Evidence that Dr Michael Mann misled a court

Guest opinion by Christopher Monckton of Brenchley

This memorandum sets out evidence of falsehood with intent to mislead a court by Dr Michael E. Mann in a case in the District of Columbia against the Competitive Enterprise Institute and the National Review.

First, it will be demonstrated that Dr Michael Mann, the plaintiff and appellee in the case, materially misled the court in his Brief of Appellee filed 3 September 2014 by falsely stating (1) that the finding of Sir Muir Russell in an inquiry into revelations of malpractice by climate scientists in the “Climategate emails” that a depiction of three graphs of northern-hemisphere temperature changes from 1000-2000 AD, reconstructed from tree-rings and published on the front cover of the World Meteorological Organization’s Statement on the Status of the Global Climate in 1999 on the WMO’s 50^th anniversary in 2000, was misleading “had absolutely nothing to do with Dr Mann or with any graph prepared by him”; and (2) that “Dr Mann did not create this depiction”.

Second, it will be demonstrated that Dr Mann had reason to know each of these two statements was false in every material particular and was calculated to mislead the court on issues central to the proceedings.

Third, it will be demonstrated that a graph by Dr Mann and a depiction by him and others of his graph together with two similar graphs on the front cover of a widely-circulated official publication gravely misrepresented the scientific data so as to mislead policymakers into the adoption of costly regimes of taxation and regulation calculated to occasion substantial losses to taxpayers, and that Dr Mann knew the depiction was misleading, and that he was given an opportunity to correct it but did not correct it.

In particular, the following facts will be established by documentary evidence herein or annexed hereto –

That Dr Mann’s own curriculum vitae lists him as having co-authored and thus, in accordance with academic norms, as having accepted full personal responsibility for the depiction on the front cover of the WMO’s publication with which in his brief to the court he denies all connection.

That Dr Mann had himself created one of the three graphs constituting the depiction characterized as misleading by Sir Muir Russell, a depiction with which Dr Mann denies all connection.

That on the front cover of the WMO’s publication Dr Mann is named as his graph’s originator and that on page 2 he is named as a co-author of the depiction that incorporates his graph and two others.

That Dr Mann had discussed with his co-authors the problem posed by the discrepancy between measured warming in the mid-20^th century and the sharp decline in temperature as reconstructed from tree-ring data series over the same period, yet they had concealed the discrepancy by tampering with one of the datasets falsely to substitute the sharp decline with a sharp increase, and by splicing measured temperature data on to the end of all three graphs without disclosing that they had done so.

That in accordance with academic practice Dr Phil Jones, director of the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia, who had prepared the depiction incorporating Dr Mann’s graph, had given Dr Mann and each of his co-authors the opportunity to comment on their depiction before Dr Jones submitted it to the WMO for publication on behalf of himself and his co-authors, including Dr Mann.

That the depiction falsely represented all three graphs of reconstructed northern-hemisphere temperature changes over the past millennium as showing global temperatures increasing steeply from 1960-2000 in line with instrumentally-measured global temperature change in a fashion calculated to leave the reader with the false impression that dendrochronology is a reliable basis for pre-instrumental temperature reconstructions, when in fact two of the graphs had shown little change in the mid-20^th century and one had shown temperatures declining steeply over a period when temperatures had in fact risen appreciably, demonstrating the unreliability of the tree-ring reconstructions on which Dr Mann and his co-authors had relied in constructing their depiction intended to diminish or abolish the medieval warm period and hence artificially to make it appear that today’s temperatures are exceptional.

That the tree-ring graphs were inadequate as a basis for reconstructing pre-instrumental temperatures, so that Dr Mann’s graph was misleading even before it was tampered with; that the suppression of the medieval warm period in his graph was an artefact of a non-standard and defective algorithm contrived by him and of the inclusion of estimated data from a single cedar-tree; and that Dr Mann knew but concealed the fact that that his graph’s apparent ability to emulate the measured increase in 20^th-century northern-hemisphere temperature depended solely upon 20 defective tree-ring datasets.

