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Posts tagged emails
AR4 on “1998 was the warmest year”
May 2nd
via ClimateAudit
May 2, 2010
As most CA readers know, a few years ago, I wondered how they knew that 1998 was the warmest year in a millennium – a claim that you don’t see in AR4. Nor, at first (second or even fifth) glance does the assertion, once so prominent, even seem to be addressed in AR4.
The Climategate letters offer an interesting vignette. Chapter 6 authors were not unaware of the matter and worked over language on the issue like New York or London lawyers, eventually inserting a clause deep in the chapter that gave them cover, intentionally leaving the issue out of the chapter Executive Summary.
On July 28, 2006, Chapter 6 Coordinating Lead Author Overpeck (1154090231.txt) wrote to Briffa (copy Jansen) passing along a question from WG1 Chairman Susan Solomon, asking the reasonable question about what happened to claimes that 1998 was the warmest year, 1990s the warmest decade.
Hi Keith – in our TS/SPM discussions, Susan has raised this question:
“In the TAR they spoke of 1998 being the warmest year in the
millennium and the 1990s the warmest decade. I don’t see that
chapter 6 addresses any of these time scales. I am not saying you
should do so – but are you planning to say anything about it and why
you aren’t doing so? and if you’re not planning to say anything at
all, can you please tell me what you think about it, just for my own
info?”Would you please give me your feedback on this, with enough
thoughtful detail to hopefully make me/Susan fully informed (a para
should be enough).
Thanks, Peck
On Aug 1, 2006, Briffa replied (728. 1154484340.txt) with a comment that would not be out of place at Climate Audit (one of the interesting things about Climategate letters is how often they express views in private that are expressed publicly at CA). Briffa:
Peck,
The TAR was, in my opinion, wrong to say anything about the precedence (or lack thereof) of the warmth of the individual year 1998. The reason is that all reconstructions have very wide uncertainty ranges bracketing individual-year estimates of part temperature.Given this, it is hard to dismiss the possibility that individual years in the past did exceed the measured 1998 value. These errors on the individual years are so wide as to make any comparison with the 1998 measured value very problematic, especially when you consider that most reconstructions do not include it in their calibration range (curtailed predictor network in recent times) and the usual estimates of uncertainty calculated from calibration (or verification) residual variances would not provide a good estimate of the likely error associated with it even if data did exist.
The Guardian’s Strange Climategate Coverage Continues…
Feb 10th
[Editor's Note: The Guardian continues its sudden outburst of coverage of Climategate with an analysis that it is calling a "definitive account of the controversy" because it will allow users to annotate the manuscript in what it is calling "a form of peer review." Of course, the author is keen to let the readers know that The Guardian has already made up its mind:]
Even if all the work of CRU were revealed as entirely phoney, which is far from being true, it would not demonstrate climate change was a hoax, or even much alter predictions of future climate.
This Day in Climategate History – February 9, 2004
Feb 9th
February 9, 2004: email 1076336623
Steve McIntyre has been trying to get raw data, and writes to Australian Antarctic scientist Tas van Ommen:
Dear Dr van Ommen,
Some time ago I inquired as to the availability of the … data set which was used in the paper of Mann and Jones in 2003. Is this the same data as was used in Jones and coworkers in 1998 (in the journal The Holocene)? Do you plan to make available a public archive of this data? Otherwise, I would appreciate an email copy of the data.
Thanks for your consideration.
Stephen McIntyre.
Van Ommen forwards the ensuing email exchange to Phil Jones:
What you will find below is … an email interchange between Steve McIntyre and myself. He has been asking for Antarctic data for a while (since your Geophysical Research Letters paper came out) and to my chagrin; I have put him off once already, for reasons I spell out below. …
Anyway, I am aware of McIntyre’s controversial history and am trying to handle things in a non-inflammatory way. He seems not to be troubling me over my own delay, but has asked for data that was used in your Holocene paper of 1998. For this, I have referred him to you. I expect he wants to replicate your calculations, and so he should use the identical data set, and I give you permission to pass on whatever it was I gave you for that work—with the caveat that it is representative of where the Antarctic proxy record was in 1997, not 2004. I leave it to you to decide how to deal with this—you may prefer to ignore the issue, and I would understand.
Van Ommen clearly understands that it is crucial for McIntyre to be given the identical data set in order to replicate Jones’s calculations—but then goes on to condone what he guesses will be Jones’s likely response: to ignore the issue completely.
Phil Jones replies, copying in Mike Mann:
Thanks for the email. Steve McIntyre hasn’t contacted me directly about the Antarctic data (yet), nor about any of the data used in the 1998 Holocene paper or the 2003 Geophysical Research Letters one with Mike. I suspect (hope) that he won’t. I had some emails with him a few years ago when he wanted to get all the station temperature data we use here in Climatic Research Unit. At that time, I hid behind the fact that some of the data had been received from individuals and not directly from Met(eorological) Services through the Global Telecommunications Service (GTS) or through the Global Climate Observing System.
We here start to learn about the tricks that Jones and colleagues have used to thwart attempts to get access to the data that their published claims are based on: to “hide behind”, in Jones’s words. In this case, Jones is trying to argue that data provided by individuals does not need to be provided for independent scrutiny—yet the mathematical results obtained from that very data can be published in leading journals, which then makes it eligible to be used support their statements in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Reports!
He continues:
Emails have also been sent to some other paleoclimatology people asking for data sets used in 1998 or 2003. Keith Briffa here got a request, for example. Here, they have also been in contact with some of Keith’s Russian contacts. All seem to relate to trying to get data that we’ve used. In the Russian case, issues relate to the Russian (Rashit Hantemirov) having a paper out with the same data that Keith used …. The data are different for two reasons. One reason is that Keith used (a mathematical method on the data); and, secondly, Rashit has added some data since Keith got the data a couple of years ago.
Jones is here giving yet more reasons why the original data should be made available. So what will he do?
I’ll just sit tight here and do nothing. Mike will likely do the same, but we’ll expect another publication in the nearish future.
Detectives question climate change scientist over email leaks
Feb 5th
The Guardian, February 4 2010
A scientist at the University of East Anglia has been questioned by detectives investigating how controversial emails were leaked from the campus’s climate research unit.
Norfolk police have interviewed and taken a formal statement from Paul Dennis, 54, another climate researcher who heads an adjacent laboratory.
The leaked emails from the head of the unit, Professor Phil Jones, surfaced just before the Copenhagen conference in December and caused a furore because they suggested that data which did not support theories of global warming was being deliberately withheld. Dennis denies leaking the material. But it is understood that his links with climate change sceptic bloggers in North America drew him to the attention of the investigating team, and have exposed rifts within the university’s environmental science faculty.
Dennis refused to sign a petition in support of Jones when the scandal broke. He told friends he was one of several staff unwilling to put their names to the Met Office-inspired statement in support of the global warming camp, because “science isn’t done by consensus”.
University sources say the head of department, Professor Jacquie Burgess, received a letter from Dennis at the height of the email uproar, calling for more open release of data. He appears to have disapproved of the way Jones resisted FoI requests.
Dennis’s own research, which dates fluctuating temperatures in ice cores stretching back thousands of years, does not support the more catastrophic current predictions of runaway global warming.
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