The emails show the concensus wasn't actually so strong even with all the Hockey Team members. Furthermore, the knowledge fraud was taking place was widely known:
Climategate: how the conspirators gagged on their deceptions
Permalink Andrew Bolt Blog
Andrew Bolt
Sunday, December 06, 2009 at 03:42pm
I’ve wondered whether Climategate scientist Tom Wigley, an Australian, finally choked on all the fraud, fiddling and coverups he was witnessing from fellow members of his Climategate cabal.
Steven Hayward points out that many other Climategate scientists privately had trouble swallowing the practices of their colleagues:
In 1998 three scientists from American universities--Michael Mann, Raymond Bradley, and Malcolm Hughes--unveiled in Nature magazine what was regarded as a signal breakthrough in paleoclimatology--the now notorious “hockey stick” temperature reconstruction (picture a flat “handle” extending from the year 1000 to roughly 1900, and a sharply upsloping “blade” from 1900 to 2000). Their paper purported to prove that current global temperatures are the highest in the last thousand years by a large margin--far outside the range of natural variability. The medieval warm period and the little ice age both disappeared. The hockey stick chart was used prominently in the 2001 IPCC report as “smoking gun” proof of human-caused global warming. Mann and his coauthors concluded that “the 1990s are likely the warmest decade, and 1998 the warmest year, in at least a millennium.”
Case closed? Hardly. The CRU emails reveal internal doubts about this entire enterprise both before and after the hockey stick made its debut. In a 1996 email to a large number of scientists in the CRU circle, Tom Wigley, a top climatologist working at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Colorado, cautioned: “I support the continued collection of such data, but I am disturbed by how some people in the paleo community try to oversell their product.” Mann and his colleagues made use of some of the CRU data, but some of the CRU scientists weren’t comfortable with the way Mann represented it and also seemed to find Mann more than a bit insufferable.
CRU scientist Keith Briffa ... emailed Edward Cook of Columbia University: “I am sick to death of Mann stating his reconstruction represents the tropical area just because it contains a few (poorly temperature representative) tropical series,” adding that he was tired of “the increasing trend of self-opinionated verbiage [Mann] has produced over the last few years .??.??. and (better say no more).”
Cook replied: “I agree with you. We both know the probable flaws in Mike’s recon[struction], particularly as it relates to the tropical stuff. ...”
In yet another revealing email, Cook told Briffa: “Of course [Bradley] and other members of the MBH [Mann, Bradley, Hughes] camp have a fundamental dislike for the very concept of the MWP, so I tend to view their evaluations as starting out from a somewhat biased perspective...”
Even as the IPCC was picking up Mann’s hockey stick with enthusiasm, Briffa sent Mann a note of caution about “the possibility of expressing an impression of more consensus than might actually exist. I suppose the earlier talk implying that we should not ‘muddy the waters’ by including contradictory evidence worried me. IPCC is supposed to represent consensus but also areas of uncertainty in the evidence.” Briffa had previously dissented from the hockey stick reconstruction in a 1999 email to Mann and Phil Jones: “I believe that the recent warmth was probably matched about 1000 years ago.”
Even Malcolm Hughes, one of the original hockey stick coauthors, privately expressed reservations about overreliance on their invention, writing to Cook, Mann and others in 2002:
All of our attempts, so far, to estimate hemisphere-scale temperatures for the period around 1000 years ago are based on far fewer data than any of us would like. None of the datasets used so far has anything like the geographical distribution that experience with recent centuries indicates we need, and no one has yet found a convincing way of validating the lower-frequency components of them against independent data....
Mann didn’t react well to these hesitations from his colleagues. Even Ray Bradley, a coauthor of the hockey stick article, felt compelled to send a message to Briffa after one of Mann’s self-serving emails with the single line: “Excuse me while I puke.”
Why did so few of these scientists speak publiicly of what they were observing - the fudging, the falsehoods, the bias, the exaggerations, the refusal to admit error and the tribal mindset, so fatal to dispassionate science?
Why did they allow the world to spend countless billions on warming policies built on such “science” and such deep uncertainties?
blogs.news.com.au
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Just two months ago Wigley wrote to Phil Jones, CRU head, to say that sceptic Steve McIntyre was actually right, CRU deputy director Keith Briffa had made an extraordinary “mess” of tree ring data which he’d claimed showed the world hadn’t been hotter. Wigley also wondered why Briffa had chosen just 12 trees in Yamal to show modern warming, and failed to include a much larger sample which would have shown cooling instead. He also warned against the CRU’s hiding of data:
Date: Mon, 05 Oct 2009 03:57:57 -0600
From: Tom Wigley
To: Phil Jones Subject: Re: [geo] Re: CCNet: A Scientific Scandal Unfolds…
139.222.131.184
Phil,
It is distressing to read that American Stinker item. But Keith does seem to have got himself into a mess. As I pointed out in emails, Yamal is insignificant....