EVIDENCE THAT DR MANN, CONTRARY TO A STATEMENT BY HIM TO THE COURT,

CO-AUTHORED THE WMO DEPICTION AND CONTRIBUTED A GRAPH THERETO

Dr Mann’s false statements were uttered in the following passage at p. 13 of his appellate brief of 3 September 2013, annexed hereto and marked “M 1”:

“[In July 2010,] … the University of East Anglia published the Independent Climate Change Email Review report, prepared under the oversight of Sir Muir Russell. The report examined whether manipulation or suppression of data occurred and concluded that the CRU scientists’ ‘rigour and honesty as scientists are not in doubt’. In their briefs, Defendants suggest that the University of East Anglia’s investigation actually found that the hockey stick graph was ‘misleading’ because it did not identify that certain data was ‘truncated’ and that other proxy and instrumental temperature data had been spliced together. … This allegation is yet another example of Defendants’ attempts to obfuscate the evidence in this case. The ‘misleading’ comment made in this report had absolutely nothing to do with Dr. Mann, or with any graph prepared by him. Rather, the report’s comment was directed at an overly simplified depiction of the hockey stick that was reproduced on the frontispiece of the World Meteorological Organization’s Statement on the Status of the Global Climate in 1999. Dr. Mann did not create this depiction, and to state that this report suggested an effort by Dr. Mann to mislead is disingenuous.”

Page 22 of Dr Mann’s own curriculum vitae, downloaded from Penn State University at http://www.meteo.psu.edu/holocene/public_html/Mann/about/cv/cv_pdf.pdf on 12 September 2014, and annexed hereto and marked “M 2”, explicitly lists Dr Mann as a co-author of that graph, as follows (the emphasis is in the original document):

“Jones, P.D., Briffa, K.R., Osborn, T.J., Mann, M.E., Bradley, R.S., Hughes, M.K., Cover Figure for World Meteorological Organization (WMO) 50th Year Anniversary Publication: Temperature changes over the last Millennium, 2000.”

There was no WMO document entitled Temperature changes over the last Millennium. Nor was Dr Jones’ depiction, containing a graph by Dr Mann together with two other graphs and approved by Dr Mann and his listed co-authors for publication at the instance of Dr Jones, entitled Temperature changes over the last Millennium.

The WMO document referred to by Dr Mann in his curriculum vitae was its Statement on the Status of the Global Climate in 1999, published in 2000 on its 50^th anniversary. It is annexed hereto and marked “M 3”. The “Cover Figure” was incorrectly titled in Dr Mann’s curriculum vitae. It was in fact the cover figure for the WMO document, of which Fig. 1 is a true image.

Nor did either Dr Mann’s graph or the depiction as a whole represent reconstructions of global temperature changes over the last millennium, though the depiction including Dr Mann’s graph appeared on the front cover of the WMO document under a prominent title referring to the global climate. The depiction represented temperature changes for the Northern Hemisphere only.

Nevertheless, it will be demonstrated that the above-cited reference in Dr Mann’s curriculum vitae is indeed the depiction on the front cover of the WMO document; that Dr Mann contributed a graph to that depiction; that he was a co-author of that depiction and was listed as such in the WMO document; that, therefore, Sir Muir Russell’s criticism of the depiction as “misleading” was as much applicable to Dr Mann as to all other co-authors of that depiction; and that, contrary to Dr Mann’s assertion in his Appellee’s Brief, the defendants and appellants in these proceedings were fully entitled to mention his name in their pleadings in connection with what will be demonstrated to be the intentionally misleading defects in that depiction.

Figure 1. Three reconstructions of mean northern-hemisphere mean surface temperature changes deduced from tree-rings, AD 1000-2000, shown on the front cover of Statement on the Status of the Global Climate in 1999 [World Meteorological Organization, 2000]. Image downloaded from https://www.wmo.int/pages/prog/wcp/wcdmp/documents/913_en.pdf 13 September 2014.

It is not until page 2 of the WMO document that it is made clear that the depiction in the front cover is not a depiction of global temperature changes but relates to the Northern Hemisphere only:

“WMO-No. 913

“© 2000, World Meteorological Organization

“ISBN 92-63-10913-3

“Front cover: Northern Hemisphere temperatures were reconstructed for the past 1000 years (up to 1999) using palaeoclimatic records (tree rings, corals, ice cores, lake sediments, etc.), along with historical and long instrumental records. The data are shown as 50-year smoothed differences from the 1961-1990 normal. Uncertainties are greater in the early part of the millennium (see page 4 for further information). For more details, readers are referred to the PAGES newsletter (Vol. 7, No. 1: March 1999, also available at http://www.pages.unibe.ch) and the National Geophysical Data Center (http://www.ngdc.noaa.gov). (Sources of data: P.D. Jones, K.R. Briffa and T.J. Osborn, University of East Anglia, UK; M.E. Mann, University of Virginia, USA; R.S. Bradley, University of Massachusetts, USA; M.K. Hughes, University of Arizona, USA; and the Hadley Centre, The Met. Office).”

The six names P.D. Jones, K.R. Briffa, T.J. Osborn, M.E. Mann, R.S. Bradley, and M.K. Hughes are, in sequence, the six names listed in Dr Mann’s curriculum vitae as the co-authors of the front cover image of the World Meteorological Organization’s 2000 publication to which he gives the false title Temperature changes over the last Millennium.

