This post will be a top “sticky” post for some time, new essays will appear below this one. UPDATES as emails are noted, will appear below. – Anthony
UPDATE8 3/19/13: Jeff Condon has received legal notice from UEA warning him not to release the password. So far, I have not seen any such notice. For those who demand it be released, take note. – Anthony
A number of climate skeptic bloggers (myself included) have received this message yesterday. While I had planned to defer announcing this until a reasonable scan could be completed, some other bloggers have let the cat out of the bag. I provide this introductory email sent by “FOIA” without editing or comment. I do have one email, which I found quite humorous, which I will add at the end so that our friends know that this is valid. Update – the first email I posted apparently was part of an earlier release (though I had not seen it, there are a number of duplicates in the all.zip file) so I have added a second one.
Update 2: Additional emails have been added – Anthony
Update 3: Delingpole weighs in.
Climategate: FOIA – The Man Who Saved The World – Telegraph Blogs
I hope one day that FOIA’s true identity can be revealed so that he can be properly applauded and rewarded for his signal service to mankind. He is a true hero, who deserves to go on the same roll of honour as Norman Borlaug, Julian Simon and Steve McIntyre: people who put truth, integrity and the human race first and ideology second. Unlike the misanthropic greenies who do exactly the opposite.
Update4: An email showing some insight on the beginning of the use of the word “denier” along with some demonstrated coziness with media activists.
Update5: Mike Mann rages and releases the attack dogs Monbiot, Romm, Media Matters and others in response to a perfectly valid and polite inquiry from the Wall Street Journal, suggesting a smear before the reporter even write the story.
Update6: From Junkscience.com, who spotted this exchange: Wigley accuses IPCC and lead authors of ‘dishonest presentations of model results’; Accuses Mann of deception; Mann admits
Update7: From Junkscience.com, Briffa worries that manmade environmental change distorts tree-ring analysis.
===========================================================
Subject: FOIA 2013: the password
It’s time to tie up loose ends and dispel some of the speculation surrounding the Climategate affair.
Indeed, it’s singular “I” this time. After certain career developments I can no longer use the papal plural 😉
If this email seems slightly disjointed it’s probably my linguistic background and the problem of trying to address both the wider audience (I expect this will be partially reproduced sooner or later) and the email recipients (whom I haven’t decided yet on).
The “all.7z” password is [redacted]
DO NOT PUBLISH THE PASSWORD. Quote other parts if you like.
Releasing the encrypted archive was a mere practicality. I didn’t want to keep the emails lying around.
I prepared CG1 & 2 alone. Even skimming through all 220.000 emails would have taken several more months of work in an increasingly unfavorable environment.
Dumping them all into the public domain would be the last resort. Majority of the emails are irrelevant, some of them probably sensitive and socially damaging.
To get the remaining scientifically (or otherwise) relevant emails out, I ask you to pass this on to any motivated and responsible individuals who could volunteer some time to sift through the material for eventual release.
Filtering\redacting personally sensitive emails doesn’t require special expertise.
I’m not entirely comfortable sending the password around unsolicited, but haven’t got better ideas at the moment. If you feel this makes you seemingly “complicit” in a way you don’t like, don’t take action.
I don’t expect these remaining emails to hold big surprises. Yet it’s possible that the most important pieces are among them. Nobody on the planet has held the archive in plaintext since CG2.
That’s right; no conspiracy, no paid hackers, no Big Oil. The Republicans didn’t plot this. USA politics is alien to me, neither am I from the UK. There is life outside the Anglo-American sphere.
If someone is still wondering why anyone would take these risks, or sees only a breach of privacy here, a few words…
The first glimpses I got behind the scenes did little to garner my trust in the state of climate science — on the contrary. I found myself in front of a choice that just might have a global impact.
Briefly put, when I had to balance the interests of my own safety, privacy\career of a few scientists, and the well-being of billions of people living in the coming several decades, the first two weren’t the decisive concern.
It was me or nobody, now or never. Combination of several rather improbable prerequisites just wouldn’t occur again for anyone else in the foreseeable future. The circus was about to arrive in Copenhagen. Later on it could be too late.
Most would agree that climate science has already directed where humanity puts its capability, innovation, mental and material “might”. The scale will grow ever grander in the coming decades if things go according to script. We’re dealing with $trillions and potentially drastic influence on practically everyone.
Wealth of the surrounding society tends to draw the major brushstrokes of a newborn’s future life. It makes a huge difference whether humanity uses its assets to achieve progress, or whether it strives to stop and reverse it, essentially sacrificing the less fortunate to the climate gods.
We can’t pour trillions in this massive hole-digging-and-filling-up endeavor and pretend it’s not away from something and someone else.
If the economy of a region, a country, a city, etc. deteriorates, what happens among the poorest? Does that usually improve their prospects? No, they will take the hardest hit. No amount of magical climate thinking can turn this one upside-down.
It’s easy for many of us in the western world to accept a tiny green inconvenience and then wallow in that righteous feeling, surrounded by our “clean” technology and energy that is only slightly more expensive if adequately subsidized.
Those millions and billions already struggling with malnutrition, sickness, violence, illiteracy, etc. don’t have that luxury. The price of “climate protection” with its cumulative and collateral effects is bound to destroy and debilitate in great numbers, for decades and generations.
Conversely, a “game-changer” could have a beneficial effect encompassing a similar scope.
If I had a chance to accomplish even a fraction of that, I’d have to try. I couldn’t morally afford inaction. Even if I risked everything, would never get personal compensation, and could probably never talk about it with anyone.
I took what I deemed the most defensible course of action, and would do it again (although with slight alterations — trying to publish something truthful on RealClimate was clearly too grandiose of a plan ;-).
Even if I have it all wrong and these scientists had some good reason to mislead us (instead of making a strong case with real data) I think disseminating the truth is still the safest bet by far.
Big thanks to Steve and Anthony and many others. My contribution would never have happened without your work (whether or not you agree with the views stated).
Oh, one more thing. I was surprised to learn from a “progressive” blog, corroborated by a renowned “scientist”, that the releases were part of a coordinated campaign receiving vast amounts of secret funding from shady energy industry groups.
I wasn’t aware of the arrangement but warmly welcome their decision to support my project. For that end I opened a bitcoin address: 1HHQ36qbsgGZWLPmiUjYHxQUPJ6EQXVJFS.
More seriously speaking, I accept, with gratitude, modest donations to support The (other) Cause. The address can also serve as a digital signature to ward off those identity thefts which are part of climate scientists’ repertoire of tricks these days.
Keep on the good work. I won’t be able to use this email address for long so if you reply, I can’t guarantee reading or answering. I will several batches, to anyone I can think of.
Over and out.
Mr. FOIA
===============================================================
Here is one email that I found interesting and humorous, email addresses redacted as a courtesy. Note the bolding:
===============================================================
—–Original Message—–
From: Simon Tett
Sent: Saturday, August 25, 2001 1:36 PM
To: matcollins@xxx.xx.xxx
Cc: t.osborn@xxx.xx.xxx ; k.briffa@xxx.xx.xxx
Subject: Paleo-Paper
Mat,
The papers looks very good. Hope these comments aren’t too late…. I
don’t think I need to see it again.
Simon
Response to reviewers
I couldn’t read your letter — PS files as attachments seem to get
munged by our firewall/email scanner so I’ve just looked at the paper
to see if I think you’ve dealt with the reviewers comments.
Editors comments:
3) Don’t think you have dealt with the enhanced multi-decadal
variability in the paper.
Reviewer B.
1) Didn’t see a justification for use of tree-rings and not using ice
cores — the obvious one is that ice cores are no good — see Jones et
al, 1998.
2) No justification for regional reconstructions rather than what Mann
et al did (I don’t think we can say we didn’t do Mann et al because
we think it is crap!)
3) No justification in the paper for the 9 regions. I think there is
justification in the JGR Briffa paper.
4) That is a good point — I would strongly suspect that the control has
a lot less variance than the observations over the last century —
not the ALL run though!
5) No response to this in the paper. I suspect we are doing better
stats than all the rest though!
Specific Questions/comments
1) That is a good point: How about (though a bit germanic)
“Comparison of simulated northern hemisphere variability with
paleo-temperature …”
Didn’t see that you had dealt with points 5 and 6.
Ditto for point 11.
Figures.
2-4 seem to be much as submitted!
