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To: Eric who wrote (14251)	11/25/2009 9:25:22 AM
From: Peter Dierks	Respond to of 86356

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. Financial Post Myron Ebell is the director of Global Warming and International Environmental Policy at the Competitive Enterprise Institute. network.nationalpost.com H/T: whitepine