It is a convention in academe that all those who agree to be listed as co-authors of a scientific paper, or of any depiction therein, assent not only to their own contributions thereto but to the paper or image as a whole – in the present instance, to the depiction on the front cover of the WMO document.

Further evidence that Dr Mann was specifically invited to approve the depiction before it was sent to the WMO for incorporation into the document and publication is given in one of the “Climategate” emails between various scientists including Dr Mann, who, in 1999, was at the University of Virginia.

The Vice-Chancellor of the University of East Anglia, from whose servers the Climate emails became publicly available in 2009, has confirmed to me in person that the “Climategate” emails are – save for certain redactions apparently intended to conceal the full telephone numbers and email addresses of persons mentioned therein, or to withhold information that was purely personal – true and accurate.

The email in question, from Dr Phil Jones, Director of the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia, was downloaded from http://www.ecowho.com/foia.php?file=0191.txt 13 September 2014. Redactions indicated by triple interrogation marks were made by those who released the emails to the public.

In the email, Dr Jones copied to Dr Mann and other co-authors the depiction he had prepared incorporating the graphs from Dr Mann and from two other sources, and invited them qua co-authors to comment in accordance with standard academic practice so that he could send the final version to the WMO for publication:

“date: Tue, 16 Nov 1999 09:20:35 +000 ???

“from: Phil Jones ???@uea.ac.uk

“subject: WMO Climate Statement for 1999 – IMPORTANT!

“to: ray Bradley >???@geo.umass.edu>, ???@virginia.edu, ???@ltrr.arizona.edu

“cc: ???@uea.ac.uk, ???@uea.ac.uk

“Dear Ray, Mike [Mann] and Malcolm,

“On the Friday last week, whilst most were still in Venice, I was in Geneva attending the last day of the WG [Working Group] on Climate Change Detection of WMO/CCL and CLIVAR. All the proxy [proxies are measured data, e.g. from tree-rings, from which attempts are made to reconstruct pre-thermometer temperature records] items on the agenda were left for me to deal with and it was certainly worth going. Keith [Briffa, author of one of the three tree-ring reconstructions of Northern-Hemisphere temperature that appeared in the depiction on the front cover of the WMO document] has given me a brief rundown on what happened in Venice on Thursday pm and Friday.

 

“The pertinent item from Geneva concerns the WMO statement on the Climate of 1999. WMO has been issuing these for the past 6 years. There are 10,000 printed each time. There were two possibilities for the front cover (1998’s showed the instrumental record from 1856) – the millennial long temperature series or the contrasting storm tracks for 1998 and 1999. I was the only one voting for the latter – partly personal as I knew I would have to organise the former. I was outvoted 12-1, maybe because in a brief presentation I oversold the advances made in paleoclimate studies over the last few years!

“That’s the background. WMO want to go with the millennial record on the cover and I said I would produce something and some text. The figure will be the 3 curves (Mike’s, mine amd [and] Keith/Tim’s). Tim is producing this curve (all wrt [with respect to 19]61-90 and 50 year smoothed). Each will be extended to 1999 by instrumental data for the zones/seasons they represent. The attached text briefly discusses the differences and what is shown. The text is attached as a word file. It is probably a little too long and is, as you’ll see, very brief. If you want anything changed/added then delete something.

“Can I have your feedback asap as I have to get the text and the diagram to Geneva by Nov 29?

“There will be a press release in Geneva on Dec 16 – they need two weeks to approve the text internally. The full text of the report is then printed during Feb 2000 – last year’s was 12 pages long. It will be released on March 15 in Geneva to coincide with WM (World Met) day and the 50^th anniversary celebrations of WMO as well. WMO are planning to print at least twice as many copies as usual and were talking about 25,000! Copies go to all WMO members and are distributed at countless meetings and sent to loads of address lists available.

“I hope you’ll all be willing to go along with this and can live with the brief text. All the previous issues have been referenceless – I’m trying to circumvent this with the web page addresses for more info.

“Cheers

“Phil

“PS I hope you can all cope with the word97 format.

“Attachment Converted: ‘c:\eudora\attach\wmocover.doc’

“Prof. Phil Jones Climatic Research Unit Telephone +44 ???

“School of Environmental Sciences Fax +44 ???