Figs 5-8 — do you want to use colour? It would cost!
Ref C.
Don’t seem to have dealt with point a) and it is quite an important
point as well!
Point b is a reasonable point which I think you go some way to dealing
with. I suggest you stress on page 20 the “exploratory” nature of our
analysis. I am just about to start such a run once I have sorted out
the orbital forcings and how to calculate their radiative forcings.
Point c — not sure what the referee is saying here!
Comments on the MS.
Page 9 “pith” means
Same sentence I think you need to add that they are grouped by
species as well (the rest of the para implies that is what is
done).
Last sentence of penultimate para: stress that decadal to century
scale variability is what we are interested mainly because of its
importance in deciding if recent climate change is anthropogenic or
natural.
First full para on page 13 — didn’t really follow this para.
2nd para, line 11 consider “in comparison” -> “when compared”
Page 14, first para — consider expanding the abbreviations i.e CAS ->
CAS (Central Asia).
Page 20, last para. insert ‘in the four simulations’ after ‘six
“negative spikes”‘.
Section 10 should be Appendix A.
—
Dr Simon Tett Managing Scientist, Data development and applications.
Met Office Hadley Centre Climate Prediction and Research
London Road Bracknell Berkshire RG12 2SY United Kingdom
Tel: +44 xxxxxxx Fax: +44 xxxxxx
E-mail: xxxxxxx
====================================================
Second email (added after original post)
====================================================
—–Original Message—–
From: Michael E. Mann
Sent: Wednesday, May 02, 2001 8:14 AM
To: Edward Cook
Cc: tom crowley ; Michael E. Mann ; esper@xxxxxx ; Jonathan
Overpeck ; Keith Briffa ; mhughes@xxxxxxx ; rbradley@xxxxxx
Subject: Re: hockey stick
<x-flowed>
Hi Ed,
Thanks for your message. I’m forwarding this to Ray and Malcolm to reply to
some of your statements below,
mike
At 10:59 AM 5/2/01 -0400, Edward Cook wrote:
> >Ed,
> >
> >heard some rumor that you are involved in a non-hockey stick
> >reconstruction
> >of northern hemisphere temperatures. I am very intrigued to learn about
> >this – are these results suggesting the so called Medieval Warm Period
> >may
> >be warmer than the early/mid 20th century?
> >
> >any enlightenment on this would be most appreciated, Tom
> >
> >
> >
> >Thomas J. Crowley
> >Dept. of Oceanography
> >Texas A&M University
> >College Station, TX 77843-3146
> >979-xxxxxxx
> >979-xxxxxxx
> >979-xxxxxxx
>
>Hi Tom,
>
>As rumors often are, the one you heard is not entirely accurate. So, I will
>take some time here to explain for you, Mike, and others exactly what was
>done and what the motivation was, in an effort to hopefully avoid any
>misunderstanding. I especially want to avoid any suggestion that this work
>was being done to specifically counter or refute the “hockey stick”.
>However, it does suggest (as do other results from your EBM, Peck’s work,
>the borehole data, and Briffa and Jones large-scale proxy estimates) that
>there are unresolved (I think) inconsistencies in the low-frequency aspects
>of the hockey stick series compared to other results. So, any comparisons
>with the hockey stick were made with that spirit in mind.
>
>What Jan Esper and I are working on (mostly Jan with me as second author)
>is a paper that was in response to Broecker’s Science Perspectives piece on
>the Medieval Warm Period. Specifically, we took strong exception to his
>claim that tree rings are incapable of preserving century time scale
>temperature variability. Of course, if Broecker had read the literature, he
>would have known that what he claimed was inaccurate. Be that as it may,
>Jan had been working on a project, as part of his post-doc here, to look at
>large-scale, low-frequency patterns of tree growth and climate in long
>tree-ring records provided to him by Fritz Schweingruber. With the addition
>of a couple of sites from foxtail pine in California, Jan amassed a
>collection of 14 tree-ring sites scattered somewhat uniformly over the
>30-70 degree NH latitude band, with most extending back 1000-1200 years.
>All of the sites are from temperature-sensitive locations (i.e. high
>elevation or high northern latitude. It is, as far as I know, the largest,
>longest, and most spatially representative set of such
>temperature-sensitive tree-ring data yet put together for the NH
>extra-tropics.
>
>In order to preserve maximum low-frequency variance, Jan used the Regional
>Curve Standardization (RCS) method, used previously by Briffa and myself
>with great success. Only here, Jan chose to do things in a somewhat radical
>fashion. Since the replication at each site was generally insufficient to
>produce a robust RCS chronology back to, say, AD 1000, Jan pooled all of
>the original measurement series into 2 classes of growth trends: non-linear
>(~700 ring-width series) and linear (~500 ring-width series). He than
>performed independent RCS on the each of the pooled sets and produced 2 RCS
>chronologies with remarkably similar multi-decadal and centennial
>low-frequency characteristics. These chronologies are not good at
>preserving high-frquency climate information because of the scattering of
>sites and the mix of different species, but the low-frequency patterns are
>probably reflecting the same long-term changes in temperature. Jan than
>averaged the 2 RCS chronologies together to produce a single chronology
>extending back to AD 800. It has a very well defined Medieval Warm Period –
>Little Ice Age – 20th Century Warming pattern, punctuated by strong decadal
>fluctuations of inferred cold that correspond well with known histories of
>neo-glacial advance in some parts of the NH. The punctuations also appear,
>in some cases, to be related to known major volcanic eruptions.
>
>Jan originally only wanted to show this NH extra-tropical RCS chronology in
>a form scaled to millimeters of growth to show how forest productivity and
>carbon sequestration may be modified by climate variability and change over
>relatively long time scales. However, I encouraged him to compare his
>series with NH instrumental temperature data and the proxy estimates
>produced by Jones, Briffa, and Mann in order bolster the claim that his
>unorthodox method of pooling the tree-ring data was producing a record that
>was indeed related to temperatures in some sense. This he did by linearly
>rescaling his RCS chronology from mm of growth to temperature anomalies. In
>so doing, Jan demonstrated that his series, on inter-decadal time scales
>only, was well correlated to the annual NH instrumental record. This result
>agreed extremely well with those of Jones and Briffa. Of course, some of
>the same data were used by them, but probably not more than 40 percent
>(Briffa in particular), so the comparison is based on mostly, but not
>fully, independent data. The similarity indicated that Jan’s approach was
>valid for producing a useful reconstruction of multi-decadal temperature
>variability (probably weighted towards the warm-season months, but it is
>impossible to know by how much) over a larger region of the NH
>extra-tropics than that produced before by Jones and Briffa. It also
>revealed somewhat more intense cooling in the Little Ice Age that is more
>consistent with what the borehole temperatures indicate back to AD 1600.
>This result also bolsters the argument for a reasonably large-scale
>Medieval Warm Period that may not be as warm as the late 20th century, but
>is of much(?) greater significance than that produced previously.
>
>Of course, Jan also had to compare his record with the hockey stick since
>that is the most prominent and oft-cited record of NH temperatures covering
>the past 1000 years. The results were consistent with the differences shown
>by others, mainly in the century-scale of variability. Again, the Esper
>series shows a very strong, even canonical, Medieval Warm Period – Little
>Ice Age – 20th Century Warming pattern, which is largely missing from the
>hockey stick. Yet the two series agree reasonably well on inter-decadal
>timescales, even though they may not be 1:1 expressions of the same
>temperature window (i.e. annual vs. warm-season weighted). However, the
>tree-ring series used in the hockey stick are warm-season weighted as well,
>so the difference between “annual” and “warm-season weighted” is probably
>not as large as it might seem, especially before the period of instrumental
>data (e.g. pre-1700) in the hockey stick. So, they both share a significant
>degree of common interdecal temperature information (and some, but not
>much, data), but do not co-vary well on century timescales. Again, this has
>all been shown before by others using different temperature
>reconstructions, but Jan’s result is probably the most comprehensive
>expression (I believe) of extra-tropical NH temperatures back to AD 800 on
>multi-decadal and century time scales.
