A baseless Mann UVa email – claims by Mann spliced and diced
Posted on May 12, 2014 by Anthony Watts
Richard S. Courtney writes in comments on the Mann and misrepresentations thread…
Anthony:
In the same week as MBH98 was published I wrote an email on the ‘ClimateSkeptics’ circulation list. That email objected to the ‘hockeystick’ graph because the graph had an overlay of ‘thermometer’ data over the plotted ‘proxy’ data. This overlay was – I said – misleading because it was an ‘apples and oranges’ comparison: of course, I was not then aware of the ‘hide the decline’ (aka “Mike’s Nature trick”) issue.
Unknown to me, somebody copied my email to Michael Mann and he replied.
‘Climategate’ revealed that email from Michael Mann and it can be read here:
http://www.ecowho.com/foia.php?file=3046.txt&search=medieval
Mann’s response consists solely of personal abuse against me and, importantly, it does not address the issue which I had raised immediately upon seeing the ‘hockeystick’ graph. Hence, I am certain that the graphical malpractice of the ‘hockeystick’ was both witting and deliberate.
I’ve reproduced the email below, the redactions were in the linked content that Courtney cites. Mann’s claims about dataset splicing are laughable, as even the Muir Russell investigation labeled it as such, as McIntyre notes:
Here are Muir Russell’s comments on the IPCC 2001 incident (of which Mann was Lead Author), which they somewhat conflated with the WMO 1999 incident of the “trick” email:
In relation to “hide the decline” we find that, given its subsequent iconic significance (not least the use of a similar figure in the TAR), the figure supplied for the WMO Report was misleading in not describing that one of the series was truncated post 1960 for the figure, and in not being clear on the fact that proxy and instrumental data were spliced together. 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.
Here is the email Courtney speaks of:
date: Tue, 18 Jul 2000 16:41:12 +010 ???
from: Phil Jones <???@uea.ac.uk>
subject: Re: Global Surface Record Must Be Wrong
to: ???@uea.ac.uk,???@uea.ac.uk
>X-Sender: ???@holocene.evsc.virginia.edu
> Date: Tue, 18 Jul 2000 10:29:15 -0400
> To: ???@lanl.gov
> From: “Michael E. Mann” <???@virginia.edu>
> Subject: Re: Global Surface Record Must Be Wrong
> Cc: ???@geo.umass.edu, ???@uea.ac.uk
>
> Chick,
>
> This guys email is intentional deceipt. Our method, as you know, doesn’t
> include any “splicing of two different datasets”-this is a myth perptuated
> by Singer and his band of hired guns, who haven’t bothered to read our
> papers or the captions of the figures they like to mis-represent…
>
> Phil Jones, Ray Bradley, and Malcolm Hughes dispelled much of the mythology
> expressed below years ago.
>
> This is intentional misrepresentation. For his sake, I hope does not go
> public w/ such comments!
>
> mike
>
>> Date: Tue, 18 Jul 2000 08:38:35 +0100 ???(BST)
>> X-Envelope-From: ???@courtney01.cix.co.uk
>> X-Sender: ???@mail.compulink.co.uk
>> To: Chick Keller <???@lanl.gov>
>> From: COURTNEY <???@courtney01.cix.co.uk>
>> Subject: Re: Global Surface Record Must Be Wrong
>> X-MIME-Autoconverted: from quoted-printable to 8bit by
> holocene.evsc.virginia.edu id DAA27832
>>
>> Dear Chick:
>>
>> Your past performance demonstrates that your recent piece to Peter Dietze is
>> unworthy of you. Smears and inuendoes are not adequate substitutes for
>> evidence and reasoned argument. You say;
>> ”As to Michael Mann’s “hocky stick” paleo-temperature graph, I realize why
>> many attack it for it puts the nail in the coffen of the argument that
>> recent natural variability is as large as what has been observed in the 20th
>> century.”
>>
>> No ! People attack the ‘hockey stick’ because it is uses an improper
>> procedure to assess inadequate data as a method to provide a desired result.
>> I have defended Mann et al. from accusations of scientific “fraud” because I
>> am willing to accept that this was done in naive stupidity, but I am not
>> willing to accept that is good science. As you say, “people like Mann,
>> Briffa, Jones, etc.” have conducted “careful work”, but doing the wrong
>> thing carefully does not make it right.
>>
>> The ‘hockey stick’ is obtained by splicing two different data sets. Similar
>> data to the earlier data set exists for up to near the present and could
>> have been spliced on, but this would not show the ‘hockey stick’ and was not
>> done.
>>
>> Also, it is not true to say, as you have;
>> ”But, it’s going to take more than rhetoric about Europe’s Little Ice Age
>> and Medieval Warming to get around the careful work of people like Mann,
>> Briffa, Jones, etc.”
>>Nobody in their right mind is going to place more trust in the proxy data of
>> ”Mann, Briffa, Jones, etc.” than in the careful – and taxed – tabulations in
>> the Doomesday Book. The Medieval Warm Period is documented from places
>> distributed around the globe, and it is not adequate to assert that it was
>> ”not global” because it did not happen everywhere at exactly the same time:
>> the claimed present day global warming is not happening everywhere at the
>> exactly the same time. Indeed, you say;
>> ”recent temperature anomalies show that, while the tropics is cooler than
>> usual due to La Niña, the rest of the world is pretty much still as warm as
>> in 1998.”