“University of East Anglia Email ???@uea.ac.uk

“Norwich NR4 7TJ, UK”

In 2001, the year following publication of the WMO’s document, the Third Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) reproduced a very similar graph of reconstructed northern-hemisphere temperatures (Fig. 2), purporting to show that there had been little or no medieval warm period and that in the 20^th century, inferentially owing to anthropogenic emissions of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere as by-products of the combustion of coal, oil and gas, there had been a sharp warming of the atmosphere unprecedented in at least the previous 1000 years. IPCC reproduced the graph six times in large scale and in full color, the only graph to be thus favored.

IPCC’s 2001 graph, which bears many similarities to Dr Mann’s graph shown in the depiction in the WMO’s document of 1999, was also by Dr Mann together with Drs Bradley and Hughes, who had also been his co-authors of the earlier graph. The 2001 graph had originally been published in Nature in 1998 and again in 1999 under the names of these three authors. For a few years the IPCC adopted a simplified representation of the graph as part of its brand image.

IPCC’s 2001 graph became known as the “hockey stick” graph because the startling uptick in Northern-Hemisphere temperatures that it portrayed bore a superficial resemblance to the blade of a hockey-stick. From 2005 onward, after Mr Steve McIntyre and Professor Ross McKitrick of the University of Guelph, Canada, exposed Dr Mann’s 2001 graph as methodologically defective and, after it became apparent that the graph was inconsistent with the overwhelming majority of proxy temperature reconstructions from all over the Northern Hemisphere, IPCC found it expedient to cease using a version of the “hockey stick” graph as part of its brand image.

Figure 2. Millennial Northern-Hemisphere temperature reconstruction (blue) and instrumental data (red) from AD 1000 to 1999, adapted from Mann et al. (1999). A smoother version of the Northern-Hemisphere series (black), the linear trend from 1000-1850 AD (purple-dashed) and two standard error limits (grey shaded) are also shown. Source: IPCC (2001).

The Independent Climate Change Emails Review, conducted by Sir Muir Russell on behalf of the University of East Anglia and published in July 2010, downloaded on 11 September 2014 from http://www.cce-review.org/pdf/FINAL%20REPORT.pdf, annexed hereto and marked “M 4”. concluded at §23 on p. 13 as follows:

“On the allegation that the references in a specific e-mail to a “trick” and to “hide the decline” in respect of a 1999 WMO report figure show evidence of intent to paint a misleading picture, we find that, given its subsequent iconic significance (not least the use of a similar figure in the IPCC Third Assessment Report), the figure supplied for the WMO Report was misleading. We do not find that it is misleading to curtail reconstructions at some point per se, or to splice data, but we believe that both of these procedures should have been made plain – ideally in the figure but certainly clearly described in either the caption or the text.”

Sir Muir Russell was plainly characterizing as misleading the depiction in the WMO’s document – a depiction of which Dr Mann, contrary to his assertion in his Appellee’s Brief, was a co-creator and co-author, and to which, contrary to his assertion, he had contributed a graph. The fact that Sir Muir Russell was indeed referring to the WMO’s 1999 Statement on the Status of the Global Climate, and could not have been referring to any other WMO document, will become apparent once the significance of the terms “trick” and “hide the decline” are explained later herein.

EVIDENCE OF DR MANN’S KNOWLEDGE OF AND PARTICIPATION IN THE UNDISCLOSED ALTERATION OF THE WMO DEPICTION

On 22 September 1999, Dr Mann wrote the following email to Dr Keith Briffa, deputy director of the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia, in which he addresses – and hence demonstrates that he is fully aware of – the discrepancy between the measured rise in 20^th-century temperature and the decline in mid-century shown by Dr Briffa’s tree-ring reconstruction:

“From: ‘Michael E. Mann’ ???@multiproxy.evsc.virginia.edu

“To: Keith Briffa ???@uea.ac.uk,

‘Folland, Chris’ ???@uea.ac.uk, ‘Phil Jones’ ???@uea.ac.uk

“Subject: RE: IPCC revisions

“Date: Wed, 22 Sep 1999 12:35:24 -0400

“Cc: ???@ncdc.noaa.gov, ???@virginia.edu

“Thanks for your response Keith,

“For all: Walked into this hornet’s nest this morning! Keith and Phil have both raised some very good points. And I should point out that Chris, through no fault of his own, but probably through ME not conveying my thoughts very clearly to the others, definitely overstates any singular confidence I have in my own (Mann et al.) series. I believe strongly that the strength in our discussion will be the fact that certain key features of past climate estimates are robust among a number of quasi-independent and truly independent estimates, each of which is not without its own limitations and potential biases. And I certainly don’t want to abuse my lead authorship by advocating my own work.

