The contextual collection of ClimateGate 2.0 quotes

One of the first whines out of RealClimate ( a Fenton Communications/ Environmental Media Services production) was that they were “out of context” saying:

“Indeed, even the out-of-context quotes aren’t that exciting, and are even less so in-context.”

That’s typical Gavin putz-speak for “nothing to see here, move along”. His message, coming just a few hours after the release in the wee hours of the morning, and just before 8AM EST on 11/22 suggests that Gavin pulled a Peter Gleick and didn’t actually read the emails before writing a dismissive review of them.  Yet it appears that with what has been discovered so far in the 5000 plus emails, the context is quite rich.

Out of context, comes understanding.

Jeff suggested I repost this collection of quotes in the words of climate scientists as discovered in Climategate 2.0 context. He’s done a great job at collecting the relevant context. – Anthony

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Their words – Guest post by Jeff Id of the Air Vent

They call us skeptics, deniers, fossil fuel funded, contrarians, anti-science, all because we criticize the IPCC, the hockey stick plots, temperature record quality, biased peer review, and the general politicizing that climate science has undergone. Don’t take it from me though, Climategate II explains the same things in the words of the scientists themselves.

In this post, I’ve posted a large number of quotes from the emails and other online sources which I have been gradually gathering for several days now. The consensus duma will say they are out-of-context so if you question that, check the numbers or links next to the comments. It is not possible that they could ALL be out-of-context but there are many  statements from climate science which leave me wondering. This post is started out with a quote from noted scientist Dr. Roy Spencer’s blog and it continues on with quotes from the consensus. All of whom are actual climate scientists.

Be sure that there are many more quotes in these emails. I am only one person and the documentation takes time. If there are more to add to the list (there are) just quote the email number and a few sentences below. No need to copy the whole email. Those interested enough will look it up anyway. I didn’t cover the FOIA and peer review issues here but hope to add them to this list in the future.

The IPCC

From the organization statement: http://www.ipcc.ch/organization/organization.shtml

Because of its scientific and intergovernmental nature, the IPCC embodies a unique opportunity to provide rigorous and balanced scientific information to decision makers. By endorsing the IPCC reports, governments acknowledge the authority of their scientific content. The work of the organization is therefore policy-relevant and yet policy-neutral, never policy-prescriptive.

Roy Spencer -on his blog regarding the IPCC

Unfortunately, there is no way to “fix” the IPCC, and there never was. The reason is that its formation over 20 years ago was to support political and energy policy goals, not to search for scientific truth. I know this not only because one of the first IPCC directors told me so, but also because it is the way the IPCC leadership behaves. If you disagree with their interpretation of climate change, you are left out of the IPCC process. They ignore or fight against any evidence which does not support their policy-driven mission, even to the point of pressuring scientific journals not to publish papers which might hurt the IPCC’s efforts.

Hans VonStorch – Wall St Journal Climategate 1.0

What we can now see is a concerted effort to emphasize scientific results that are useful to a political agenda by blocking papers in the purportedly independent review process and skewing the assessments of the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

#0714 Phil Jones – on finding authors for the IPCC AR4 report

Getting people we know and trust is vital – hence my comment about the tornadoes group.

#4755 Johnathan Overpeck – Picking what goes into IPCC AR4

 The trick may be to decide on the main message and use that to guid what’s included and what is left out. For the IPCC, we need to know what is relevant and useful for assessing recent and future climate change.

#3066 Peter Thorne – IPCC Zero’th order draft

I note that my box on the lapse rates was completely and utterly ignored which may explain to some extent my reaction, but I also think the science is being manipulated to put a political spin on it which for all our sakes might not be too clever in the long run.

#2009 Keith Briffa – writing zero’th order draft of paleo IPCC AR4 chapter.

I find myself in the strange position of being very skeptical of the quality of all present reconstructions, yet sounding like a pro greenhouse zealot here!

#0170 Jones – Looking for hurricane paper to be included in the IPCC AR4

Seems that this potential Nature paper may be worth citing, if it does say that GW is having an effect on TC activity.

#1922 Johnathan Overpeck – on the message for the IPCC paleo section

Need to convince readers that there really has been an increase in knowledge – more evidence. What is it?

#3066 Tim Carter – on what is going into the IPCC. Written to IPCC authors because of amazing THC claims.

Regarding the phrase ‘IPCC position’? Would it be wise to check that McCarthy /Watson have the same understanding as we do.

[and the reply]

[TC] You could try, but it has been tricky getting anyone to make statements about anything. It seems that a few people have a very strong say, and no matter how much talking goes on beforehand, the big decisions are made at the eleventh hour by a select core group.

#4133 Johnathan Overpeck – IPCC review. Doing what is necessary for the IPCC

Synthesis and Implications for Climate change combine ideas from the different time periods – it gives paleoclimate studies more of an unified feel, as if it were a real discipline rather than a bunch of people doing their own time-period thing. That’s necessary for IPCC, and necessary for the outside community to see as well. So I would vote for keeping the general order, but eliminating the overlap and inconsistencies in ways that seem most reasonable.