>
>Now back to the Broecker perspectives piece. I felt compelled to refute
>Broecker’s erroneous claim that tree rings could not preserve long-term
>temperature information. So, I organized a “Special Wally Seminar” in which
>I introduced the topic to him and the packed audience using Samuel
>Johnson’s famous “I refute it thus” statement in the form of “Jan Esper and
>I refute Broecker thus”. Jan than presented, in a very detailed and well
>espressed fashion, his story and Broecker became an instant convert. In
>other words, Wally now believes that long tree-ring records, when properly
>selected and processed, can preserve low-frequency temperature variability
>on centennial time scales. Others in the audience came away with the same
>understanding, one that we dendrochronologists always knew to be the case.
>This was the entire purpose of Jan’s work and the presentation of it to
>Wally and others. Wally had expressed some doubts about the hockey stick
>previously to me and did so again in his perspectives article. So, Jan’s
>presentation strongly re-enforced Wally’s opinion about the hockey stick,
>which he has expressed to others including several who attended a
>subsequent NOAA meeting at Lamont. I have no control over what Wally says
>and only hope that we can work together to reconcile, in a professional,
>friendly manner, the differences between the hockey stick and other proxy
>temperature records covering the past 1000 years. This I would like to do.
>
>I do think that the Medieval Warm Period was a far more significant event
>than has been recognized previously, as much because the high-resolution
>data to evaluate it had not been available before. That is much less so the
>case now. It is even showing up strongly now in long SH tree-ring series.
>However, there is still the question of how strong this event was in the
>tropics. I maintain that we do not have the proxies to tell us that now.
>The tropical ice core data are very difficult to interpret as temperature
>proxies (far worse than tree rings for sure and maybe even unrelated to
>temperatures in any simple linear sense as is often assumed), so I do not
>believe that they can be used alone as records to test for the existence of
>a Medieval Warm Period in the tropics. That being the case, there are
>really no other high-resolution records from the tropics to use, and the
>teleconnections between long extra-tropical proxies and the tropics are, I
>believe, far too tenuous and probably unstable to use to sort out this
>issue.
>
>So, at this stage I would argue that the Medieval Warm Period was probably
>a global extra-tropical event, at the very least, with warmth that was
>persistent and probably comparable to much of what we have experienced in
>the 20th century. However, I would not claim (and nor would Jan) that it
>exceeded the warmth of the late 20th century. We simply do not have the
>precision or the proxy replication to say that yet. This being said, I do
>find the dismissal of the Medieval Warm Period as a meaningful global event
>to be grossly premature and probably wrong. Kind of like Mark Twain’s
>commment that accounts of his death were greatly exaggerated. If, as some
>people believe, a degree of symmetry in climate exists between the
>hemispheres, which would appear to arise from the tropics, then the
>existence of a Medieval Warm Period in the extra-tropics of the NH and SH
>argues for its existence in the tropics as well. Only time and an enlarged
>suite of proxies that extend into the tropics will tell if this is true.
>
>I hope that what I have written clarifies the rumor and expresses my views
>more completely and accurately.
>
>Cheers,
>
>Ed
>
>==================================
>Dr. Edward R. Cook
>Doherty Senior Scholar
>Tree-Ring Laboratory
>Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory
>Palisades, New York 10964 USA
>Phone: 1-845-xxxxxx
>Fax: 1-845-xxxxxx
>Email: drdendro@xxxxxxx
>==================================
_______________________________________________________________________
Professor Michael E. Mann
Department of Environmental Sciences, Clark Hall
University of Virginia
Charlottesville, VA 22903
_______________________________________________________________________
e-mail: mann@xxxxxxx Phone: (804) 924-7770 FAX: (804) 982-2137
http://www.evsc.virginia.edu/faculty/people/mann.shtml
—–Original Message—–
From: Michael E. Mann
Sent: Wednesday, May 02, 2001 8:14 AM
To: Edward Cook
Cc: tom crowley ; Michael E. Mann ; esper@xxxxxxxx ; Jonathan
Overpeck ; Keith Briffa ; mhughes@xxxxxx ; rbradley@xxxxxxx
Subject: Re: hockey stick
<x-flowed>
Hi Ed,
Thanks for your message. I’m forwarding this to Ray and Malcolm to reply to
some of your statements below,
mike
At 10:59 AM 5/2/01 -0400, Edward Cook wrote:
> >Ed,
> >
> >heard some rumor that you are involved in a non-hockey stick
> >reconstruction
> >of northern hemisphere temperatures. I am very intrigued to learn about
> >this – are these results suggesting the so called Medieval Warm Period
> >may
> >be warmer than the early/mid 20th century?
> >
> >any enlightenment on this would be most appreciated, Tom
> >
> >
> >
> >Thomas J. Crowley
> >Dept. of Oceanography
> >Texas A&M University
> >College Station, TX 77843-3146
> >979-xxxxx
> >979-xxxxx
> >979-xxxxx
>
>Hi Tom,
>
>As rumors often are, the one you heard is not entirely accurate. So, I will
>take some time here to explain for you, Mike, and others exactly what was
>done and what the motivation was, in an effort to hopefully avoid any
>misunderstanding. I especially want to avoid any suggestion that this work
>was being done to specifically counter or refute the “hockey stick”.
>However, it does suggest (as do other results from your EBM, Peck’s work,
>the borehole data, and Briffa and Jones large-scale proxy estimates) that
>there are unresolved (I think) inconsistencies in the low-frequency aspects
>of the hockey stick series compared to other results. So, any comparisons
>with the hockey stick were made with that spirit in mind.
>
>What Jan Esper and I are working on (mostly Jan with me as second author)
>is a paper that was in response to Broecker’s Science Perspectives piece on
>the Medieval Warm Period. Specifically, we took strong exception to his
>claim that tree rings are incapable of preserving century time scale
>temperature variability. Of course, if Broecker had read the literature, he
>would have known that what he claimed was inaccurate. Be that as it may,
>Jan had been working on a project, as part of his post-doc here, to look at
>large-scale, low-frequency patterns of tree growth and climate in long
>tree-ring records provided to him by Fritz Schweingruber. With the addition
>of a couple of sites from foxtail pine in California, Jan amassed a
>collection of 14 tree-ring sites scattered somewhat uniformly over the
>30-70 degree NH latitude band, with most extending back 1000-1200 years.
>All of the sites are from temperature-sensitive locations (i.e. high
>elevation or high northern latitude. It is, as far as I know, the largest,
>longest, and most spatially representative set of such
>temperature-sensitive tree-ring data yet put together for the NH
>extra-tropics.
>
>In order to preserve maximum low-frequency variance, Jan used the Regional
>Curve Standardization (RCS) method, used previously by Briffa and myself
>with great success. Only here, Jan chose to do things in a somewhat radical
>fashion. Since the replication at each site was generally insufficient to
>produce a robust RCS chronology back to, say, AD 1000, Jan pooled all of
>the original measurement series into 2 classes of growth trends: non-linear
>(~700 ring-width series) and linear (~500 ring-width series). He than
>performed independent RCS on the each of the pooled sets and produced 2 RCS
>chronologies with remarkably similar multi-decadal and centennial
>low-frequency characteristics. These chronologies are not good at
>preserving high-frquency climate information because of the scattering of
>sites and the mix of different species, but the low-frequency patterns are
>probably reflecting the same long-term changes in temperature. Jan than
>averaged the 2 RCS chronologies together to produce a single chronology
>extending back to AD 800. It has a very well defined Medieval Warm Period –
>Little Ice Age – 20th Century Warming pattern, punctuated by strong decadal
>fluctuations of inferred cold that correspond well with known histories of
>neo-glacial advance in some parts of the NH. The punctuations also appear,
>in some cases, to be related to known major volcanic eruptions.
>
>Jan originally only wanted to show this NH extra-tropical RCS chronology in
>a form scaled to millimeters of growth to show how forest productivity and
>carbon sequestration may be modified by climate variability and change over
>relatively long time scales. However, I encouraged him to compare his
>series with NH instrumental temperature data and the proxy estimates
>produced by Jones, Briffa, and Mann in order bolster the claim that his
>unorthodox method of pooling the tree-ring data was producing a record that
>was indeed related to temperatures in some sense. This he did by linearly
>rescaling his RCS chronology from mm of growth to temperature anomalies. In
>so doing, Jan demonstrated that his series, on inter-decadal time scales
>only, was well correlated to the annual NH instrumental record. This result
>agreed extremely well with those of Jones and Briffa. Of course, some of
>the same data were used by them, but probably not more than 40 percent
>(Briffa in particular), so the comparison is based on mostly, but not
>fully, independent data. The similarity indicated that Jan’s approach was
>valid for producing a useful reconstruction of multi-decadal temperature
>variability (probably weighted towards the warm-season months, but it is
>impossible to know by how much) over a larger region of the NH
>extra-tropics than that produced before by Jones and Briffa. It also
>revealed somewhat more intense cooling in the Little Ice Age that is more
>consistent with what the borehole temperatures indicate back to AD 1600.