“I am perfectly amenable to keeping Keith’s series in the plot, and can ask Ian Macadam (Chris?) to add it to the plot he has been preparing (nobody liked my own color/plotting conventions so I’ve given up doing this myself). The key thing is making sure the series are vertically aligned in a reasonable way. I had been using the entire 20^th century, but in the case of Keith’s, we need to align the first half of the 20^th century w/ the corresponding mean values of the other series, due to the late 20^th century decline. [emphasis added].

“So if Chris and Tom (?) are ok with this, I would be happy to add Keith’s series. That having been said, it does raise a conundrum: We demonstrate (through comparining an exatropical averaging of our nothern hemisphere patterns with Phil’s more extratropical series) that the major discrepancies between Phil’s and our series can be explained in terms of spatial sampling/latitudinal emphasis (seasonality seems to be secondary here, but probably explains much of the residual differences). But that explanation certainly can’t rectify why Keith’s series, which has similar seasonality *and* latitudinal emphasis to Phil’s series, differs in large part in exactly the opposite direction than Phil’s does from ours. This is the problem all picked up on (everyone in the room at IPCC was in agreement that this was a problem and a potential distraction/detraction from the reasonably concensus viewpoint we’d like to show w/ the Jones et al and Mann et al series.

“So, if we show Keith’s series in this plot, we have to comment that ‘something else’ is responsible for the discrepancies in this case. Perhaps Keith can help us out a bit by explaining the processing that went into the series and the potential factors that might lead to it being ‘warming’ than the Jones et al and Mann et al series?? We would need to put in a few words in this regard. Otherwise, the skeptics have an field day casting doubt on our ability to understand the factors that influence these estimates and, thus, can undermine faith in the paleoestimates. I don’t think that doubt is scientifically justified, and I’d hate to be the one to have to give it fodder! …”

On November 16, 1999, Phil Jones, Director of the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia, sent an email containing the following statement to Drs Mann, Bradley, and Hughes, the three co-authors of the “hockey stick” graph, as follows:

“I’ve just completed Mike’s Nature trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years (ie from 1981 onwards) and from 1961 for Keith’s to hide the decline.”

The “real temps” referred to in Dr Mann’s email are modern-era surface temperatures measured by thermometers. “Keith” is Keith Briffa, Jones’ deputy director at the Climatic Research Unit.

Figure 3. Left panel: The raw, unaltered data for the three tree-ring graphs, compared with observed temperature trends (in black). Right panel: the depiction of the three graphs published in the WMO’s Statement on the Status of the Global Climate in 1999. All three graphs of reconstructed northern-hemisphere temperatures were tampered with to make it appear, falsely, that the tree-rings faithfully reproduced the measured global warming of the 20^th century, when in fact none of the three graphs showed rapid warming after 1960 and the third showed a decline that was the opposite of the measured temperature trend. It was this “decline” that the depiction hid.

EVIDENCE OF DEFECTS IN THE CONTRIVING OF THE “HOCKEY-STICK” GRAPH

Professor Ross McKitrick, co-author of the papers in the learned journals Geophysical Research Letters and Energy and Environment that exposed the defects in the “hockey stick” graph, wrote in a brief for the Australia Asia Pacific Economic Co-operation Study Centre at Monash University, Melbourne, delivered at Parliament House, Canberra in 2005, annexed hereto and marked “M 5”:

“Scientists try to discern local climate histories over past centuries using various techniques, including temperature proxies and ground borehole temperature data. ‘Proxies’ include a wide range of measures that are, potentially, sensitive to local temperature trends, such as tree ring widths. Boreholes drilled into the ground have a vertical temperature profile that can be inverted to yield an estimate of the historical surface temperature sequence at the surface.

“In the mid-1990s the use of ground boreholes as a clue to paleoclimate history was becoming well-established. In 1995 David Deming, a geoscientist at the University of Oklahoma, published a study in Science that demonstrated the technique by generating a 150-year climate history for North America. Here, in his own words, is what happened next.

“ ‘With the publication of the article in Science, I gained significant credibility in the community of scientists working on climate change. They thought I was one of them, someone who would pervert science in the service of social and political causes. So one of them let his guard down. A major person working in the area of climate change and global warming sent me an astonishing email that said “We have to get rid of the Medieval Warm Period.’

“The Medieval Warm Period (MWP) is an interval from approximately AD 1000 to AD 1300 during which many places around the world exhibited conditions that seem warm compared to today. In the 1995 Second Assessment Report of the IPCC [actually the 1990 First Assessment Report], there was no hockey stick. Instead the millennial climate history contained a MWP and a subsequent Little Ice Age … The late 20^th century appears to be nothing special by comparison.”

“It is easy to see why this graph was a problem for those pushing the global warming alarm. If the world could warm so much on such a short time scale as a result of natural causes, surely the 20^th century climate change could simply be a natural effect as well. And the present climate change could hardly be considered unusually hazardous if even larger climate changes happened in the recent past, and we are simply fluctuating in the middle of what nature regularly dishes out?”