>>
>> It is historical revisionism to assert that the Little Ice Age and Medieval
>> Warming did not happen or were not globally significant. It will take much,
>> much more than analyses of sparse and debatable proxy data to achieve such a
>> dramatic overturning of all the historical and archaelogical evidence for
>> the Little Ice Age and the Medieval Warm Period. Those who wish to make
>> such assertions should explain why all the historical and archaelogical
>> evidence is wrong or – failing that – they should expect to be ridiculed.
>>
>> All the best
>>
>> Richard
>>
>>> Dear Peter,
>>>
>>> In a recent message to Tom Wigley you wrote:
>>>
>>>> ”Nowadays, what is measured is mostly quite correct. This holds for the
>>>> counts of frogs, butterflies and for the MSU measurements as well as for
>>>> the ground station readings. What is seriously flawed, are the biased
>>>> *interpretations*. So the surface record may be not wrong at all and
>>>> part of the warming is indeed anthropogenic. Wrong is only the paradigm
>>>> that ground warming is mostly caused by CO2 – and that this warming has
>>>> to show up in the lower troposphere as well. It is striking how the
>>>> ground warming grid pattern coincides with winter heating (Vincent Gray)
>>>> - if the warming was caused by CO2 it should rather be evenly
>>>> distributed over the globe, MSU-detected and only being modified by
>>>> meteorological conditions. Note that this energy caused warming only
>>>> depends on our energy demand and does hardly increase with CO2
>>>> concentration. So this warming should neither be allocated to the CO2
>>>> increment nor be misused with future CO2 projections.”
>>>
>>> I have been looking at NCDC plots of global temperature anomalis divided
>>> into three regions- tropics (20N–20S) and the rest of the
>>> globe–(20N–90N) and (20S–90S). When looked at that way, recent
>>> temperature anomalies show that, while the tropics is cooler than usual due
>>> to La Niña, the rest of the world is pretty much still as warm as in 1998.
>>> This is particularly true of northern subtropics and southern subtropical
>>> oceans. The most recent data in fact show the following: for the period
>>> March-May 2000, the northern subtropics are the warmest march-may ever, and
>>> the southern subtropics are essentially as warm as in 1998. Note that this
>>> is not in the winter for either hemisphere. Thus, it would seem to be
>>> important not to make too much of the winter-only observations.
>>>
>>> As to Michael Mann’s “hocky stick” paleo-temperature graph, I realize why
>>> many attack it for it puts the nail in the coffen of the argument that
>>> recent natural variability is as large as what has been observed in the
>>> 20th century. Gene Parker in the most recent Physics Today just pushed
>>> that point of view citing 20 year-old work as his only support. But, it’s
>>> going to take more than rhetoric about Europe’s Little Ice Age and Medieval
>>> Warming to get around the careful work of people like Mann, Briffa, Jones,
>>> etc. And more recently , Tom Crowley’s article in last week’s Science!!!
>>> Their work includes those acknowledged regional events (LIA and MWP) and
>>> still shows the 20th cent. to be anomalous. (I might add here that it also
>>> calls into question suggestions that solar variability has an additional
>>> indirect forcing amplification since that should have come out of the data.
>>> Instead most published studies show a significant solar influence but a
>>> moderate one.) And so the only way around recent thousand year paleo
>>> studies is for more comprehensive hemispheric and global studies that fill
>>> in acknowledged gaps and in addition show that climate variability is
>>> larger than recent studies show.
>>>
>>> Perhaps a more fruitful approach would be to ask what the magnitude
>>> of regional variations has been in the past 150 years. If there are no
>>> regions whose temperature variations were very far from the global average,
>>> then one could legitimately ask how clear anomalies such as the little ice
>>> age could have been sustained in the face of the larger hemispheric
>>> climate. As one example I might cite the eastern United States and perhaps
>>> a large region to the north east since 1940. It clearly has not
>>> participated in the global trend, so much so that urban heat island fans
>>> cite it as an example of how good records (the US) don’t show as much
>>> warming as bad records (the rest of the world).
>>>
>>> Regards,
>>> Charles. “Chick” F. Keller,
>>> Institute of Geophysics and Planetary Physics/University of California
>>> Mail Stop MS C-305
>>> Los Alamos National Laboratory
>>> Los Alamos, New Mexico, 87545
>>> ???@lanl.gov
>>> Phone: (505)???
>>> FAX: (505)???
>>> http://www.igpp.lanl.gov/climate.html
>>>
>>> Every thoughtful man who hopes for the creation of a contemporary culture
>>> knows that this hinges on one central problem: to find a coherent relation
>>> between science and the humanities. –Jacob Bronowski
>>>
>>>
>>
>>
>>
> _________________________________________
> Professor Michael E. Mann
> Department of Environmental Sciences, Clark Hall
> University of Virginia
> Charlottesville, VA 22903
> _________________________________________
> e-mail: ???@virginia.edu Phone: (804)??? FAX: (804)???
> http://www.evsc.virginia.edu/faculty/people/mann.html
>
>
Prof. Phil Jones
Climatic Research Unit Telephone +44 ???
School of Environmental Sciences Fax +44 ???
University of East Anglia
Norwich Email ???@uea.ac.uk
NR4 7TJ
UK
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