>This result also bolsters the argument for a reasonably large-scale
>Medieval Warm Period that may not be as warm as the late 20th century, but
>is of much(?) greater significance than that produced previously.
>
>Of course, Jan also had to compare his record with the hockey stick since
>that is the most prominent and oft-cited record of NH temperatures covering
>the past 1000 years. The results were consistent with the differences shown
>by others, mainly in the century-scale of variability. Again, the Esper
>series shows a very strong, even canonical, Medieval Warm Period – Little
>Ice Age – 20th Century Warming pattern, which is largely missing from the
>hockey stick. Yet the two series agree reasonably well on inter-decadal
>timescales, even though they may not be 1:1 expressions of the same
>temperature window (i.e. annual vs. warm-season weighted). However, the
>tree-ring series used in the hockey stick are warm-season weighted as well,
>so the difference between “annual” and “warm-season weighted” is probably
>not as large as it might seem, especially before the period of instrumental
>data (e.g. pre-1700) in the hockey stick. So, they both share a significant
>degree of common interdecal temperature information (and some, but not
>much, data), but do not co-vary well on century timescales. Again, this has
>all been shown before by others using different temperature
>reconstructions, but Jan’s result is probably the most comprehensive
>expression (I believe) of extra-tropical NH temperatures back to AD 800 on
>multi-decadal and century time scales.
>
>Now back to the Broecker perspectives piece. I felt compelled to refute
>Broecker’s erroneous claim that tree rings could not preserve long-term
>temperature information. So, I organized a “Special Wally Seminar” in which
>I introduced the topic to him and the packed audience using Samuel
>Johnson’s famous “I refute it thus” statement in the form of “Jan Esper and
>I refute Broecker thus”. Jan than presented, in a very detailed and well
>espressed fashion, his story and Broecker became an instant convert. In
>other words, Wally now believes that long tree-ring records, when properly
>selected and processed, can preserve low-frequency temperature variability
>on centennial time scales. Others in the audience came away with the same
>understanding, one that we dendrochronologists always knew to be the case.
>This was the entire purpose of Jan’s work and the presentation of it to
>Wally and others. Wally had expressed some doubts about the hockey stick
>previously to me and did so again in his perspectives article. So, Jan’s
>presentation strongly re-enforced Wally’s opinion about the hockey stick,
>which he has expressed to others including several who attended a
>subsequent NOAA meeting at Lamont. I have no control over what Wally says
>and only hope that we can work together to reconcile, in a professional,
>friendly manner, the differences between the hockey stick and other proxy
>temperature records covering the past 1000 years. This I would like to do.
>
>I do think that the Medieval Warm Period was a far more significant event
>than has been recognized previously, as much because the high-resolution
>data to evaluate it had not been available before. That is much less so the
>case now. It is even showing up strongly now in long SH tree-ring series.
>However, there is still the question of how strong this event was in the
>tropics. I maintain that we do not have the proxies to tell us that now.
>The tropical ice core data are very difficult to interpret as temperature
>proxies (far worse than tree rings for sure and maybe even unrelated to
>temperatures in any simple linear sense as is often assumed), so I do not
>believe that they can be used alone as records to test for the existence of
>a Medieval Warm Period in the tropics. That being the case, there are
>really no other high-resolution records from the tropics to use, and the
>teleconnections between long extra-tropical proxies and the tropics are, I
>believe, far too tenuous and probably unstable to use to sort out this
>issue.
>
>So, at this stage I would argue that the Medieval Warm Period was probably
>a global extra-tropical event, at the very least, with warmth that was
>persistent and probably comparable to much of what we have experienced in
>the 20th century. However, I would not claim (and nor would Jan) that it
>exceeded the warmth of the late 20th century. We simply do not have the
>precision or the proxy replication to say that yet. This being said, I do
>find the dismissal of the Medieval Warm Period as a meaningful global event
>to be grossly premature and probably wrong. Kind of like Mark Twain’s
>commment that accounts of his death were greatly exaggerated. If, as some
>people believe, a degree of symmetry in climate exists between the
>hemispheres, which would appear to arise from the tropics, then the
>existence of a Medieval Warm Period in the extra-tropics of the NH and SH
>argues for its existence in the tropics as well. Only time and an enlarged
>suite of proxies that extend into the tropics will tell if this is true.
>
>I hope that what I have written clarifies the rumor and expresses my views
>more completely and accurately.
>
>Cheers,
>
>Ed
>
>==================================
>Dr. Edward R. Cook
>Doherty Senior Scholar
>Tree-Ring Laboratory
>Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory
>Palisades, New York 10964 USA
>Phone: 1-845-xxxxx
>Fax: 1-845-xxxxx
>Email: drdendro@xxxxx.xxxxx.xxx
>==================================
_______________________________________________________________________
Professor Michael E. Mann
Department of Environmental Sciences, Clark Hall
University of Virginia
Charlottesville, VA 22903
_______________________________________________________________________
e-mail: mann@virginia.edu Phone: (804) 924-7770 FAX: (804) 982-2137
http://www.evsc.virginia.edu/faculty/people/mann.shtml
=========================================================================
Here is an email from Tom Wigley on Naomi Oreskes. Bold mine. (h/t to Junkscience.com)
=========================================================================
date: Thu, 12 Nov 2009 14:16:40 -0700
from: Tom Wigley
subject: Re: [Fwd: Your Submission]
to: Phil Jones
Phil,
This is weird. I used Web of Knowledge, “create citation report”, and
added 1999 thru 2009 numbers. Can’t do you becoz of the too many PDJs
problem.
Here are 3 results …
Kevin Trenberth, 9049
Me, 5523
Ben, 2407
The max on their list has only 3365 cites over this period.
Analyses like these by people who don’t know the field are useless.
A good example is Naomi Oreskes work.
Tom.
==============================================================
UPDATE 4:
Barry Woods writes via email:
The social network is of interest..
In the earlier emails, when Mann wanted to contact Monbiot, he got Monbiot’s email address from George Marshall
(Marshall is a veteran greenpeace campaigner, founder of Rising Tide, COIN –) and creator of a – Deniers Hall of Shame.. and very active at grass roots
Perhaps scientists a bit too close to activists, picking up their thinking about ‘deniers’ and fossil fuel companies ? Marshall had been battling Chevron, in the 90’s about rainforest destruction (Rainforest Foundation)
And of course Monbiot – published a Deniers photo Hall of Shame in the Guardian (including Booker) and ‘fights’ Booker on climate change
———————–
cc: Gavin Schmidt <gschmidt@giss.xxxx>, k.briffa@xxxxxxx
date: Mon, 26 Oct 2009 08:29:39 -0400
from: Michael Mann <mann@xxxxxxx>
subject: Re: More of the same from Booker
to: Phil Jones <p.jones@xxxxxx>
Hi Phil,
Might want to see if George Monbiot wants to *review* the book.
That would be both amusing and satisfying,
mike
On Oct 26, 2009, at 5:21 AM, Phil Jones wrote:
Gavin, Mike,
[1]http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/6425269/The-real-climate-change-catastrophe.html
Apparently he has a book out
[2]http://www.amazon.com/Real-Global-Warming-Disaster-Scientific/dp/1441110526
———————–
Remember the earlier email –
http://foia2011.org/index.php?id=1377
– that when Mann wanted to get hold of Monbiot, about Durkin and Great Global Warming Scandal..
Mann got Monbiots email address from none other than George Marshall (Rising Tide – COIN) Some scientists perhaps been influenced a bit too much by activist rhetoric,.. and picked up the rhetoric and language of activists/environmentalistsie
I.e. when did Mann start using the phrase ‘climate denier’?
George Marshall and Mark Lynas writing about it in 2003, – New Statesman – including a whose who of climate change deniers – (lindzen one of them)
Marshall had a Deniers Hall of Shame in 2001-2002 (Rising Tide) – Lindzen included
And if you look at Wayback machine – Lynas and Marshall were very early entries to Realclimate’s blog roll.
