On 03/12/2011 23:31, Terry Fields wrote:

Roger Chapman wrote:

Do you remember the huge row engineered by the deniers last year based
on a leaked e-mail about a trick used to conclude a temperature
sequence. The deniers take of course was that this was prima facie
evidence that the climate scientists were falsifying the data to delude
the public when the reality was that the secondary data that that
particular sequence related to (which was I think tree ring data but
could have been something else) didn't match the actual temperatures
known to have been correct. So which to believe - direct temperature
measurement or derived temperatures? No contest really although they
would have been wiser to admit earlier that there was a particular
problem with the tree ring data.

I can't let that comment stand with making a few observations.

IIRC, the item concerned contained information in the form of a graph,
showing several sources of information relating to temperature
changes. All but one showed a rise. That one caused a flurry of
emails, of which spoke about hiding the decline, and someone's Nature
trick.

The Nature trick was to terminate that graphical line early, so it
could be followed to peak, but the subsequent fall was missed off,
neatly hiding the decline.

That is not science, that is theatre.

In science one gathers data. Not some of the data, but all the data
that can be gathered. And that's what has to be dealt with. That the
tree-ring data didn't fit with the rest, is an occurrence that has to
be accounted for, not merely missed off because it didn't 'fit'. It
was a disgraceful episode.

wikipedia

"Most of the emails concerned technical and mundane aspects of climate
research, such as data analysis and details of scientific
conferences.[30] The Guardian's analysis of the emails suggests that the
hacker had filtered them. Four scientists were targeted and a
concordance plot shows that the words "data", "climate", "paper",
"research", "temperature" and "model" were predominant.[21] The
controversy has thus focused on a small number of emails.[30] Skeptic
websites picked out particular phrases, including one in which Kevin
Trenberth stated, "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".[20] This was
actually part of a discussion on the need for better monitoring of
energy flows involved in short-term climate variability,[31] but was
grossly mischaracterised by critics.[32][33]

Many commentators quoted one email referring to "Mike's Nature trick"
which Jones used in a 1999 graph for the World Meteorological
Organization, to deal with the well-discussed tree ring divergence
problem "to hide the decline" that a particular proxy showed for modern
temperatures after 1950, when measured temperatures were rising. These
two phrases from the emails were also taken out of context by climate
change sceptics including US Senator Jim Inhofe and former Governor of
Alaska Sarah Palin as though they referred to a decline in measured
global temperatures, even though they were written when temperatures
were at a record high.[33] John Tierney, writing in the New York Times
in November 2009, said that the claims by sceptics of "hoax" or "fraud"
were incorrect, but the graph on the cover of a report for policy makers
and journalists did not show these non-experts where proxy measurements
changed to measured temperatures.[34] The final analyses from various
subsequent inquiries concluded that in this context 'trick' was normal
scientific or mathematical jargon for a neat way of handling data, in
this case a statistical method used to bring two or more different kinds
of data sets together in a legitimate fashion.[35][36] The EPA notes
that in fact, the evidence shows that the research community was fully
aware of these issues and was not hiding or concealing them."

--
Roger Chapman