Hat tip to Geoff Chambers and Tom Nelson for alerting us to this gem hidden away on archive.org. A the beginnings of plot for a film about the Climategate emailS plus background research by Michael Kelly. It’s very long, and I’m reblogging it here so it doesn’t get lost. Dip in and enjoy.
The CRU Mails
by Michael Kelly
Like an Aristophanes satire, like Hamlet, it opens with two slaves, spear-carriers, little people. Footsoldiers of history, two researchers in a corrupt and impoverished mid-90s Russia schlep through the tundra to take core samples from trees at the behest of the bigger fish in far-off East Anglia. Stepan and Rashit don’t even have their own e-mail address and like characters in some absurdist comedy must pass jointly under the name of Tatiana M. Dedkova. Conscientious and obliging, they strike a human note all through this drama. Their talk is of mundane material concerns, the smallness of funds, the expense of helicopters, the scramble for grants. They are the ones who get their hands dirty, and their vicissitudes periodically revived my interest during the slower stretches of the tale, those otherwise devoted to abstruse details of committee work and other longueurs. ‘We also collected many wood samples from living and dead larches of various ages. But we were bited by many thousands of mosquitos especially small ones.’ They are perhaps the only likeable characters on the establishment side, apart from the exasperated and appalled IT man Harry in the separate ‘Harry_read_me’ document, and I cheered up whenever they appeared. ‘Slaves’ is horseshit, and ‘footsoldiers’ insulting, but if scientists are allowed to put a creative spin on facts, I can certainly do so. They are respected scientists: in fact, it emerges, eminent or destined to be eminent. But they talk funny and are at the beck and call of CRU, are financially dependent on them; when the film is made they will be comedy relief, played by Alexei Sayle and the dopey one out of The Fast Show.
In the early parts of the story those who are to become the bigger players are not much better off, though. The mails start in 1996 when they have not yet attained world fame and the ear of statesmen, and often do not know where their next grant is coming from. There are moments of poignance:
As always I seem to have been away bullshiting and politiking in various meetings for weeks! I try to convince myself that this is of use to us as a dendrochronological community but I am not so sure how much that is really true these days.
[0846715553]
The first disquieting note, the first thing that causes the novice to this to frown with unease or hang his mouth open with alarm, and the experienced skeptic to laugh bitterly, comes ten mails in, text document 0842992948. Two scientists – one cajoling the other to try to wring more from his data than the latter thinks it warrants, to try to turn some mildly interesting samples into a reconstruction of past climate – share a joke about a third who appears to have been notoriously fastidious about jumping to conclusions: ‘Are you not being (in the time honoured Don Graybill fashion) too demanding of the response function results when you say deriving a transfer function is not justified? We all strive for perfection but does it exist? Seriously, it would be easier as regards publication policy to get the Editor to accept a reconstruction…’
Keith Briffa to one Gary Funkhouser. Funkhouser laughs but declines the suggestion:
‘I really wish I could be more positive about the Kyrgyzstan material, but I swear I pulled every trick out of my sleeve trying to milk something out of that. It was pretty funny though – I told Malcolm what you said about my possibly being too Graybill-like in evaluating the response functions – he laughed and said that’s what he thought at first also. The data’s tempting but there’s too much variation even within stands. I don’t think it’d be productive to try and juggle the chronology statistics any more than I already have – they just are what they are (that does sound Graybillian).’
[0843161829]
Silly old finicky Graybill died some years ago. I had to do an internet search for this Gary Funkhouser who – sheepishly, laughing at himself – manages to resist temptation: unlike Briffa he has not become a household name in climate science.
A while later, Briffa is being interviewed by New Scientist [0845217169]: a draft of the article is copied into an e-mail to him from the reporter. It details efforts to isolate man’s fingerprint on weather patterns: at this point problems with the theory, the models and the raw data can still be admitted to outsiders. It is still 1996 and the existence of a Medieval Warm Period and Little Ice Age may be acknowledged. There is frank, excited talk of how the problems might be resolved. Keith’s on a high: he may be the man to do it. ‘The modellers are queuing at Briffa’s door to find out what his tree-ring data shows about the real world beyond the computer simulations.’
Even knowing how the story ends, I found their enthusiasm infectious. A glimpse of men doing what they were born to do is always vicariously exhilarating, the spectacle of humans applying their intelligence uplifting.