But, more generally, (even if it *is* irrelevant) how does Keith explain the McIntyre plot that compares Yamal-12 with Yamal-all? And how does he explain the apparent “selection” of the less well-replicated chronology rather that the later (better replicated) chronology?
Of course, I don’t know how often Yamal-12 has really been used in recent, post-1995, work. I suspect from what you say it is much less often that M&M [McIntyre and fellow sceptic Professor Ross McKitrick] say—but where did they get their information? I presume they went thru papers to see if Yamal was cited, a pretty foolproof method if you ask me. Perhaps these things can be explained clearly and concisely—but I am not sure Keith is able to do this as he is too close to the issue and probably quite pissed of. And the issue of with-holding data is still a hot potato, one that affects both you and Keith (and Mann). Yes, there are reasons—but many *good* scientists appear to be unsympathetic to these. The trouble here is that with-holding data looks like hiding something,
and hiding means (in some eyes) that it is bogus science that is being hidden.
I think Keith needs to be very, very careful in how he handles this.
I’d be willing to check over anything he puts together.
Tom.
EVIDENCE: “The Figure you sent is very deceptive”
Two months ago Wigley rebuked Climategate’s Michael “Hockey Stick” Mann for sending a deceptive graph with a “fluke” result to back up Wigley’s contention that the recent cooling was still consistent with overall warming. He also claimed the IPCC and warmist scientists had made too many “dishonest presentations”.
> On Oct 14, 2009, at 5:57 PM, Tom Wigley wrote:
> > Mike,
> >
> > The Figure you sent is very deceptive. As an example, historical runs with PCM look as though they match observations—but the match is a fluke. PCM has no indirect aerosol forcing and a low climate sensitivity—compensating errors. In my (perhaps too harsh) view, there have been a number of dishonest presentations of model results by individual authors and by IPCC. This is why I still use results from MAGICC to compare with observed temperatures. At least here I can assess how sensitive matches are to sensitivity and forcing assumptions/uncertainties.
> >
> > Tom.
> >
> > +++++++++++++++++++
> >
> > Michael Mann wrote:
> > > thanks Tom,
> > > I’ve taken the liberty of attaching a figure that Gavin put > > > together the other day (its an update from a similar figure he > > > prepared for an earlier RealClimate post. see:
> > > realclimate.org… It is indeed worth a thousand words, and drives home Tom’s point below. We’re planning on doing a post on this shortly, but would be nice to see the Sep. HadCRU numbers first,
> > > mike
> > > On Oct 14, 2009, at 3:01 AM, Tom Wigley wrote:
> > > > Dear all, > > > > At the risk of overload, here are some notes of mine on the > > > > recent
> > > > lack of warming. I look at this in two ways. The first is to > > > > look at > > > > the difference between the observed and expected anthropogenic > > > > trend relative to the pdf for unforced variability. The second
> > > > is to remove ENSO, volcanoes and TSI variations from the > > > > observed data.
> > > > Both methods show that what we are seeing is not unusual. The > > > > second > > > > method leaves a significant warming over the past decade.
> > > > These sums complement Kevin’s energy work.
> > > > Kevin says ... “The fact is that we can’t account for the lack > > > > of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can’t”. I > > > > do not > > > > agree with this.
> > > > Tom.
EVIDENCE: “asking for trouble” on the Wang case.
One of the biggest problems with calculating temperature trends over the past century is how much to allow for the fact that measurements in our fast-growing concrete jungles will suffer from the “urban heat island” effect of all those extra machines and concrete. How much of the warming until 2001 must be discounted as a result?
(The following draws from this post by Counting Cats in Zanzibar and from Watts Up With That’s summary.)
The IPCC’s 2007 report made an allowance that drew heavily on a 1990 paper by Phil Jones that dismissed the UHI effect as largely trivial. That in turn drew heavily on a paper by Professor Wang Wei-Chyung of Albany, State University of New York, which presented data from China which both Wang and Jones claimed came from stations that had “few, if any, changes in instrumentation, location or observation times”, and so could be relied upon.
Mathematician Doug Keenan and others obtained the original Wang data and used it to track down the Chinese weather stations. They found that 49 of the 84 stations used actually had no records of station location, eight had inconsistent histories, 18 had been moved a considerable distance, and only seven were known not to have been relocated. One station had five different locations in 30 years as far as 41 km apart.
Wang seemed to have lied. His data was essentially worthless, and Jones’ (and the IPCC’s) claim that the Urban Heat Island effect was trivial now seemed unsupported by solid evidence.
