CRU’s climate ‘tricks’ - Is this how ‘tip-top’ scientists talk?
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"tunderbar" <tdco...@gmail.com> wrote in message
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CRU�s climate �tricks�
Posted: November 23, 2009, 8:19 PM by NP Editor
Climate change
Is this how �tip-top� scientists talk?
By Myron Ebell
I
n the case of the apparently scandalous leaked e-mails from the
Climatic Research Unit in England, it�s all a matter of getting the
context right. That�s what Prof. Michael E Mann, the fabricator of the
celebrated hockey stick graph, told the Washington Post recently �
that skeptics �are taking these words totally out of context to make
something trivial appear nefarious.�
Let�s look at the context of a couple of these e-mails. Here�s one
that looks pretty bad until you understand the context:
From: Ben Santer To: P.Jones, Oct 9, 2009. Subject: Re: CEI formal
petition to derail EPA GHG endangerment finding with charge that
destruction of CRU raw data undermines integrity of global temperature
record: �Next time I see Pat Michaels at a scientific meeting, I�ll be
tempted to beat the crap out of him. Very tempted.�
Now let�s put that in context. Dr. Ben Santer is a researcher at the
Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California. In the
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change�s Second Assessment Report
(1995), he was the lead author of a chapter and cleverly cut off the
early and later years of a dataset, so that the resulting graph would
show that global temperatures were only going in one direction in
recent years�rapidly upwards. In fact, temperatures were just as high
in earlier years and had declined in the most recent years, but that
data at both ends was cleverly deleted. This made the graph much
easier to understand correctly. So the first bit of context is that
Dr. Santer is an outstanding scientist of fine and upstanding
character.
The next bit of context is that CEI � the Competitive Enterprise
Institute (which is where I work) � had filed a petition with the
Environmental Protection Agency to reopen a regulatory decision on the
basis of an affidavit by Dr. Patrick Michaels of the Cato Institute.
Michaels explained that it had recently been revealed that Prof. Phil
Jones, director of the CRU, had destroyed much of the original raw
data he used to compile the global mean temperature record. EPA relied
on the CRU global temperature record, but the lack of underlying data
means that the CRU record cannot be analyzed or reproduced. That means
that EPA must take Prof. Jones�s work on trust, which of course is
standard operating procedure in all good climate research. Dr.
Michaels is clearly just being disagreeable. Everyone knows that we
can trust Prof. Jones�s honesty and utter scientific competence.
Now, what is Dr. Santer writing in this e-mail to Prof. Jones? Clearly
this is the sort of high level scientific communication that ordinary
people often can�t understand or de-code. It contains the kind of
innocent remark that tip-top scientists are always making. And you can
see that Dr. Santer is a real wit. I bet Prof. Jones couldn�t stop
laughing. The phrase �beat the crap out of him� is a common pleasantry
among this tip-top scientific crowd.
Here�s another e-mail where the appearance looks bad. When Prof. Phil
Jones at CRU tells Ray, Mike and Malcolm of hockey-stick fame that he
�just completed Mike�s Nature trick of adding in the real temps ... to
hide the decline� we should quickly put that in context before anyone
draws the wrong conclusions.
For people who don�t know any better, this looks like Jones is saying
that he has used a �trick� that he got from Prof. Michael Mann in
order to �hide the decline.� First of all, we know that Prof. Jones of
Pennsylvania State University is a man of high integrity, so he would
never do anything dishonest, sneaky, or duplicitous. Second, �trick�
is a technical term often employed by the cream of climate scientists.
It simply means employing a clever method to accomplish some technical
goal (in this case, �to hide the decline�). Anyone can see that
�trick� is a much shorter and more elegant way to say that. And you�ve
got to admire the verbal facility of these tip-top scientists. They
are as articulate and literate as they are scientifically tip-top.
What is the clever method that Prof. Jones learned from Prof. Mann? I
think he is referring to the way Prof. Mann constructed his celebrated
hockey stick graph. His proxy records showed flat temperatures for the
past 1,000 years, including the past century. But everyone knows that
temperatures have gone up rapidly in the past few decades. That�s what
the surface temperature record compiled by Prof. Jones at CRU shows.
And everyone knows that Prof. Jones�s temperature record is
irreproachable, even though he destroyed the raw data. So what Prof.
Mann did was splice the last few decades of surface temperature
records onto his proxy record. Voila! � the hockey stick. What Prof.
Mann did was simply make sure that ordinary people weren�t misled by
the proxy data.
What does Prof. Jones mean, then, by �to hide the decline�? I�m not
sure, but I expect he�s just doing what Prof. Mann did. He�s got some
obviously misleading data, which he doesn�t want people to see so they
won�t get confused and draw the wrong conclusion. So he�s hiding it
for our own good.
Context is everything. And you�ve got to hand it to Prof. Michael E.
Mann. He sure knows his context. Pennsylvania State University can be
just as proud of him as the University of East Anglia undoubtedly is
of their Climatic Research Unit and its head, Prof. Phil Jones.
Read more:
http://network.nationalpost.com/np/blogs/fpcomment/archive/2009/11/23/cru-s-climate-tricks.aspx#ixzz0XuOTCEZ0
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