#0419 Mike Hulme –

I am increasingly unconvinced by the majority of climate impact studies – including some of those I am involved in – and feel we are not really giving the right message to our audiences.

 Douglas Maraun Die Klimazweibel blog –

Second, I agree with von Storch, that some climate scientists are alarmist, and even more, some climate scientists are politicised and give scientific results a certain spin to push their political agenda. Yet, as I experienced CRU, the institute was far from being alarmist or streamlined in any way.

NAS panel review of hockeysticks prompted by McIntyre and McKitrick.

#1104 -Heinz Wanner – on reporting his NAS panel critique of Mann to the media.

I just refused to give an exclusive interview to SPIEGEL because I will not cause damage for climate science.

#1656 Douglas Maraun – on how to react to skeptics.

How should we deal with flaws inside the climate community? I think, that “our” reaction on the errors found in Mike Mann’s work were not especially honest.

#3234 Richard Alley

Taking the recent instrumental record and the tree-ring record and joining them yields a dramatic picture, with rather high confidence that recent times are anomalously warm. Taking strictly the tree-ring record and omitting the instrumental record yields a less-dramatic picture and a lower confidence that the recent temperatures are anomalous.

Paleoclimate and hide the decline

#0300

Bo Christiansen – On Hockey stick reconstructions

All methods strongly underestimates the amplitude of low-frequency variability and trends. This means that it is almost impossible to conclude from reconstruction studies that the present period is warmer than any period in the reconstructed period.

Ed Cook #3253

the results of this study will show that we can probably say a fair bit about <100 year extra-tropical NH temperature variability (at least as far as we believe the proxy estimates), but honestly know fuck-all about what the >100 year variability was like with any certainty (i.e. we know with certainty that we know fuck-all).

#4133 Johnathan Overpeck – IPCC review.

what Mike Mann continually fails to understand, and no amount of references will solve, is that there is practically no reliable tropical data for most of the time period, and without knowing the tropical sensitivity, we have no way of knowing how cold (or warm)the globe actually got.

[and later]

Unsatisfying, perhaps, since people will want to know whether 1200 AD was warmer than today, but if the data doesn’t exist, the question can’t yet be answered. A good topic for needed future work.

Rob Wilson – 1583

The palaeo-world has become a much more complex place in the last 10 years and with all the different calibration methods, data processing methods, proxy interpretations – any method that incorporates all forms of uncertainty and error will undoubtedly result in reconstructions with wider error bars than we currently have. These many be more honest, but may not be too helpful for model comparison attribution studies. We need to be careful with the wording I think.

#3234 Richard Alley – on NAS panel and divergence

records, or some other records such as Rosanne’s new ones, show “divergence”, then I believe it casts doubt on the use of joined tree-ring/instrumental records, and I don’t believe that I have yet heard why this interpretation is wrong.

#4758 Tim Osborne – Criticizing other people for doing the same thing

Because how can we be critical of Crowley for throwing out 40-years in the middle of his calibration, when we’re throwing out all post-1960 data ‘cos the MXD has a non-temperature signal in it, and also all pre-1881 or pre-1871 data ‘cos the temperature data may have a non-temperature signal in it! If we write the Holocene forum article then we’ll have to be critical or our paper as well as Crowley’s!

#0497 – Phil Jones UEA – Scientists don’t know the magnitude of past warming.

Even though the tree-ring chronologies used have robust rbar statistics for the whole 1000 years ( ie they lose nothing because core numbers stay high throughout), they have lost low frequency because of standardization. We’ve all tried with RCS/very stiff splines/hardly any detrending to keep this to a minimum, but until we know it is minimal it is still worth mentioning.

#0886 Jan Esper on his own reconstruction – also hidden decline

And the curve will also show that the IPCC curve needs to be improved according to missing long-term declining trends/signals, which were removed (by dendrochronologists!) before Mann merged the local records together.

Tiim Osborne 4007

Also we have applied a completely artificial adjustment to the data after 1960, so they look closer to observed temperatures than the tree-ring data actually were

Tim Osborne #2347

Also, we set all post-1960 values to missing in the MXD data set (due to decline), and the method will infill these, estimating them from the real temperatures – another way of “correcting” for the decline, though may be not defensible!

#3234 Richard Alley

Unless the “divergence problem” can be confidently ascribed to some cause that was not active a millennium ago, then the comparison between tree rings from a millennium ago and instrumental records from the last decades does not seem to be justified, and the confidence level in the anomalous nature of the recent warmth is lowered.

I think the best way to sum up all of this is a quote from a guest post at tAV and DieKlimazweibel by Bo Christiansen:

Where does all this lead us? It is very likely that the NH mean temperature has shown much larger past variability than caught by previous reconstructions. We cannot from these reconstructions conclude that the previous 50-year period has been unique in the context of the last 500-1000 years.

Of course we all know that the IPCC reports differently.