IPCC’s graph from the first of its five quinquennial Assessment Reports, published in 1990 and showing the medieval warm period, is reproduced and colorized as the lower panel in Fig. 3. The upper panel is a reconstruction of sea level by Grinsted et al. (2009), largely based on Jevrejeva et al. (2007). The correlation between the graphs of temperature change and sea-level change over the past millennium is self-evident.

IPCC maintains that changes in global temperature are reflected in changes in global sea level. The correlation between reconstructed sea-level change and the reconstructed surface temperatures as shown in IPCC’s 1990 graph accordingly suggests that it is that graph and not the IPCC’s 2001 graph based on Dr Mann’s “hockey stick” reconstruction that was correct as to the existence of the medieval warm period and of the little ice age, and as to the position of today’s temperatures approximately halfway between the two extremes. This inferentially causative correlation is one of the simplest and clearest methods of demonstrating that the medieval warm period is likely to have been warmer and the little ice age cooler than the present: for, in the absence of temperature change as presented in IPCC’s 1990 graph, no other explanation for the changes in sea level shown in Grinsted et al. (2009) is known.

It is also evident from the sea-level reconstruction that, notwithstanding the changes in temperature over the past millennium, sea level has varied by only 20 cm (8 in) either side of the millennial mean.

A list of some 450 papers in the reviewed scientific literature most of which provide evidence by a variety of proxy methods of temperature reconstruction that the medieval warm period was almost everywhere warmer than the present is annexed hereto and marked “M 6”.

A far smaller number of papers supporting Dr Mann’s contention that there was little or no medieval warm period and that today’s temperatures are unprecedented in a millennium appeared rather suddenly after McIntyre and McKitrick had exposed Dr Mann’s “hockey stick” graph as defective.

However, these papers were nearly all based not so much on direct observation as on modeling, and, as a report by three statisticians for the U.S. House of Representatives revealed in 2006, the overwhelming majority of these papers’ authors were closely linked to Dr Mann by previous co-authorship.

Figure 4. Upper panel: Reconstruction of sea-level changes, 1000-2000 AD, from Grinsted et al. (2009). Lower panel: Colorized representation of reconstructed temperature changes, 1000-2000 AD, from IPCC (1990). The close correlation between the two graphs is self-evident.

Dr Mann and his colleagues had used the varying widths of tree-rings as their principal method of estimating early-climate temperatures. They had assumed that wider tree-rings always indicated warmer temperatures. However, one reason for caution about using tree-rings as proxies for pre-instrumental surface temperatures is that wider tree-rings do not always indicate warmer temperatures. Trees grow faster not only when it is warmer but also when there is more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, because carbon dioxide is not a pollutant but a naturally-occurring trace gas that, with sunlight, chlorophyll, and water, is an essential ingredient in plant photosynthesis, without which there would be little or no life on Earth.

Seen in a geological perspective, the pre-industrial concentration of carbon dioxide is almost as low as it has been in the past half-billion years (Fig. 4). Indeed, even the present concentration is well below what has been the norm in recent geological history. In the Cambrian era, for instance, a diagram in the IPCC’s 2001 assessment report shows that carbon dioxide concentration was almost 20 times that of today.

It is also known that in the Neoproterozoic era 750 million years ago the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere was at least 30%, compared with just 0.04% today (for otherwise the dolomitic limestones that precipitated out of the oceans in that era could not have formed). Yet during that era equatorial glaciers came and went twice at sea level.

Figure 5. Reconstructed atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration (Berner, 2001) and global mean surface temperature (Scotese, 1999) over the past 550 million years.

In the past 400,000 years, the correlation between changes in the atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide and in global mean surface temperature inferred from ice-core data has been closer than shown in Fig. 4. However, many papers in the learned journals attest to the fact that in the paleoclimate it was temperatures that changed first. Carbon dioxide did not lead: it followed.

As the discrepancy between the rise in global temperatures over the 20^th century and the decline shown in the true tree-ring data from the three series falsely depicted in the WMO document demonstrates, tree-rings are unsuitable as a method of reconstructing past temperatures because CO₂ fertilization distorts the data.

McIntyre and McKitrick identified numerous other defects in the construction of IPCC’s 2001 version of “hockey-stick” 1000-year temperature graph by Dr Mann and his colleagues:

Ø Many location labels were incorrect.

Ø Obsolete versions of the data were used.

Ø Available data series were inexplicably truncated.