But already the fatal flaw is evident. One of the more cautious scientists, one who has actually fought with the IPCC to keep caveats as to the uncertainty of models within their reports, one who does not underestimate natural variability, has set up a group to examine patterns of forcings on the climate. He says, ‘What we hope is that the current patterns of temperature change prove distinctive, quite different from the patterns of natural variability in the past.’
I think they are not supposed to ‘hope’ things in that way. There is a human tendency to magnify the evidence that proves the things we hope to find and diminish that which does not, and scientists of all people are supposed to guard rigorously against this. They are a forensic team looking to bring a murder home to a pre-determined suspect. Without even being sure there is a body.
The journalist says: ‘For climatologists, the search for an irrefutable “sign” of anthropogenic warming has assumed an almost Biblical intensity.’ I don’t think I need point out how that sentence should have sounded alarm bells.
*
Now it’s June 1997 and one of the CRU scientists, Mike Hulme, who will go on to espouse the theory of ‘post-normal science’, is putting his name to a letter to The Times, drafted on his behalf by Greenpeace, ‘to remind your readers of the seriousness of the potential threat caused by our continued use of fossil fuels … There is no doubt the need for precautionary, preventative action is urgent.’ [0872202064]
Kyoto is coming up. Hulme receives a World Wildlife Fund circular expressing outrage that the Japanese want only a 5% reduction in ‘greenhouse gas’ emissions. ‘It would also be very useful if progressive business groups would express their horror at the new economic opportunities which will be foregone if Kyoto is a flop.’
I had a big laugh-out-loud at another mail to Hulme shortly after that. One Joseph Alcamo weighs in on a pre-Kyoto Statement (his capital) they are trying to put together:
‘I am very strongly in favor of as wide and rapid a distribution as possible for endorsements. I think the only thing that counts is numbers. The media is going to say “1000 scientists signed” or “1500 signed”. No one is going to check if it is 600 with PhDs versus 2000 without. They will mention the prominent ones, but that is a different story. Conclusion — Forget the screening, forget asking them about their last publication (most will ignore you.) Get those names!’
[0876437553]
He’s right, of course. The media isn’t going to check. The media wouldn’t care if it was 2000 lab rats.
There are still scientists who care though. Shortly after [0880476729] Tom Wigley bollocks them for this lobbying:
This is a complex issue, and your misrepresentation of it does you a dis-service. To someone like me, who knows the science, it is apparent that you are presenting a personal view, not an informed, balanced scientific assessment. What is unfortunate is that this will not be apparent to the vast majority of scientists you have contacted. In issues like this, scientists have an added responsibility to keep their personal views separate from the science, and to make it clear to others when they diverge from the objectivity they (hopefully) adhere to in their scientific research. I think you have failed to do this.
And on and on. The whole thing is worth reading in full.
November 97. 0878654527. Keith is excited about what he thinks he’s found in his tree samples but admits: ‘We now need to make some horrible simplistic assumptions about absolute carbon … Without these implications we will have difficulty convincing Nature that this work is mega important.’
There are the demands of science; there are the demands of careerism; there are the demands of propaganda. Their downfall will be in the conflict between the latter two and the first.
On a bit. July 1999. 0933255789. The WWF in Australia wants Hulme to add more scariness to a risk assessment paper. ‘In particular, they would like to see the section on variability and extreme events beefed up if possible.’ He is told that warnings of drought and tropical storms are what the audience demands there.
At this point I did a big skip forward to 2003. En route I passed over the already famous 0942777075, in November 99, in which Phil Jones says, ‘I’ve 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 from 1961 for Keith’s to hide the decline.’
Here is the explanation of what that trick was and why it matters.
2003
By 2003 the gang are on top of the world. Michael Mann’s famous ‘hockey-stick’ temperature reconstruction has appeared to be the irrefutable Sign, Oh Lord, of mankind’s guilt which they have hoped to find with such Biblical fervour. Predictions of effects of warming have become increasingly hysterical. Governments are alarmed and the grants are bountiful.
Privately they will still admit to problems, uncertainties, how much they don’t know; they will even gently or not so gently query the reliability or value of each other’s work, sometimes appear to have difficulties reproducing it for themselves; and sometimes say bluntly it is worthless. But they adopt a stern policy of pas devant les domestiques and to the media present a united front of complete confidence and mutual esteem.
They are still curious and inquiring, try to resolve the problems; but it genuinely never seems to occur to them that the answers may lie outside the theory of man-made greenhouse warming, or that they may not be problems at all without it. Every apparent contradiction must be fitted into that paradigm with crowbar or blowtorch.
