s doing the right thing. He may be wrong, and he may have helped spread that wrong message. But, I don’t think he’s evil, just seriously misguided.
REPLY: I just had an email exchange with Dr. Phil Jones, I can assure you he appears anything but suicidal. He’s also publishing papers again. – Anthony
Anthony, I’m reassured to hear that. And, from the sounds of your reply, I’m guessing he’s keeping up his appalling behaviour that we’re learning about from the e-mails… 🙁
I just don’t like the idea of causing someone to have a nervous breakdown (or worse)… even a guy like him.
I do think his behaviour was and is appalling, and that he brought Climategate on himself by his ridiculous stonewalling on basic requests for data. Especially, when he had no qualms in giving that data to a “non-sceptic” if it meant another publication. So, I have very little sympathy for him at all.
But, I never liked the idea of fighting fire with fire.
P.S. Happy Thanksgiving for yesterday, and thanks for keeping the posts going during your holidays. They’re making fascinating reading! 🙂
@davidmhoffer: Priceless! The kind of humour (UK sp) that was so good I could actually see the dialogue taking place.
@Lazy T: At time of comment you have yet to apologise to Gail. It is the mark of a man that he not only knows when he is in error (some error!!), but that he has enough guts to apologise for it. That you fail in both of these qualities marks you out as a mindless troll. I shall be happy to change my opinion when I see you apologise.
Sad, but it reminds me of a question I’ve always had: Isn’t linear regression the wrong method, considering that the underlying function is roughly trigonometric, both on an annual and daily basis? I’ll bet that attempts to fit a more realistic equation have been unsuccessful (or show the opposite of the desired result with a significant goodness of fit measure), so resort was made to LR because it showed the trend they “knew” was right. Wouldn’t be the first time.
My previous comment only makes sense if you’re looking at one station at a time, but I think that’s the right way to do it. If the preponderance show warming, then a case can be made that there has been wide scale warming over the period under study. But I would monitor the predictive accuracy for each station for many years before venturing to make long-term predictions. My guess is that the accuracy would not be stunningly high.
I think using linear regression of a daily global average would only work if if every station were equidistant and diametrically opposite from another station, otherwise the cancellation of seasonal variation would be skewed according to the regional density of the stations. You could try to simulate equidistance by averaging into a global grid, but the result would still be skewed according to the regional density of the stations, and would convey less information. IMO.
re: davidmhoffer says: November 24, 2011 at 7:03 pm
“ring ring…”
Thanks for the good laugh!
davidmhoffer says:
November 24, 2011 at 9:09 pm
Speaking of Phil, he’s got some explanations up on the web about the context of some of those emails. He comes up with some very nice explanations that I have some questions about. Oddly, comments aren’t allowed, so, with the permission of the mods, I’m posting my questions here in the hopes that Phil sees them and answers.
Professor Phil Jones explains the context of some of the phrases cherry-picked from the thousands of emails (from 1995 to 2009) posted on the web on November 22, 2011.
….
Email 1577:
“Any work we have done in the past is done on the back of the research grants we get – and has to be well hidden. I’ve discussed this with the main funder…in the past and they are happy about not releasing the original station data.”
Phil;
‘Hidden’ refers here to some of the work on data collection and management. This is a common issue in some areas of climate research and refers to issues of an operational nature and research aspects. An obvious example is updating earlier data sets within a new project. Most funders are fully aware that this is common practice.
REPLY:
Well Phil, after the whole “hide the decline” think by using “Mike’s Nature trick” which was to cut and past temperature records over top of tree ring records, but only for those parts of the graph where the tree rings didn’t show what they were “supposed to”, I’m sure you can understand that some of us are a bit sensitive to words like “hidden”. You see, when someone with a track record like yours says things have to be “well hidden” and that people should “cover” themselves by deleting all their work, well, we just get a but suspiscious Phil. Tell you what, let’s give you the benefit of the doubt. How about you specify exactly which data you were referring to, and exactly how it was “hidden” and we’ll double check with the “funder”. Of course we’ll need to know exactly who the funder was, which, since this is evidently fresh in your mind given your ability to recall the obscure details the email was in reference to, I’m sure you will be able to remember.
Looking forward to your answers Phil. I’m sure you can clear up the issues I’ve raised in nothing flat.
===============================================
🙂 we know who the funder was, it was in the original email which Phil snipped before posting his excuse.
“Any work we have done in the past is done on the back of the research grants we
get – and has to be well hidden. I’ve discussed this with the main funder (US
Dept of Energy) in the past and they are happy about not releasing the original
station data.”
How the US Dept of Energy comes to be the main funder?
Excel illiteracy is more common than you would expect. I interviewed for an engineering position recently and they said they needed people who were expert in Excel, so they were asking prospects if they knew how to use the VLOOKUP() function.
I’m a stats wiz. I’ve used SAS for plenty of analysis, plus innumerable programs I’ve written to analyse time series data.
In this case I’ll have to agree that Excel sucks big time. Serious analysts should avoid Excel at all costs.
While this is amusing and all, the inability to do something in Excel shouldn’t be taken as an indicator of ability/intelligence. Excel does sometimes make some … er … inexcusable … errors.
This said, Octave is free, and has lots of stats packages in it. So if you don’t want to code up your own linear least squares, you could use this. And it runs everywhere. The R language is built for stats, and does an amazingly good job at analysis. You could use that as well.
All this said, without grasping the full context, the a-priori assumption they are making is that they have something best modeled by a linear function. Least squares will give you an approximation to such a line based upon your data. They might need to look more at an Levenburg-Marquardt routine. Which I am pretty sure isn’t in baseline Excel. Could be there though, I haven’t looked.
As sad as all of this is, lets not attack someone for their assumed lack of knowledge of a particular (and relatively poor) analysis tool. Not knowing of other tools, and the techniques to use them? Yeah, thats a good reason to poke at someone (a simple google search would help them find what they need these days, and certainly when the emails were written).