Ø The data actually used by Dr Mann in the compilation of the “hockey stick” graph differed in important ways from the description of the data set out in Dr Mann’s original paper in Nature.

Ø Dr Mann, contrary to the crucial principle of replicability of scientific results, refused all requests by McIntyre and McKitrick for a copy of the computer code he had used in generating his “hockey stick” graph. Nature, in which Dr Mann’s “hockey stick” graph had first been published in 1998, also flatly refused to require Dr Mann to part with details of the data and methods used by the scientists who had created the defective graph it had published. These refusals run directly counter to the central principle of the scientific method, which is that the unpublished methods and data that underlie the published results of any scientist in any learned journal must be made available to other scientists so that they can replicate the methods and test whether the results are valid. Honoring this principle of replicability is of particular importance where scientists such as Dr Mann are lobbying and campaigning for costly regulations and taxes on the basis of their published research conclusions.

Ø Some fragments of Dr Mann’s computer code retrieved by McIntyre and McKitrick showed that Dr Mann had used a defective technique that had had the effect of giving 390 times as much weighting to the small minority of tree-ring data series that showed an uptick in temperature in the 20^th century than to the great majority that showed no uptick (Fig. 5).

Figure 6. The few datasets such as the bristlecone-pine tree-ring series from Sheep Mountain, CA (upper panel), that produced a “hockey-stick” shape, falsely suggesting an unprecedented uptrend in the 20th century, were given 390 times more weight in Dr Mann’s “hockey-stick” graph than tree-rings from Mayberry Slough, AZ (lower panel), that did not exhibit a “hockey-stick” shape.

Ø Dr Mann had spliced together a number of different data series in order to handle segments with missing data in the earliest period of the analysis, but had not disclosed in his Nature article that he had thus tampered with the data.

Ø Dr Mann refused requests to supply the splicing sequence he had used, yet again offending against the principle of replicability of scientific results.

Ø The non-standard algorithm used by Dr Mann to construct the “hockey-stick” graph generated “hockey stick” curves showing a pronounced uptick at the end of the “time”-series even if the real-world proxy data from tree-rings and other sources were replaced with trendless red noise, a type of random data that simulates the data from trees in a climate that is only subject to random fluctuations with no warming trend.

Ø In 10,000 repetitions on random trendless red noise, McIntyre and McKitrick found that a conventional algorithm almost never yielded a hockey stick shaped output, but Dr Mann’s algorithm yielded a pronounced hockey-stick shape more than 99% of the time (Fig. 7).

Figure 7. Seven runs of Dr Mann’s algorithm (a-g) using untrended random red noise, and a single run (MBH) using Dr Mann’s tree-ring data. Dr Mann’s algorithm generates “hockey stick” curves more than 99% of the time, even if untrended random data are input to it.

Ø The journal Nature, in which the defective “hockey-stick” graph had been first published, required Dr Mann and his co-authors to publish a Corrigendum amending the defective list of data series they had used in compiling the graph and explaining that the statistical method they had used had not been the standard method. However, they falsely stated that “none of these errors affect our previously published results”.

Ø Owing to the propensity of Dr Mann’s algorithm to generate “hockey sticks” falsely making the 20^th-century warming appear exceptional, removal of just 20 “Graybill-Idso” bristlecone-pine data series from Dr Mann’s data removed the “hockey stick” from his graph (Fig. 8).

Figure 8. Top panel downward: 1. Dr Mann’s “hockey stick” graph, first published in Nature in 1998, then reproduced in IPCC’s Third Assessment Report (2001: see Fig. 2 supra). 2. Simple mean of all Dr Mann’s proxies, showing that without his algorithm the “hockey stick” shape vanishes. 3. Mean of all Dr Mann’s proxies adjusted to exclude short-segment standardization. 4. Dr Mann’s own graph after he had removed the 20 defective “Graybill-Idso” tree-ring proxies. He concealed this result showing that the abolition of the medieval warm period he had contrived in his “hockey stick” graph depended on the presence of just 20 defective tree-ring data series, hiding the data for the bottom panel in a folder marked CENSORED_DATA at Dr Mann’s file-transfer protocol site.

Ø Dr Mann had himself done an experiment to remove the 20 Graybill-Idso bristlecone-pine datasets, and had discovered that the “hockey stick” shape creating the 20^th-century data peak disappeared without them (Fig. 8): in short, that the “hockey stick” shape depended entirely on just 20 of several hundred data series that are not considered by experts to be valid climate indicators. However, Dr Mann did not disclose what Professor McKitrick describes as “this fatal weakness of his results”, which only came to light because Professor McKitrick’s co-author, Steve McIntyre, had persisted until he discovered the error.