Neither Jones nor Wang replied to Keenan’s request for an explanation and retraction. When Benny Peiser’s sceptic-friendly journal Energy and Environment said it would detail the evidence, Climategate scientist Kevin Trenberth, an IPCC lead author, tried deliberately to mislead it with the warmists typical smears, later confiding in a leaked email:
(1177158252.txt):
So my feeble suggestion is to indeed cast aspersions on their motives and throw in some counter rhetoric. Labeling them as lazy with nothng better to do seems like a good thing to do.
Amazing to see the head of NCAR, Trenberth, who privately said “The fact is that we can’t account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can’t”, acting to prevent the uncovering of a fraud by alarmist researcher, Wang. The frauds at the top of the climategate conspiracy are thoroughly dishonest. NCAR is funded by the NSF and its in a position to control most of the climate research in the US. And now we know its headed by a dishonest fraud-friendly bastard.
In August last year Wang was cleared of fraud by his university’s inquiry into the allegations, but the inquiry was held in secret and did not allow Keenan to participate, in violation of the university’s own rules. Nor would it release its report. It was now clear that climate scientists were working as a clique, refusing to release data or confront error - if not outright fraud.
Now to Wigley’s emails. He had been the director of CRU at the time, and knew the charges against Wang were actually true, and that the failure to answer and address them was wrong. He hints to Jones that Jones could have known the data was wrong, too, and participated in a coverup. He accuses the university of “asking for trouble” with its seeming coverup, too..
Tom Wigley to Phil Jones:
(1188557698.txt)
Phil,
Seems to me that Keenan has a valid point. The statements in the papers that he quotes seem to be incorrect statements, and that someone (WCW [Wang] at the very least) must have known at the time that they were incorrect.
Whether or not this makes a difference is not the issue here.
Tom.
Again from Tom Wigley to Phil Jones, just seven months ago:
(1241415427.txt)
Date: Mon, 04 May 2009
Phil,
Do you know where this stands? The key things from the Peiser items are …
“Wang had been claiming the existence of such exonerating documents for nearly a year, but he has not been able to produce them. Additionally, there was a report published in 1991 (with a second version in 1997) explicitly stating that no such documents exist. Moreover, the report was published as part of the Department of Energy Carbon Dioxide Research Program, and Wang was the Chief Scientist of that program.”
and
“Wang had a co-worker in Britain. In Britain, the Freedom of Information Act requires that data from publicly-funded research be made available.
I was able to get the data by requiring Wang’s co-worker to release it, under British law. It was only then that I was able to confirm that Wang had committed fraud.”
You are the co-worker, so you must have done something like provide Keenan with the DOE report that shows that there are no station records for 49 of the 84 stations. I presume Keenan therefore thinks that it was not possible to select stations on the basis of …
“… station histories: selected stations have relatively few, if any, changes in instrumentation, location, or observation times”
[THIS IS ITEM “X"]
Of course, if the only stations used were ones from the 35 stations that *did* have station histories, then all could be OK. However, if some of the stations used were from the remaining 49, then the above selection method could not have been applied (but see below) — unless there are other “hard copy” station history data not in the DOE report (but in China) that were used. From what Wang has said, if what he says is true, the second possibility appears to be the case.
What is the answer here?
The next puzzle is why Wei-Chyung didn’t make the hard copy information available. Either it does not exist, or he thought it was too much trouble to access and copy. My guess is that it does not exist — if it did then why was it not in the DOE report? In support of this, it seems that there are other papers from 1991 and 1997 that show that the datado not exist. What are these papers? Do they really show this?
Now my views. (1) I have always thought W-C W was a rather sloppy scientist. I therefore would not be surprised if he screwed up here. But ITEM X is in both the W-C W and Jones et al. papers — so where does it come from first? Were you taking W-C W on trust?
(2) It also seems to me that the University at Albany has screwed up. To accept a complaint from Keenan and not refer directly to the complaint and the complainant in its report really is asking for trouble.
(3) At the very start it seems this could have been easily dispatched.
ITEM X really should have been …
“Where possible, stations were chosen on the basis of station histories and/or local knowledge: selected stations have relatively few, if any, changes in instrumentation, location, or observation times”
Of course the real get out is the final “or”. A station could be selected if either it had relatively few “changes in instrumentation”
OR “changes in location” OR “changes in observation times”. Not all three, simply any one of the three. One could argue about the science here — it would be better to have all three — but this is not what the statement says.
Why, why, why did you and W-C W not simply say this right at the start?
Perhaps it’s not too late?
—–
I realise that Keenan is just a trouble maker and out to waste time, so I apologize for continuing to waste your time on this, Phil. However, I *am* concerned because all this happened under my watch as Director of CRU and, although this is unlikely, the buck eventually should stop with me.”
When did Tom Wigley finally choke on all that deceit? And if he didn’t, why the hell not?
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