The Great Climate Change Swindle II
The Climate of Confusion
Dear Emanuel,
I suspect that, given the Fascist censorship, you’ll have difficulty getting hold of the infamous climategate emails so I’ve decided to do a selection on your behalf. This is all taken from “The Climategate Emails” by John Costella, which I’d strongly recommend you read in its entirety:
September 19, 1996
Gary Funkhouser (University of Arizona) to Keith Briffa (University of East Anglia):
I really wish I could be more positive about the ... material, but I swear I pulled every trick out of my sleeve trying to milk something out of that.... I don’t think it’d be productive to try and juggle the chronology statistics any more than I already have—they just are what they are ... I think I’ll have to look for an option where I can let this little story go as it is.
November 22, 1996
Geoff Jenkins (head of climate change prediction at the Hadley Centre for Climate Prediction and Research, part of the United Kingdom’s Meteorological Office) to Phil Jones (who became director of the Climate Research Unit and a professor in the School of Environmental Sciences at the University of East Anglia in 1998):
Remember all the fun we had last year over 1995 global temperatures, with the early release of information (via Australia), “inventing” the December monthly value, letters to Nature, etc., etc.?
I think we should have a cunning plan about what to do this year, simply to avoid a lot of wasted time.
September 22, 1999
Keith Briffa to Mike Mann (director of the Center for Science, Sustainability & the Media at the University of Pennsylvania), Phil Jones, Tom Karl (a Lab Chief, Senior Scientist and ultimately Director of the National Climate Centre), and Chris Folland (Research Fellow, Met Office Hadley Centre UK & Guest Professor of Climate, Univ. of Gothenburg):
I know there is pressure to present a nice tidy story as regards “apparent unprecedented warming in a thousand years or more in the temperature proxy data” but in reality, the situation is not quite so simple. We don’t have a lot of temperature proxies that come right up to today and those that do (at least a significant number of tree proxies) have some unexpected changes in response that do not match the recent warming. I do not think it wise that this issue be ignored in the chapter.
I believe that the recent warmth was probably matched about 1000 years ago.
November 16, 1999
Phil Jones to Ray Bradley, Mike Mann, Malcolm Hughes, Keith Briffa, and Tim Osborn, regarding a diagram for a World Meteorological Organization Statement:
I’ve just completed Mike’s Nature trick of adding in the real temperatures to each series for the last 20 years (i.e. from 1981 onwards) and from 1961 for Keith’s to hide the decline.
September 22, 2000
Tom Crowley (Department of Oceanography at the Texas A&M University) to Malcolm Hughes and Keith Briffa:
As I discuss in my ... paper the “anomalous” late 19th century warming also occurs in a ... tree ring record from central Colorado, the Urals record of Keith Briffa, and the east China ... temperature record of Zhu.
Alpine glaciers also started to retreat in many regions around 1850, with one-third to one-half of their full retreat occurring before the warming that commenced about 1920.
...
So, are you sure that some carbon dioxide effect is responsible for this?
May we not actually be seeing a warming?
March 2, 2001
Chick Keller (Institute of Geophysics and Planetary Physics at the University of California at San Diego) to Mike Mann, Ray Bradley, Phil Jones, Keith Briffa, Tom Crowley, Jonathan Overpeck, Tom Wigley, and Mike MacCracken:
Anyone looking at the records gets the impression that the temperature variation for many individual records or sites over the past 1000 years or so is often larger than 1° Celsius. ... And they see this as evidence that the 0.8° Celsius or so temperature rise in the 20th century is not all that special.
The community of climate scientists, however, in making averages of different proxies gets a much smaller amplitude of about 0.5° Celsius, which they say shows that reasonable combinations of effects can indeed explain this and that the 20th century warming is unique.
Thus, the impasse—one side the skeptics pointing to large temperature variations in many records around the globe, and the other side saying, “Yes, but not at the same time and so, if averaged out, is no big deal.”
But, just replying that events don’t happen at the same time (sometimes by a few decades) is the reason might not be enough. It seems to me that we must go one step further. We must address the question: what effects can generate large ... temperature variations over hundreds of years, regional though they may be (and, could these occur at different times in different regions due to shifting climate patterns)? If we can’t do this, then there might be something wrong with our rationale that the average does not vary much even though many regions see large variations. This may be the nub of the disagreement, and until we answer it, many careful scientists will decide the issue is still unsettled, and that indeed climate in the past may well have varied as much or more than in the last hundred years.