Barry
===============================================================
UPDATE 5:
From Junkscience.com
In response to a polite media inquiry from Wall Street journal editorial writer Anne Jolis, Mann rages, in part, “Misrepresenting the work of scientists is a serious offense” — and then cc’s his response to Media Matters, Joe Romm and other allies in the warmest-media industrial complex.
The e-mail exchange is below.
###
from: Michael Mann
subject: Re: From the Wall Street Journal:
to: Anne Jolis , Joe Romm , Media Matters Erikka Knuti , DarkSydOTheMoon@aol.com,
Dan Vergano , Bud Ward , george@monbiot.info, AJ Walzer , “Paul D. Thacker”, Chris Mooney
Ms. Jolis,
I’ve taken the liberty of copying this exchange to a few others who might be
interested in it, within the broader context of issues related to the history of biased
reporting on climate change at the Wall Street Journal Europe,
Yours,
Mike Mann
On Oct 23, 2009, at 12:42 PM, Michael Mann wrote:
Ms. Jolis,
I am traveling through this weekend and have only brief email access, so can
only respond w/ a very short email to your inquiry. I’m sad to report that the tone of your questions suggests a highly distorted, contrarian-driven view of the entirety of our science. The premise of essentially everyone of your questions is wrong, and is contradicted by assessments such as the IPCC report, reports by the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, etc. The National Academy of Science report (more info below) reported in 2006 that “The basic conclusion of Mann et al. (1998, 1999) was that the late 20th century warmth in the Northern Hemisphere was unprecedented during at least the last 1,000 years. This conclusion has subsequently been supported by an array of evidence…”. The conclusions in the most recent 2007 IPCC Fourth Assessment report have been significantly strengthened relative to what was originally concluded in our work from the 1990s or in the IPCC 2001 Third Assessment Report, something that of course should have been expected given the numerous additional studies that have since been
done that all point in the same direction. The conclusion that large-scale
recent warmth likely exceeds the range seen in past centuries has been extended from the
past 1000 years in the TAR, to the past 1300 years in the current report, and the confidence in this conclusion has been upped from likely in the Third Assessment Report to very likely in the current report for the past half millennium.
Since then, the conclusions have been further strengthened by other work,
including work by us. Please see e.g. the reporting by the BBC:
[1]http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/8236797.stm
[2]http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/7592575.stm
You don’t seem to be aware of the fact that our original “Hockey Stick”
reconstruction didn’t even use the “Yamal” data. It seems you have uncritically accepted
nearly every specious contrarian claim and innuendo against me, my colleagues, and the
science of climate change itself. Furthermore, I doubt that the various authors you cite
as critics, such as Pollack and Smerdon, would in any way agree w/ your assessment of
this work.
Misrepresenting the work of scientists is a serious offense, and would work
to further besmirch the reputation of the Wall Street Journal, which is strongly been
called into question in the past with regard to the treatment of climate change.
I’ve copied my response to a number of others who might wish to comment
further, as I will be unavailable to speak with you until next week.
I’ve pasted below various summaries by mainstream news venues which reported
a couple years ago that the National Academy of Sciences, in the words of Nature “Affirmed The Hockey Stick” below this message.
In addition, here are a few links you might want to read to better
familiarize yourself with what the science actually states with regard to the issues raised in
your inquiry below:
[3]http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2009/09/hey-ya-mal/
[4]http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2007/02/the-ipcc-fourthassessment-
summary
-for-policy-makers/
[5]http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2006/06/national-academiessynthesis-
repor
t/
[6]http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2005/10/hockey-sticks-round-
27/
[7]http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2005/05/new-analysisreproduces-
graph-of-l
ate-20th-century-temperature-rise/
[8]http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2005/02/dummies-guide-tothe-
latest-hockey
-stick-controversy/
[9]http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2006/02/a-new-take-on-anold-
millennium/
Finally, let me suggest, under the assumption that your intent is indeed to
report the reality of our current scientific understanding, rather than contrarian
politically-motivated spin, that any legitimate journalistic inquiry into
the current state of the science, and the extent to which uncertainties and controversy
have been overstated and misrepresented in the public discourse, would probably choose
to focus on the issues raised here:
[10]http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2009/10/climate-cover-up-abrief-
review/
Yours,
Mike Mann
___________________NEWS CLIPS ON ACADEMY REPORT_____________________
from BBC (6/23/06 “Backing for ‘Hockey Stick’ graph”)
The Earth was hotter in the late 20th Century than it had been in the last
400 or possibly 1,000 years, a report requested by the US Congress concludes. It backs some of the key findings of the original study that gave rise to the iconic “hockey stick”
graph.) from New York Times (Andy Revkin, 6/22/06 “Science Panel Packs Study on
Warming Climate”):
At a news conference at the headquarters of the National Academies, several
members of the panel reviewing the study said they saw no sign that its authors had
intentionally chosen data sets or methods to get a desired result.
“I saw nothing that spoke to me of any manipulation,” said one member, Peter
Bloomfield, a statistics professor at [11]North Carolina State University. He added that
his impression was the study was “an honest attempt to construct a data analysis procedure.
Boston Globe (Beth Daley, 6/22/06 “Report backs global warming claims”):
Our conclusion is that this recent period of warming is likely the warmest in
a (millennium), said John Wallace, one of the 12 members on the panel and
professor of atmospheric science at the University of Washington.
Los Angeles Times (Thomas H. Maugh II and Karen Kaplan, “U.S. Panel Backs
Data on Global Warming”):
After a comprehensive review of climate change data, the nation’s preeminent
scientific body found that average temperatures on Earth had risen by about 1 degree
over the last century, a development that “is unprecedented for the last 400 years and
potentially the last several millennia.”
and
The panel affirmed that proxy measurements made over the last 150 years
correlated well with actual measurements during that period, lending credence to the proxy data for earlier times. It concluded that, “with a high level of confidence,” global temperatures during the last century were higher than at any time since 1600.
Although the report did not place numerical values on that confidence level,
committee member and statistician Peter Bloomfield of North Carolina State University
said the panel was about 95% sure of the conclusion.
The committee supported Mann’s other conclusions, but said they were not as
definitive. For example, the report said the panel was “less confident” that the 20th century was the warmest century since 1000, largely because of the scarcity of data from
before 1600. Bloomfield said the committee was about 67% confident of the validity of that
finding the same degree of confidence Mann and his colleagues had placed in their initial
report.
Associated Press (syndicate with 100s of newspapers accross the U.S. (John
Heilprin, 6/22/06 “The Earth is the hottest it has been in at least 400 years, perhaps
even longer”):
The National Academy scientists concluded that the Mann-Bradley-Hughes
research from the late 1990s was “likely” to be true, said John “Mike” Wallace, an atmospheric sciences professor at the University of Washington and a panel member. The conclusions from the ’90s research “are very close to being right” and are supported by even more recent data, Wallace said.
and
Overall, the panel agreed that the warming in the last few decades of the
20th century was unprecedented over the last 1,000 years, though relatively warm conditions persisted around the year 1000, followed by a “Little Ice Age” from about 1500 to 1850.
Washington Post (Juliet Eilperin, 6/23/06 “Study Confirms Past Few Decades
Warmest on Record”):
Panel member Kurt M. Cuffey, a geography professor at the University of
California at Berkeley, said at a news briefing that the report “essentially validated” the
conclusions Mann reported in 1998 and 1999 using temperature records. The panel also
estimated there is a roughly 67 percent chance that Mann is right in saying the past 25 years were the warmest in a 1,000 years.
Nature (Geoff Brumfield, 6/28/06 “Academy affirms hockey-stick graph”)
“We roughly agree with the substance of their findings,” says Gerald North,
the committee’s chair and a climate scientist at Texas A&M University in College Station. In particular, he says, the committee has a “high level of confidence” that the second half of the twentieth century was warmer than any other period in the past four centuries. But, he adds, claims for the earlier period covered by the study, from AD 900 to 1600, are less
certain. This earlier period is particularly important because global-warming sceptics
claim that the current warming trend is a rebound from a ‘little ice age’ around 1600.
Overall, the committee thought the temperature reconstructions from that era had only a
two-to-one chance of being right.
and
says Peter Bloomfield, a statistician at North Carolina State University in
Raleigh, who was involved in the latest report. “This study was the first of its kind, and
they had to make choices at various stages about how the data were processed,” he says,
adding that he “would not be embarrassed” to have been involved in the work.
