What a pointless article from The Guardian

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2011/nov/29/secret-message-hacked-climate-science-emails?intcmp=122

CLIMLIST the back channel communication method for teamthink

cc: REDACTED, "Phil Jones" <REDACTED>, "raymond s.bradley" <REDACTED>, REDACTED
date: Thu, 30 Oct 2003 06:22:50 -0500
from: "Michael E. Mann" <REDACTED>
subject: Re: Fwd: op ed for USA Today
to: Tim Osborn <REDACTED>

Thanks a bunch Tim,
Well, we didn't add your name because we weren't sure, but USA Today probably won't publish
it--if not we may try to distribute it.
But more importantly, as we speak, I am drafting a long description of what they done
wrong. Just over the last 24 hours I've discovered something extremely dishonest that it
appears they did. In their reconstruction based on their 'redo' of the MBH98 proxy network,
the one that shows the ridiculous warming in the early centuries, it appears that they
eliminated all of our ITRDB Western North American (and Stahle max latewood chronologies)
from our network. As you guys know, the ITRDB WNA data are fairly important to our
reconstruction. Based on Table 7.5 in their paper, if you read the fine details, it looks
like they've just eradicated the earlier data because they claim they couldn't find it on
the NGDC website--even though we all know the data are there. And more importantly, all of
those data were on our public ftp site on holocene.
So in one extremely dishonest stroke of data eradication, they removed the most important
indicators from our network fromREDACTEDand I'm pretty sure that's how they get their
spike. Would be interesting to see what cross-validation they get using *their* network
available from 1400-present. I bet we're talking REs approaching negative infinity...
So I think that is what they did! Do you guys have the paper--does anyone mind
double-checking, and assuring that I'm correct about this. If I am, this is really
scandalous, and it should be as broadcast as widely as possible. Note that they don't even
report how many proxy data were available in their network back in time, they only show the
# of reported/found proxies in the Mann et al network (apparently our data site was missing
a few of the series). This is probably intentional as well--they didn't want to show how
many series they had actually eliminated from the set. And of course, if they're using a
completely different set of proxies, then the would have to reapply the selection rules,
they can't just use the basis set that we had determined, based on application of the
selection rules to the data at hand...
So its looking increasingly dishonest, deceptive, and intentionally so. I've identified
other problems, they used an incorrect version of the the Mann et al proxy dataset that
Scott had put into excel format, so the early PC proxy series were overprinted w/ later
ones kept in the same column. And they used inconsistent CRU surface temperature datasets
and inconsistent normalization conventions to un-normalize the Mann et al EOFs, etc. And
all of this could lead to significant differences. But I think its the dropping of the key
predictors w/ barely a mention, that gives them the ADREDACTEDspike
Second opinions--am I imagining this?
Thanks,
mike
At 10:44 AM 10/30/REDACTED, Tim Osborn wrote:

At 17:45 29/10/2003, you wrote:

We need to submit within the next hour or so, so its really do-or-die time!

Mike,
was away yesterday, so I missed all the fun-and-games! If you went ahead and submitted
it with my name on anyway, then that's fine because I would have agreed had I been
here. If you dropped me in my absence, then fine too - you had enough co-signees, I'm
sure.
Going back to an earlier email when you were asking whether anyone had reviewed the E&E
piece by M&M (have I got the initials correct? have to avoid confusion with M&M sweets -
do you get them in the US? some are nuts, which seems appropriate!). Anyway, just
wanted to confirm that I did not review it.
Despite the hard and time consuming work that it evidently took you to get to the bottom
of their work's problems, I think it was essential to get this cleared up so soon. It's
important to get this information out as publicly as possible, so that nobody who wants
to push the M&M conclusions can do so while claiming ignorance of the fact that data
problems make their conclusions baseless and wrong. If you want to avoid the
climatesceptics list then perhaps one of us (or all of us?) here in CRU could circulate
a note to that list, hence the cc to Keith and Phil. Let us know. Do you ever use the
CLIMLIST mailing list? It's not generally a debating type list, but I'm sure it would
be relevant to post something there that makes clear the M&M conclusions are invalid -
as a public information service?
Cheers
Tim
Dr Timothy J Osborn
Climatic Research Unit
School of Environmental Sciences, University of East Anglia
Norwich NR4 7TJ, UK
e-mail: REDACTED
phone:REDACTED9
fax:REDACTED784
web: [1]http://www.cru.uea.ac.uk/~timo/
sunclock: [2]http://www.cru.uea.ac.uk/~timo/sunclock.htm

______________________________________________________________
REDACTED Professor Michael E. Mann
REDACTEDDepartment of Environmental Sciences, Clark Hall
REDACTED University of Virginia
REDACTED Charlottesville, VA 22903
_______________________________________________________________________
e-mail: REDACTED Phone: (434)REDACTEDFAX: (434) 982-2137
REDACTED[3]http://www.evsc.virginia.edu/faculty/people/mann.shtml

A lot of the FOIA emails were sent through a distribution email list hosted at Kentuky University called CLIMLIST http://climlist.wku.edu/join/ it reports to have archives of all mail sent through it, now that's an archive I'd love to see,

Regarding Phil Jones’ apparent inability to work with an EXCEL spreadsheet.

I noted a wry and succinct comment made by one of your correspondents – Jack Hughes – on November 18th 2010 in the wake of the original “Climategate” releases. It’s reproduced below and seems to capture both Jones’ individual limitations and the overall second-rate nature of the science of “climate science”:

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

Bishop Hill – 18/11/2010 – Raising the Temperature

Jones was a second rate academic at a second rate university.

He enjoyed the easy years when it was just another dead end subject like golf psychology and medieval textiles. They had conferences, wrote papers, wrote their crummy software. It was occupational therapy for them - on the taxpayer.

But suddenly the climate subject was needed to spearhead a new political/social movement: eco-socialism.

Jones was out of his depth. He knew he was out of his depth. His work was just not good enough to support any proposed action on any scale - especially a remodelling of everyone's way of life forever.

Climategate just brought this home to him. We know what he knows about his level of skill. He knows that we know. He's got nowhere to hide now.

Nov 18, 2010 at 8:46 AM |
Unregistered Commenter
Jack Hughes

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

Hats off to Jack Hughes for his perspicacity.

Now they are all safely in Durban can we just lock the door?

King and Porritt on R4 this morning, each trying to 'out-carbon' each other, so not much balance there, either. I would just love to hear a Beeboid ask how much climate change is really caused by man-made CO2...

Ah must be hard being a climate scientist
http://foia2011.org/index.php?id=3930

@oakwood

Nurse started off well too, talking about the scientific method and the big no-no of cherry picking data... unfortunately with the tag-team of him and Jones it was only ever going one way.

BBC: A Balanced progaramme about Balance?

No. It was a completely one-sided and primitive propaganda attempt to constantly ridicule CC scepticsm and associate it with astrology, Creationism, 2+2 = 5, etc. To think that Brian Cox and Paul Nurse are eminent 'scientists' when they remain so gullible on this subject.

Seismic shift

Richard Black in a BBC article admits that the politics of the UN climate process are undergoing something of a fundamental transformation.