Reply #84: some light reading for you

[MH1]

if you are interested:

http://enviroknow.com/2009/12/10/pew-center-on-global-climate-change-releases-swifthack-climategate-background-document/


excerpts (emphasis mine):

In an email dated Nov. 12, 1999, Prof. Phil Jones stated that he had used a “trick” to “hide the decline.” The email does not say what decline he was talking about, so it has been widely misreported that he was hiding a decline in temperatures. Those reports are not correct, nor is it accurate to say that he was actually hiding data, even though he chose the word. The word “trick” was used as it is in common parlance to mean a clever solution to a problem (e.g., “I know a trick to get that stain off your shirt.”). The decline he said he was hiding referred to one series of high‐latitude tree ring data from 1960 to 1994 that did not follow measured temperatures at the same locations, even though they had followed measured temperatures for about a century before 1960. That set of tree ring data incorrectly implied a downward temperature trend after 1960. It cannot be said that Jones was literally hiding this fact because two years before he wrote this email he was a co‐author on the first paper to document this “divergence” issue. That paper, published in Nature in February of 1998, concluded publicly that these post‐1960 tree ring data produce inaccurate temperature estimates (http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v391/n6668/full/ 391678a0.html). Hence, “hiding” this decline simply meant following the advice that Jones and colleagues had since already aired in the peer‐reviewed literature two years earlier. Many more papers havebeen published on the same topic.

The email was discussing a presentation, not a formal paper. If you've ever had to put together a presentation where you struggle to convey a lot of information effectively in a short time, to people who might not all share a certain level of background knowledge, then you are grateful for "tricks" you've learned from others to get your message across.