Those CRU emails in full

Anyone who cares has found them by now so I won’t trouble you with all the details. James “Gonad Watcher” Annan is fulfilling, with commendable neutrality, the role of arbitrator to which I appointed him, and I don’t think there is much more I need to say. That won’t stop me from saying it, of course. Other people who have said sensible things include Denial Depot, Newtongate, CM and of course RC (apologies if you’re not on the list; oh all right Eli too since he says he needs the traffic). Indeed pretty well everyone with any sense seems to have got the right answer by now.

So I’ll deal with the interesting bit, which is obviously me. I appear in 5 emails; one only incidentally, the rest about an interesting search for the origins of the first IPCC report fig 7.1.c. This is a fun topic; there is even a wiki page about it [[MWP and LIA in IPCC reports]] (yes, of course, I wrote most of it). If you’re not familiar with that issue, go off and read the wiki page. So: at the time of the first report, there wasn’t a good reconstruction of the last 1kyr, and they wanted one, so they found one from somewhere. Unlike just about everything else in that report, the figure is unsourced. If, nowadays, IPCC were to try to include a completely unsourced 1kyr reconstruction they’d get ripped to shreds. However, since that old graph shows a warm MWP plenty of septics nowadays are very keen to throw away all the peer-reviewed stuff we have and go back to this sourceless pic (e.g. [1]). It would be funny if it wasn’t so stupid. Oddly enough, although the text of that email is really jolly exciting – we still don’t have an adequat explanation as to how Jack “cooked up” that figure – I do not believe it was purely out of thin air – no-one seems interested in putting it about. As for Ah, you mean A9(d) (I thought you meant A9(a) for a bit). Yes, that looks pretty similar to IPCC 1990. Though not identical – the scaling is different, but the timing is similar. – well, it is strong stuff.

I was going to write up the wiki-wars on this topic; but its past 10 now so I won’t. Write an encouraging comment and I might. In the meantime, have a look at (and maybe contribute to) [[Climatic Research Unit e-mail hacking incident]].

Also, I recommned looking up “McLean”.

Late news: you thought this couldn’t get any stupider? It has. Reminds me of the good old days in BAS, where the acid test of any rumoured management decision was always “is this really stupid enough to be true?”. Usually it was 😦

[Update: apart from the gonads, which I’ve corrected, I feel obliged to point you towards the comment policy. I was a little late to the party with this post, deliberately so, and while *I*’m allowed to say things that have already been said before I reserve the right to delete silly comments that merely repeat what has been said already. Oh, and did I forget Smoking guns in the CRU stolen e-mails: A real tale of real ethics in science

Update: example of abuse of 7.1.c added

Update: Melanie Phillips is a dull bozo. But you knew that already. “Thanks” Tom

Update: Science historian [Spencer Weart] reacts to hacked climate e-mails is very good -W]