New Scientist (Roxanne Khamsi, 6/23/06, “US report backs study on global
warming”):
It was really the first analysis of its type, panel member Kurt Cuffey of the
University of California, Berkeley, US, said at a news conference on Thursday.
He added that it was the first time anyone has done such a large-scale and
continual analysis of temperature over time. So its not surprising that they could have
probably done some detailed aspects of it better.
But it was a remarkable contribution and gave birth to a debate thats
ongoing, thats teaching us a lot about how climate has changed.
Science (Richard Kerr, June 30, 2006, “Yes, Its been Getting Warmer in Here
Since the CO2 Begain to Rise”): In addition, none of the three committee members at the press briefing– North, Bloomfield, and paleoclimatologist Kurt Cuffey of the University of California, Berkeley- -had found any hint of scientific impropriety. “I certainly did not see anything inappropriate,” said North. “Maybe things could have been done better, but after all, it was the first analysis of its kind.”
–
On Oct 23, 2009, at 10:41 AM, Jolis, Anne wrote:
Dear Dr. Mann,
My name is Anne Jolis, and I’m with the Wall Street Journal Europe, based in
London. I’m working on a piece about climate change, and specifically the growing
questions that people outside the field have about the methods and processes used by climatologists and other climate-change scientists – and, necessarily, about the conclusions that result. The idea came from the recent controversy that has arisen once again over Steve McIntyre, the publication of the full Yamal data used in Keith Briffa’s work. This of course raises questions among climate scientistis, and observers, about whether the socalled “hockey stick” graph of global temperatures , as produced by Dr. Briffa and originally by yourself, was drawn from narrow data which, and then when broadened to include a wider range of available dendroclimatological data, seems to show no important spike in global temperatures in the last 100 year .
I realize this is not exactly the silverbullet to anthropogenic global warming that some would like to read into it, but it seems to me that it does underscore some of the issues in climate science. Specifically, the publication of the data, and the earlier controversy over your work, seems to illustrate that best practices and reliable methods of data collection remain far from established, and that much of what is presented as scientific fact is really more of a value judgment based on select data. Would you agree?
I’d love to get some insight from you for my article. I’ll be filing this
weekend, but I can call you any time it’s convenient for you on Friday – just let me know
the best time and number. Please note that if we do speak on the phone, I will email you
with any quotes or paraphrases that I would like to attribute to you, before publication, so
as to secure your approval and confirm the accuracy of what I’m attributing to you.
Additionally, if you’d like to correspond via email, that’s fine too. I’ve listed below some
of the questions and assumptions I’m working on – if, in lieu of a phone call, you’d
like to answer and/or respond to these, as well as share any other thoughts you have
on these issues, I’d be most grateful. Feel welcome to reply at length!
I thank you in advance for your time and attention, and look forward to any of your comments.
All the best,
Anne Jolis
Mobile: +44 xxxxxx
– Given that methods in climate science are still being refined, do you
agree with policy makers’ and advocates’ use of data such as your own? Do you feel it is
accurately represented to laymans, and that the inherent uncertainties present in the
data are appropriately underscored? As a citizen, do you feel there is enough
certainty in the conclusions of, for instance, the latest IPCC report, to introduce new
economic regulations? Why or why not?
-What methods do you feel are the most accurate for predicting future climate
change, for evaluatinag the causes of climate change and for predicting whether or what
man can do to try to control or mitigate climate change in the future in the future? Why
do you feel these methods are the most accurate? Do you feel they’re given enough weight
in the current debate?
-What is your opinion of the value of Steve McIntyre’s work? Clearly he is
not a professional scientist, but do you feel there is nonetheless a place for his
“auditing” in the climate science community? Why or why not?
-Do you think McIntyre’s work and findings are likely to change the way
leading climate scientists operate? Do you think his recent campaign to get Dr. Keith Briffa
to publish the Yamal data he used is likely to make climate scientists more forthcoming
with their data? Do you think his work will make scientists, policymakers and advocates
any more exacting about the uncertainties in their procedures, methods and conclusions
when they present scientific data?
-How would you respond to the critique that, as a key part of the review
processes of publications in the field of climate science, as something of a “gatekeeper,”
you have rejected and otherwise sought to suppress work that contradicted your work.
Is this fair?
Why or why not? How would you characterize your selection process for work
that is worthy
of publication?
-Do you stand by your original “hockey stick” graf, even after the
publication of borehole
data from Henry Pollack and Jason Smerdon that seems to contradict your
conclusions? Or
work published in 2005 by Hans von Storch that seems to indicate that the
predictive
capabilities of the method you used in your original “hockey stick” would not
be able to
predict current temperatures?
–
Michael E. Mann
Professor
Director, Earth System Science Center (ESSC)
Department of Meteorology Phone: (814) xxxxx
503 Walker Building FAX: (814) xxxxx
The Pennsylvania State University email: [12]mann@psu.edu
University Park, PA 16802-5013
website: [13]http://www.meteo.psu.edu/~mann/Mann/index.html
“Dire Predictions” book site:
[14]http://www.essc.psu.edu/essc_web/news/DirePredictions/index.html
–
Update6:
Wigley accuses IPCC and lead authors of ‘dishonest presentations of model results’; Accuses Mann of deception; Mann admits
Mann: “Its (sic) hard to imagine what sort of comparison wouldn’t be deceptive.”
The e-mails are below.
###
On Wed, 2009-10-14 at 18:06, Michael Mann wrote:
> Hi Tom,
>
> thanks for the comments. well, ok. but this is the full CMIP3
> ensemble, so at least the plot is sampling the range of choices
> regarding if and how indirect effects are represented, what the cloud
> radiative feedback & sensitivity is, etc. across the modeling
> community. I’m not saying that these things necessarily cancel out
> (after all, there is an interesting and perhaps somewhat disturbing
> compensation between indirect aerosol forcing and sensitivity across
> the CMIP3 models that defies the assumption of independence), but if
> showing the full spread from CMIP3 is deceptive, its hard to imagine
> what sort of comparison wouldn’t be deceptive (your point re MAGICC
> notwithstanding),
>
> perhaps Gavin has some further comments on this (it is his plot after
> all),
>
> mike
>
> On Oct 14, 2009, at 5:57 PM, Tom Wigley wrote:
> > Mike,
> >
> > The Figure you sent is very deceptive. As an example, historical
> > runs with PCM look as though they match observations — but the
> > match is a fluke. PCM has no indirect aerosol forcing and a low
> > climate sensitivity — compensating errors. In my (perhaps too
> > harsh)
> > view, there have been a number of dishonest presentations of model
> > results by individual authors and by IPCC. This is why I still use
> > results from MAGICC to compare with observed temperatures. At least
> > here I can assess how sensitive matches are to sensitivity and
> > forcing assumptions/uncertainties.
> >
> > Tom.
> > +++++++++++++++++++
> >
> > Michael Mann wrote:
> > > thanks Tom,
> > > I’ve taken the liberty of attaching a figure that Gavin put
> > > together the other day (its an update from a similar figure he
> > > prepared for an earlier RealClimate post. see:
> > > http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2009/05/moncktonsdeliberate-
manipulation/). It is indeed worth a thousand words, and drives home
Tom’s point below. We’re planning on doing a post on this shortly, but would be
nice to see the Sep. HadCRU numbers first,
> > > mike
> > > On Oct 14, 2009, at 3:01 AM, Tom Wigley wrote:
> > > > Dear all,
> > > > At the risk of overload, here are some notes of mine on the
> > > > recent
> > > > lack of warming. I look at this in two ways. The first is to
> > > > look at
> > > > the difference between the observed and expected anthropogenic
> > > > trend relative to the pdf for unforced variability. The second
> > > > is to remove ENSO, volcanoes and TSI variations from the
> > > > observed data.
> > > > Both methods show that what we are seeing is not unusual. The
> > > > second
> > > > method leaves a significant warming over the past decade.
> > > > These sums complement Kevin’s energy work.
> > > > Kevin says … “The fact is that we can’t account for the lack
> > > > of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can’t”. I
> > > > do not
> > > > agree with this.
> > > > Tom.