Ø Some data series were duplicated within the database, doubling the weight assigned to them compared with all others. One of these, the Gaspe “northern treeline” data series, is included both as treeline #11 and as part of the North American collection, where it is labeled “cana036”.

Ø The Gaspe chronology is based upon only one tree from 1404 to 1450. Dr Mann, however, listed the start date as 1400 and filled in the missing data by extrapolation. Simply removing that one incorrectly-padded period had a substantial effect on the final graph (Fig. 9).

Figure 9. Dr Mann’s “hockey stick” graph (dashed curve) falsely abolishing the medieval warm period, and the true graph (solid line) generated after removing extrapolated data related to the single Gaspe cedar tree. After removal of those estimated data for that one tree, Dr Mann’s algorithm based on all remaining data shows the medieval warm period, demonstrating that there is nothing remarkable about today’s temperatures.

Ø On the basis that meaningless red noise could yield “hockey stick” curves when Dr Mann’s algorithm was applied to them, McIntyre and McKitrick generated a Monte Carlo benchmark for statistical significance: for a model fitted using random numbers allows study of how well they appear to “explain” the data. Then the “real-world” data, if they are informative about the climate, have to outperform the random numbers. McIntyre and McKitrick calculated statistical significance benchmarks for the hockey-stick algorithm and showed that in the medieval warm period, before 1450, the “hockey stick” did not achieve statistical significance. Dr Mann’s graph, therefore, presents results that tell us no more about the temperature record of the past millennium than random numbers.

Ø Dr Mann and his co-authors, in a paper in Nature in 1999, acknowledged that the bristlecone-pine temperature reconstruction data series they had used were flawed and required an adjustment to remove the CO₂ fertilization effect (more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere accelerates tree growth, just as higher rainfall and higher temperature do). However, they only applied the necessary correction to the pre-1400 segment of the series. When the necessary corrections were applied to the full series length, the “hockey stick” shape disappeared.

For these reasons, the “hockey stick” graph was not fit for its purpose. In particular, Dr Mann’s apparent suppression of the medieval warm period whose existence and magnitude in relation to subsequent temperature change IPCC had acknowledged in its 1990 First Assessment Report was an artefact of the inclusion in the data of just 50 years’ invented data in respect of a single cedar tree for which no real data were available at the relevant period; and its apparent ability to track the increase in measured northern-hemisphere temperature in the 20^th century was an artefact of the inclusion of just 20 tree-ring datasets known to be defective. Furthermore, Dr Mann knew that his algorithm was unreliable, for he had run an experiment omitting the 20 defective data series and had generated a graph showing no 20^th-century uptick, thus revealing that tree-ring reconstructions are unsound as a basis for determining pre-instrumental temperatures. But he had sought to conceal the ineffectiveness of his algorithm by hiding the data for that graph in a file marked “CENSORED_DATA”.

The false suppression of the medieval warm period by Dr Mann, and his false concealment of the fact that the 20^th-century uptick in temperatures shown in his “hockey-stick” graph was an artefact of the inclusion of 20 dubious tree-ring proxies, provide a necessary background to understanding why Dr Mann’s mendacious attempts to dissociate himself from Sir Muir Russell’s finding and from the depiction in the WMO’s 1999 report of which he was a co-author and to deny that any of the graphs in that depiction was his were calculated to mislead the court. Dr Mann’s deception at the expense of the defendants and appellants in the case, a deception perpetrated in a brief lodged in court proceedings, was calculated to enable him to achieve a gain in money value for himself and inflict a corresponding loss upon the defendants and appellants. The question whether Dr Mann has committed fraud, perjury, and contempt of court should be investigated by the prosecuting authorities.

The following documentary evidence of the offenses alleged herein is attached:

M 1 Appellate brief by Dr Mann dated 3 September 2014 and filed with the DC Court of Appeals

http://cei.org/sites/default/files/OPPOSSING%20APPELLATE%20BRIEF%20Mann.pdf

M 2 Dr Mann’s Curriculum Vitae

http://www.meteo.psu.edu/holocene/public_html/Mann/about/cv/cv_pdf.pdf

M 3 World Meteorological Organization’s Statement on the Status of the Global Climate in 1999

https://www.wmo.int/pages/prog/wcp/wcdmp/documents/913_en.pdf

M 4 Sir Muir Russell’s Independent Climate Change Emails Review

http://www.cce-review.org/pdf/FINAL%20REPORT.pdf

M 5 Professor Ross McKitrick’s report What is the ‘Hockey Stick’ debate about?

http://www.uoguelph.ca/~rmckitri/research/APEC-hockey.pdf

M 6 List of ~450 papers most of which demonstrate that the medieval warm period was real.