Confidential E-Mails Uncovered: AGW May Of Been Faked / Exagerated

[Sqrl]

Rath said:

@Sqrl.

Umm, from what I can see is that he is trying to reconcile the divergence between theoretical and actual temperatures. The actual temperature on the instrumental record was pointing upwards, the model was pointing downwards. He changed the model to match the actual temperatures.

It's not a scandalous "We must have it pointing upwards to fool the public", it's a sensible "we must have it pointing upwards as that is what the smoothed instrumental record shows".

 

Edit: Actually reconcile historical temperatures taken from other sources with instrumental temperatures I think.

It is not a question of what he is trying to do, nobody is debating that...it is whether how he went about it is legitimate.  And the issue is that he is mixing his apples and oranges so to speak.  As much as I hate appeals to authority I am fairly sure you won't take my word for it so here:

 

Back in December 2004 John Finn asked about “the divergence” in Myth vs. Fact Regarding the “Hockey Stick” -thread of RealClimate.org.

 

Whatever the reason for the divergence, it would seem to suggest that the practice of grafting the thermometer record onto a proxy temperature record – as I believe was done in the case of the ‘hockey stick’ – is dubious to say the least.

 

 

WUWT was able to actually dig up a comment on the issue from the guy who invented the "trick". He too thinks this useage was illegitimate:

 

"No researchers in this field have ever, to our knowledge, “grafted the thermometer record onto” any reconstrution. It is somewhat disappointing to find this specious claim (which we usually find originating from industry-funded climate disinformation websites) appearing in this forum.

 

This is not just skeptics pointing this e-mail saying "gotcha"....several pro-AGW scientists have also weighed in on the side of it being an illegitimate useage of the technique.  Which is why I added the quote to my discussion of it about how the problem is not that he called it a "trick" but that he abuses the trick to mislead people.

edit: oh and just to clarify, he was not adjusting a "model".  He was adjusting a reconstruction from proxy data...proxy data for which he had more data for but chose to supplement it with this instrument data.  This is of course another problem because you cannot simply do that "just because"...you have to explain why you are doing it..AFAIK he never has other than so he can have it match.  But the goal of science is not to produce matching data sets...in fact any scientificly minded individual would find this divergence exciting as a potential opportunity to find a previously unknown mechanism...his responce was to just poor existing data over it and make it dissappear rather than explain it. I'm sorry but I don't know how anyone can defend that as legitimate science....it simply is not....