More, it never occurs to them that anyone else could question the theory in good faith. Any scientist who raises doubts is automatically dismissed, and slandered, as having been paid to do so by big oil.
This is ironic when in fact… well, see for example 0962818260, 0973374325, 0968367517, 0968691929, 0947541692, or the separate Shell_Memo document, for illustrations of how CRU themselves are only too eager to accept oil money. Or the article quoted at the bottom of 0965750123, for an indication of how many years ago (1997) the oil companies started to jump on board the AGW bandwagon.
Those beyond the circle of Anthropogenic Global Warming believers who doubt the miraculous Sign must be cast into the outer darkness. The policy the gang have evolved is to insist all skeptics must point out problems with their work in peer-reviewed journals or not be taken seriously. They then do their utmost to deny them access to these journals by means of unfavourable peer reviews; when this fails, they will start to boycott these journals and lobby for the editors to be removed, and deny that they are peer-reviewed literature at all.
They call the skeptics ‘Contrarians’, the phrase ‘Deniers’ not having come into use yet, and say they have a right-wing agenda as well as taking the oil money which they would rather have themselves. Any editor or publisher who allows the Contrarians’ research to be aired is suspect too. Anyone who casts doubt on the theory of man-made global warming is, circularly, disparaged as being a known doubter of the theory of man-made global warming.
In mail 1057944829 in July 2003, Chris de Freitas, an editor at Climate Research, a journal which has lately published two major papers by skeptics, entertainingly asks them where they get off with regard to this: ‘I have spent a considerable amount of my time on this matter and had my integrity attacked in the process. I want to emphasize that the people leading this attack are hardly impartial observers. Mike himself refers to “politics” and political incitement involved. Both Hulme and Goodess are from the Climate Research Unit of UEA that is not particularly well known for impartial views on the climate change debate. The CRU has a large stake in climate change research funding as I understand it pays the salaries of most of its staff. … Mike Hulme refers to the number of papers I have processed for CR that “have been authored by scientists who are well known for their opposition to the notion that humans are significantly altering global climate.” How many can he say he has processed? I suspect the answer is nil. Does this mean he is biased towards scientists who are well known for their support for the notion that humans are significantly altering global climate?’
They write to Otto Kinne, publisher of Climate Research, to bitch about De Freitas, but Kinne backs him up. They decide Kinne, too, must have an agenda. [1057941657] Says Michael Mann:
‘It seems to me that this “Kinne” character’s words are disingenuous, and he probably supports what De Freitas is trying to do. It seems clear we have to go above him. I think that the community should, as Mike H has previously suggested in this eventuality, terminate its involvement with this journal at all levels–reviewing, editing, and submitting, and leave it to wither way into oblivion and disrepute.’
Cautious Tom Wigley puts in: ‘I agree that Kinne seems like he could be a deFreitas clone. However, what would be our legal position if we were to openly and extensively tell people to avoid the journal?’
By the way ‘this “Kinne” character’, according to a net search, would be Professor Otto Kinne, ‘one of the great marine biologists of our time … editor and major author of the world famous treatises Marine Ecology … founded the International Ecology Institute … In 1998, anxious about harmful tendencies in the anthropogenic degradation of the environment, Kinne founded the Eco-Ethics International Union’ and etcetera and etcetera, respected academic heavyweight and fish-hugging conservationist.
In the same month, mail 1059664704, Tim Osborn has queries about Mann’s models. ‘I now understand how you compute them in theory … how do you compute them in practise?’ Mann is helpful, within limits, and provides some of the calibrations he used. ‘I can’t find the one for the network back to 1820! … You only want to look at the first column (year) and second column (residual) of the files. I can’t even remember what the other columns are!’ He adds:
I know I probably don’t need to mention this, but just to insure absolutely clarify on this, I’m providing these for your own personal use, since you’re a trusted colleague. So please don’t pass this along to others without checking w/ me first. This is the sort of “dirty laundry” one doesn’t want to fall into the hands of those who might potentially try to distort things.
1061625894
A paper by Mann and CRU’s Phil Jones in GRL [Geophysical Research Letters, the journal of the American Geophysical Union] is attacked. They sneer at their opponents but are forced to admit they identify at least one pertinent problem. Their reconstructions from tree proxies have not factored for increased CO2 as well as warming driving tree growth. ‘While I am confident that you are correct, and that this is not a crucial factor, I think one should be careful about denying its existence,’ says Wigley. Mann concedes, ‘In retrospect, Phil and I should have included this analysis in the GRL article, but its always hard to know what specifics the contrarians are going to target in their attacks.’ And of course one must never under any circumstances admit to uncertainties needlessly.
