Big deal: Of the hundreds of scientists working independently around the world for countless governments, universities, and research insitutions, TWO OF THEM at ONE university in England exhanged emails that used the words "trick" and "hide" when discussing a particular research project they were working on.
Doesnt mean anything. I admit it looks bad to all the Homer Simpsons and Joe Lunchbuckets out there, but these emails were related to a specific project they were working on, this is not "Global Climate Change HQ" talking about how to falsify the global argument for Global warming.
Does anybody even know what project these guys were working on specifically, or what exactly these guys were talking about? Nope.
$1:
Phil Jones in discussing the presentation of temperature reconstructions stated that “I’ve just completed Mike’s Nature trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years (ie from 1981 onwards) and from 1961 for Keith’s to hide the decline.” The paper in question is the Mann, Bradley and Hughes (1998) Nature paper on the original multiproxy temperature reconstruction, and the ‘trick’ is just to plot the instrumental records along with reconstruction so that the context of the recent warming is clear. Scientists often use the term “trick” to refer to a “a good way to deal with a problem”, rather than something that is “secret”, and so there is nothing problematic in this at all. As for the ‘decline’, it is well known that Keith Briffa’s maximum latewood tree ring density proxy diverges from the temperature records after 1960 (this is more commonly known as the “divergence problem”–see e.g. the recent discussion in this paper) and has been discussed in the literature since Briffa et al in Nature in 1998 (Nature, 391, 678-682). Those authors have always recommend not using the post 1960 part of their reconstruction, and so while ‘hiding’ is probably a poor choice of words (since it is ‘hidden’ in plain sight), not using the data in the plot is completely appropriate, as is further research to understand why this happens.
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2009/11/the-cru-hack/comment-page-2/ Now, this is a bit technical and jargon-y and so theres a high probability that our sloping forehead friends will say "Ug..Me no understand, me ignore this!" so I'll do my best to interpret this into plain english.
The researchers in question are taking historical climate data from different collected sources (ie analysis of tree rings, ice core samples, etc) to try and estimate past temperatures and then charting the historical change in temperature on a line graph. There is a well-known issue in environmental science as a result of research from the "Keith" mentioned above, where tree-ring data is different from all the other data. Tree ring data suggests a temperature decline after 1960 while all other scientific measurements show the opposite. This is the “divergence problem" mentioned above. Scientists are hesitant to include this data when calculating the overall temperature average because they dont understand why this measure alone is so different from all the others. The explanation above suggests that the scientists aren't trying to conceal the well-publicised tree ring data, they are simply trying to factor it out of the numbers they were using in their data project, which is exactly what the scientist who found the tree ring data recommended because its not well understood. The "trick" -by which they mean the process that solves the problem- apparently is to include numbers from actual measured temperatures over the period when trying to calculate the average of calculated temperatures. The "trick" was hardly a secret, but recommended by the Mike mentioned in the email as an ideal way to solve the divergence problem as it had been publicized in the 1998 publication "Nature."
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