> > > > +++++++++++++++++++++++
> > > > Kevin Trenberth wrote:
> > > > > Hi all
> > > > > Well I have my own article on where the heck is global
> > > > > warming? We are asking that here in Boulder where we have
> > > > > broken records the past two days for the coldest days on
> > > > > record. We had 4 inches of snow. The high the last 2 days
> > > > > was below 30F and the normal is 69F, and it smashed the
> > > > > previous records for these days by 10F. The low was about 18F
> > > > > and also a record low, well below the previous record low.
> > > > > This is January weather (see the Rockies baseball playoff game
> > > > > was canceled on saturday and then played last night in below
> > > > > freezing weather).
> > > > > Trenberth, K. E., 2009: An imperative for climate change
> > > > > planning: tracking Earth’s global energy. /Current Opinion in
> > > > > Environmental Sustainability/, *1*, 19-27,
> > > > > doi:10.1016/j.cosust.2009.06.001. [PDF]
> > > > >
(A PDF of the published version can be obtained from the author.)
> > > > > The fact is that we can’t account for the lack of warming at
> > > > > the moment and it is a travesty that we can’t. The CERES data
> > > > > published in the August BAMS 09 supplement on 2008 shows there
> > > > > should be even more warming: but the data are surely wrong.
> > > > > Our observing system is inadequate.
> > > > > That said there is a LOT of nonsense about the PDO. People
> > > > > like CPC are tracking PDO on a monthly basis but it is highly
> > > > > correlated with ENSO. Most of what they are seeing is the
> > > > > change in ENSO not real PDO. It surely isn’t decadal. The
> > > > > PDO is already reversing with the switch to El Nino. The PDO
> > > > > index became positive in September for first time since Sept
> > > > > 2007.
=====================================================
UPDATE7:
In October 1996, Keith Briffa frets that the calibration for tree-ring analysis may be off due to manmade changes in the environment.
“I spoke to you about the problem of anthropogenic influences ( i.e. increased CO2, nitrate fallout , increased UV radiation) possibly having an influence on recent tree growth and so complicating our efforts to use these recent data to define how we interpret past tree growth. Is it possible to put in some reference to me worrying about this?”
The full e-mail is below.
###
date: Tue Oct 15 17:01:05 1996
from: Keith Briffa
subject: New Scientist article
to: Fred Pearce
Dear Fred
I have done a redraft of the article. I know you said not to
rewrite it (preferably) but rather to correct, make notes suggestins etc.
I thought about this for some time and realized that it woulld be far more
difficult to indicate the precise places,the precise problems and the
suggested corrections at all of the places I considered were subtle
misinterpretations of what I said, or meant, or feel. It therefore seemed
easier FOR BOTH OF US if I went through one attempt at what amounts to a
simple rewording. This lets me change the inference , correct minor errors
and fill in all your questions without having to explain the myriad details
of where and why.
Do not , please, grimace and get pissed off at my apparent cheek!
Hopefully, you can see when you go through this draft that most of it is
entirely yours and my changes are meant to be efficient and constructive.
I hope you will be able to accept this version pretty much as it stands now.
Incidentally, a pedantic point, but where you refer to a tree with rings
about 30 microns wide being equivelent to a tree increasing its GIRTH by one
centimetre in 100 years, should this not be 2 cms? Assuming the tree has a
starting diameter of about 15 cm , after 100 years its diameter will be 15.6 cm
(the rings occur on both sides of the tree) so that the cicumference change over
this period will be 1.9 cm.
There remain a couple of points for your consideration. Is it possible,
somehow, to get the ADVANCE-10K name in and explained( i.e. the project
title)? This is important to us as publicity in the context of our funding.
Also, I spoke to you about the problem of anthropogenic influences ( i.e.
increased CO2, nitrate fallout , increased UV radiation) possibly having
an influence on recent tree growth and so complicating our efforts to use
these recent data to define how we interpret past tree growth. Is it possible
to put in some reference to me worrying about this?
Finally, can you suggest to the editor that we put a footnote in to
flag our home page which details all the objectives and participants ?
(perhaps with the reference to the ADVANCE-10K acronym,title and grant
number)
I look forward to hearing from you and can send the text as ASCII,
WORD or WORDPERFECT files – for now should I fax it and if so to where?
cheers
Keith
I suspect that FOIA put the bitcoin ref in as a way of stating he/she isn’t “in it for the money”
(certainly not for the dollar and change that was in there early on…). More of a
“sewing machine oil” as opposed to “big oil” funding….
Folks, again, who gives a rip who FOIA is????? Knowing does not add one whit to
the value of the information/disclosure/etc., wastes a lot of time and resources, and
puts FOIA potentially at risk. (Sorry FOIA, I don’t mean this as an insult!).
With all this infighting and arguments, the warmist watermelons are probably
having a field day….let’s get back to the science and stay away from whodunits….
BTC – Bitcoin explained:
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2013-03-15/guest-post-what-world-bitcoin
Maybe this will help some…
Mk
feet2thefire says: March 18, 2013 at 1:36 am
Well, considering that – like most of what Steve Milloy has been posting – this string was part of CG2 (and/or CG1) – I’m not entirely sure that releasing the entire CG3 will result in any “greater” impact.
http://www.ecowho.com/foia.php?file=3973.txt
The Saint, as I still prefer to call FOIA, did an awful lot of work for us prior to releasing CG1 – and particularly CG2. And how do we show our appreciation? By ignoring this work and complaining – instead of revisiting that which is available to us and using it to see what we might have missed.
There’s something really wrong with this picture, folks! Particularly since The Saint (who is in a better position to know than anyone on the planet!) has already told us:
We’re impatient to find the merely “possible” when we haven’t fully explored (and exploited the impact of) that which is already at our virtual fingertips?!
Btw, I’ve found Buffy Minton’s .”spreadsheet of Climategate 1 and 2 emails in chronological order” is an excellent starting point:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/11/29/new-tool-all-climategate-emails-in-order-in-excel/
How be we consider setting aside the scatterguns, paying heed to what The Saint has told us about the likely contents of CG3 (which I’m inclined to suspect was called all.7z for a very good reason!) – and start mining the work s/he has already completed (and others have compiled into searchable databases) while those entrusted with the password get on with the business of making CG3 equally useful for all of us.
Hilary Ostrov
Still no password released? How utterly stupid. So it’s not climategate at all it is the passing from one to the few, the new hierachy of climate scepticism.
This is the move away from collective demonstration towards the endgame where the main players hold all the cards and line their retirement nests with books and other crap based on the info we cannot all see.
REPLY: Put your butt on the line and put your name to it (instead of tossing out anonymous rants like this one) and see how fast you release it. – Anthony
@ur momisugly feet2thefire says: March 18, 2013 at 12:10 am
“What Briffa feels…”
This is now normal if not usually stated explicitly. Even more to the point the distinction between what “feeling”, “having a sense of”, “knowing”, as a personal response which gives legitimacy to a position or action in itself and a “truth” which exists independently of that person has been blurred and in effect therefore lost.
This is general, not in any one area of human endeavor. That it is almost never explicit in formal science does not mean that it is not an element throughout.
In a world where there is no sense that there exists anything that cannot be personalized, or is by right personal, and where the relationship between personal “knowing” and observable and unavoidable implications for the “knower” is tenuous or non-existent, this must be the inevitable result.
keep up the good work Anthony
I’m in. You have my email.
REPLY: Ah, but no name. I see what you did there, sorry, I and many others made a promise to “FOIA” You’ll just have to wait like everyone else. – Anthony
hro001 says:
March 18, 2013 at 3:34 am
Btw, I’ve found Buffy Minton’s .”spreadsheet of Climategate 1 and 2 emails in chronological order” is an excellent starting point:
Hilary, I converted Buffy Minton’s spreadsheet to an html index with a link in the subject line that opens the selected email in your web browser window, all offline. 35 Meg zip file here:
https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B4EzgaD0DOfYaFBmdUZoaUJvTmM/edit?usp=sharing
Next step is to imbed a more comprehensive search engine, something better than Ctrl-f.
Posted this on Tips and Notes awhile back, but it went unnoticed, apparently.
This constant nagging at Anthony to release the password is becoming tiresome.
We’ve waited this long whats a little extra waiting time?
To quote my favourite Oddball; “Have a little faith baby, have a little faith”.
