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26 Dec 09

RealClimate: The CRU hack

  • Good post; many thanks for reacting so quickly. I think the enthusiasm with which many of the AGW-sceptics have jumped on this hack tells us more about the sceptics than the scientists. James Delingpole of the Telegraph, for example, is jumping up and down claiming that this may well be the greatest scandal of modern science.

Climatic Research Unit e-mail hacking incident - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

  • RealClimate characterizes the e-mail excerpt as follows:



    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 recommended 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.[35]
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