CRU Hackery Update; Dr. Jones Explains his "Hide the Decline" Email

It was getting a little hot in the other comments (get it? getting hot? thanks, I'm here all week), so I'm putting this here.

TGIF Edition (PDF) spoke with Dr. Phil Jones, the researcher who wrote about attempting to fit data to "hide the decline." Here's his explanation:

“In the sense that they’re talking about two different things here. They’re talking about the instrumental data which is unaltered – but they’re talking about proxy data going further back in time, a thousand years, and it’s just about how you add on the last few years, because when you get proxy data you sample things like tree rings and ice cores, and they don’t always have the last few years. So one way is to add on the instrumental data for the last few years.”

Jones told TGIF he had no idea what me meant by using the words “hide the decline”.

“That was an email from ten years ago. Can you remember the exact context of what you wrote ten years ago?”

Uh huh. Speculate, doctor. What do you think you meant when you wrote that you had "just completed Mike’s Nature trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years (ie from 1981 onwards) amd [sic] from 1961 for Keith’s to hide the decline." What decline could you possibly be talking about?

Keep in mind that when Jones wrote that in 1999 we hadn't had a decade of global cooling yet. So perhaps he was obscuring a decline in the warming trend?

posted by Gabriel Malor at 12:43 PM

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