REPLY: The idea that I’m the only one that can release it is silly, FOIA sent it to several people. – Anthony
So far this bombshell a.k.a. Climategate 3 has been a serious dud.
I for one hope that the wait will be worth wile. Any info on the current progress?
– – – – – – – –
dp,
Keeping the dialog alive is appreciated.
Clever comment dp, but again I was specifically focused on only the narrow issue of moral consistency.
NOTE: I see Mr FOIA as a contributor (CG1, 2, 3) to the overall dialog critical of alarming / dangerous AGW by CO2. I cannot in skeptical conscience give him even close to the same order of magnitude of respect / credit as those who have consistently put their names to their skeptically critical contribution and taken very harsh treatment from the ‘consensus’ establishment. Those engaging in the great critical discourse in their own names are the heroes / heroines. However, an anonymous leaker / hacker, although helping the discourse, should not be considered even close to their hero / heroine status. I need to know who Mr FOIA is before I evaluate whether he deserves respect at all much less respect comparable the non-anonymous skeptics.
John
Charles.U.Farley says:
March 18, 2013 at 9:39 am
…To quote my favourite Oddball; “Have a little faith baby, have a little faith”.
And now this is stuck in my head…
Mr? FOIA did not preclude you giving out the password. You were asked to not publish it. It can be given out with a clear conscience to any and all who meet his/her brief list of qualifications. There are thousands of us who meet that and who will agree to not publish it which is more than original 12 were asked to commit to. It was given to Tallbloke, for example. My name is attached to the whois record of my domain. I work for a company that disagrees with my views and yours so for now I prefer to remain just me. I’m not invisible and not hiding, and am equally dependant upon integrity of others. My retirement resumes in about 30 days and I don’t care what happens after that.
Heck, at this point I wouldn’t want the darn password. Too many people pestering for it. What a pain in the butt. I’m pretty sure Anthony or one of the other bloggers will make it known if there’s anything really interesting in there, I sort of suspect that there isn’t. Good enough for me.
dp says:
March 18, 2013 at 12:16 pm
totally agree! IMHO, there is no need for such a clandestine approach. As others have said this is turning into a bit of a dud – but I do appreciate the integrity requirement and caution MAY well be valid. I can’t be certain, as I can’t see emails and thus far, no-one seems to be saying/reporting much at all!
Mark Urbo, that does not explain anything because the author does not understand what money is. There is some sort of mental disconnect with the millennial generation understanding what money is. They confuse using computers to make the transactions of money easier with money itself. Therefore they falsely assume you can make money digitally. To make it worse they attempt to give it validity by cherry picking some of the factors that makes a commodity money by ignoring the fact that bitcoins was not and cannot be a commodity because it has no value outside of it’s digital pyramid / ponzi scheme. It works perfectly on naive millennials since bitcoins is “high-tech” (not really) and uses “peer-peer” networking and is named “bit”coins just like “bit”torent which they use to steal copywritten content.
John Whitman,
Please, please, please keep wasting your time worrying about FOIA’s and the 12’s morals, conflicts-of-interest, integrity, credibility, legal exposure, etc.
It’s very funny to read.
Thanks,
wobble
Poptech says:
March 18, 2013 at 12:41 am
Daryl, I suggest studying up on economics and learning more about what money really is,
http://www.lewrockwell.com/blog/lewrw/archives/89471.html
I understand what bitcoins is very well, including all of the “technical” details. You cannot create money via a computer program. Computer programs can only be used to assist in monetary transactions.
What material use/value did bitcoins have before being used? Nothing
What is bitcoins backed by? Nothing
What makes bitcoins scarce? A computer program that can be hacked, rewritten and manipulated.
Bitcoins are promoted and used by people who don’t fully understand economics and instead have some naive, juvenile view of what money is. I find it embarrassing but what can I say, suckers are born every minute.
Spare me the lecture on economics. Most currencies went off the gold standard years ago. The value of bitcoins is no different then the value of anything else that’s based on supply, demand and liquidity. (By the way, if you’re claiming to be the person who wrote the opinion piece, sign your name, otherwise, attribute the quotation accordingly. If not, you’re just plagiarizing the author.)
Many places in Argentina are now accepting Bitcoin because access to other currencies has been blocked and their own currency is being devalued.
But you misunderstand something about money. Money is whatever someone will accept for something else. I could use shiny white pebbles as money if someone will accept them for payment. All money is basically fiat money. If a country goes on the gold standard, for example, they set a value of their currency to some amount of gold. They can revalue their currency by simply changing that valuation. Also, gold standards only work when the “right” people have access to most of the gold. China right now has enough cash in its foreign exchange reserves to buy all of the gold reserves in the entire world … three times.
Fiat money IS a good idea IF it is used responsibly. What we have now is a federal reserve that is operating too closely with politicians. The fed is bailing out the politicians by printing money and using it to purchase government debt in order to keep interest rates down. If all that treasury debt had to be purchased at auction on the open market, interest rates would soar and we would be unable to service the interest payments on the debt.
The major mistake was made by shoveling money into bank reserves rather than having government purchase “troubled” assets as TARP was originally designed to do and them wasting TARP money on bailouts. If you look at the M0 monetary base, it has shot through the roof. The federal reserve may not be able to get that money pulled back out in time if inflation appears. If that money ever seeps into M1, we’re doomed.
If I were a Greek citizen right now, I would prefer bitcoins to bank deposits.
==================================================================
One of the things that contributed to this CAGW mess is the lack of integrity by those promoting (and profiting?) from the thing.
I doubt if FOIA had the opportunity to pick and choose the files only relevant to CAGW. My impression is that he gave the password to those he trusted to be able to “draw the line” between the info that would do harm to the people and the info that would do harm to and expose the hoax.
To those who are calling CG3 a “dud”, it’s going to take time to sift and sort through the files. CG1&2 were already sifted some by FOIA. Be patient.
Anthony and the others (whoever they are) are showing integrity that CAGW’s promoters have not by not releasing the password as promised.
Why does anyone have a problem with that?
Poptech says:
“Actually there is an unspoken skeptic heir-achy in this debate which has do to with level of risk exposure.
1. There are the scientists who publish, testify and put their careers on the line (Lindzen, Michaels, Christy, Spencer, Singer, McIntyre ect…)
2. There are the bloggers who have to deal with real life harassment and legal threats (Anthony Watts, Marc Morano, Andrew Montford, Jo Nova ect…)”
Just because Anthony Watts does not call himself a scientist does not mean that he isn’t one. Remember it was a meteorologist, Edward Lorenz, who fathered the complex dynamic system now known as Chaos Theory.
Daryl M, again you cherry pick facts. Fiat currencies, while all can be subjected to inflation, they are also government backed meaning, they can operate for a long time due to coercion. Their “backing” is government force.
– – – – – – – –
Wobble,
Comic relief is useful in heavy threads. Thanks for your comment to that effect. : )
New thought not directly mentioned in your comment => What of the comparative integrity of leakers / hackers? As opposed to unknown integrity of Mr. FOIA and his indirection / misdirection in his three (CG1, 2, 3) communiques, here is a comment about a self-identified ‘leaker’ that can be admired for his verifiable integrity.
Alec Rawls’ clearly accepting responsibility is a kind of integrity that should be emulated by those ‘outing’ the problematic ‘consensus’ climate scientists gaming the scientific process. And less so emulating Mr FOIA.
Take care.
John
crosspatch, no I understand fully what money is you don’t. You just repeated the same nonsensical statement that money can be anything, no it can’t. Money, cannot be a pebble because they are not scarce and thus their very low value would not make them worth using. All market based forms of money arose because the commodity used had intrinsic value before it was used as money, it could be easily divisible and was relatively scarce. Then people further confuse this with digital transactions. Just because you use a commodity standard like gold does not mean you would carry around gold coins, it can still be transacted digitally.
Gold does not have to be used, any other commodity that has similar traits can be a substitute such as silver. If you “revalue” your fiat currency backed by gold you are either inflating it or deflating it, there are no magic tricks.
Prisons are a perfect experiment of how this process happens in markets. For years cigarette packs became currency due to their intrinsic value, ability to be divisible and relative scarcity. When prisons banned cigarettes, cans/packs of mackerel were used,
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122290720439096481.html
Bitcoins are a fiat pyramid / ponzi scheme that truly is only what people believe it to be. If you believe gold has no value send it to me, no need to burden yourself with such beliefs.