Another problem their opponents have pointed out is that: ‘The globe only becomes warmer in the 20th century when its measured temperatures are substituted for its reconstructed temperatures. This approach is clearly unacceptable; it is like comparing apples and oranges.’
Now here’s fun. Here is a proverbial cordite-smelling revolver. Here is something interesting Jeremy Paxman apparently didn’t find. 1062592331. Edward Cook of Columbia to Keith Briffa, proposing some kind of multi-author meta-study of uncertainties with and differences between the key temperature reconstructions. Describes the latest Mann and Jones one as ‘a mess’. Suggests they be excluded: ‘I am afraid the Mike and Phil are too personally invested in things now (i.e. the 2003 GRL paper that is probably the worst paper Phil has ever been involved in – Bradley hates it as well), but I am willing to offer to include them if they can contribute without just defending their past work – this is the key to having anyone involved. Be honest.’
Says they should ‘Publish, retire, and don’t leave a forwarding address.’ Because,
Without trying to prejudice this work, but also because of what I almost think I know to be the case, the results of this study will show that we can probably say a fair bit about <100 year extra-tropical NH temperature variability (at least as far as we believe the proxy estimates), but honestly know fuck-all about what the >100 year variability was like with any certainty (i.e. we know with certainty that we know fuck-all).
My bold, obviously, and I think it’s worth it; in fact when we the people rise up it ought to be tattooed on every one of these two-faced bastards’ foreheads, and that of every journalist who has betrayed his profession and got down on his knees and serviced them.
He continues: ‘I think this is exactly the kind of study that needs to be done before the next IPCC assessment. But to give it credibility, it has to have a reasonably broad spectrum of authors to avoid looking like a biased attack paper, i.e. like Soon and Balliunas.’ [There's the problem: those from outside the gang who point out flaws and problems in the science are dismissed as biased, bought, oil-industry shills and professional contrarians. Those inside the gang ... daren't point them out, for fear of being excluded from the gang and/or missing out on the global-panic funding.] If you don’t want to do it, just say so and I will drop the whole idea like a hot potato. I honestly don’t want to do it without your participation.’
In the next, 1062618881, Tim Osborn has picked this idea up, sort of; actually as far as I can see he has hijacked it to his own ends. He seems to regard it not so much as an exercise in frank cards-on-the-table as an opportunity to defend their position and rebut the skeptical Soon and Balliunas paper published in Climate Research. Copied are a number of mails about the latter. Phil Jones has said: ‘I will be emailing the journal to tell them I’m having nothing more to do with it until they rid themselves of this troublesome editor.’ (In fact they end up ordering all their friends to resign from the board.) They’re discussing a multi-author response: ‘NOT’, says Phil Jones, ‘the scholarly review a la Jean Grove (bless her soul) that just reviews but doesn’t come to anything firm. We want a critical review that enables agendas to be set.’ Wants to ‘address the misconceptions by finally coming up with definitive dates for the LIA [Little Ice Age] and MWP [Medieval Warm Period] and redefining what we think the terms really mean?’
(Who Jean Grove, bless her soul? Another stodgy old Graybill? Damn her fusty scholarliness. Damn her and her tweed and her twinsets and her apologetic little cough and her dryly ironic ‘In point of fact’. What modern science needs is men with fire in their belly, go-getters, agenda-setters, two-fisted, big-balled, lectern-hammering loudmouths.)
(In a mail from 1999, 925823304, I came across discussions to do with an invitation to bid for a research project of which it was apparently a precondition that an “internationally renowned and charismatic scientist” head up the team. No. No. Why? God save us from us charismatic rainmakers in any field but especially science.)
(I looked her up. Jean Grove, bless her soul, used to crawl around glaciers and up Alps carrying her children on her back. She published a classic book on the Little Ice Age in 1988 which, with a worldwide scope, drawing on strenuous and dangerous personal ice-face research and neglected archives of contemporary accounts, some written in Norse and Catalan, ‘showed that natural climate fluctuations in history were in fact very large, with a distinct medieval warm period from about 950 to 1250; her research served to counterbalance the view that large changes in climate, such as those currently being experienced, are artificially caused.’ Phil is probably wise to NOT want a scholarly review a la Jean Grove, then.)
The Medieval Warm Period and Little Ice Age which followed it are to be central battlegrounds. If they existed, and the overwhelming evidence – historical, literary, and scientific – is that they did, then the warming of recent years (up until 1998) was nothing to do with man. Michael Mann’s famous, erroneous hockey-stick graph attempted to do away with them; when that is at length shown to be false, others will take its place, and they will die a death of a thousand fudges and ‘redefinitions’ in the IPCC reports. Eventually the plan is to claim that, due to the incomplete picture of the temperature of the past, the MWP and LIA cannot be shown to have happened all over the world in the same period. Or just to fiddle the data to do away with them.
2nd October 2003. 1065125462. The Science Correspondent of the Sunday Telegraph dares question the Mann-Jones paper in Geophysical Research Letters on “Global surface temperatures over the past two millennia”:
‘When the paper came out, some critics argued that the paper actually showed that there have been three periods in the last 2000 years which were warmer than today (one just prior to AD 700, one just after, and one just prior to AD 1000). They also claimed that the paper could only conclude that current temperatures were warmer if one compared the proxy data with other data sets. …I’d be very interested to include your rebuttals to these arguments in the piece I’m doing. I must admit to being confused by why proxy data should be compared to instrumental data for the last part of the data-set. Shouldn’t the comparison be a consistent one throughout?With many thanks for your patience with this
His thanks are premature. The great Mann has no patience:
Owing to pressures on my time, I will not be able to respond to any further inquiries from you. Given your extremely poor past record of reporting on climate change issues, however, I will leave you with some final words. Professional journalists I am used to dealing with do not rely upon un-peer-reviewed claims off internet sites for their sources of information. They rely instead on peer-reviewed scientific research, and mainstream, rather than fringe, scientific opinion.
I call this rude. But by this point the inner gang are rude, tetchy and lordly even to those on their own side. In March 2004 a scientist called Chick Keller sends out a request (‘REQUEST FOR INFORMATION ON CLIMATE CHANGE AND HUMAN ATTRIBUTIONS’) for help with a presentation where he will be debating a skeptic [1079108576]:
‘Their main point is that their counter information hangs together into a logically coherent picture.
Models: no real finger print that distinguishes AGHG forcings from others! Models using AGHG forcings predict warming is function of latitude yet the Arctic is hardly warming (north of ~^65°N), and high latitude Antarctic (excepting for the peninsula) is actually cooling slightly. …
Models predict that any surface warming will be seen in the troposphere. Since UAH satellite reduction shows no such warming–1. models are wrong and/or no warming at surface just lousy observations. 2. If no warming at surface in last 30 years AGHG forcing predictions by models is incorrect probably due to poor cloud/water vapor modeling …
[And on and on, several other cogent points]
… Soooo, it still ain’t all that easy to convince an audience … AND keep in mind that increased CO2 is good for us–more agriculture, etc. Nope it just ain’t that easy. So any information–graphics, etc on these issues will be greatly appreciated.’
Tom Crowley snaps:
‘For goodness sakes, I don’t know where to start … enough, this is like trying to convert someone with one religion to another.’ Indeed.
Someone called Richard (Somerville, I think) has tried to be more helpful to poor Chick in his work trying to proselytize among the heathens, but isn’t really – in fact is downright demoralizing as far as I can see, telling him he won’t really get anywhere by trying to make sense of the facts:
‘ I respectfully disagree with you that hammering away on reconciling the MSU data with radiosonde and surface data is the right way to go … Even though much of the differences may now be apparently explained, it’s still a terribly messy job. The satellite system wasn’t designed to measure tropospheric temperatures, the calibration and orbital decay and retrieval algorithm and all the other technical issues are ugly, and nobody knows how much the lower stratospheric cooling ought to have infected the upper troposphere … No matter what one does on trying to make the MSU data tell us a clean story, there are remaining serious uncertainties… I certainly don’t think the issue of whether anthropogenic influences are a serious concern should be settled by looking at any single data set.’
Did you get that? Instead he recommends simply depending on the ex cathedra pronouncements recently made by two scientific societies, the strongness of which he says have surprised even him. He says there is a ‘scientific consensus’ which ‘cannot be refuted or disproved by attacking any single data set’.
Do you, if you are someone coming new to this, understand the implications of that? Do you see the point they have reached? No matter what is disproved on the data, the theory goes rolling majestically on – because we say so. It simply cannot be refuted or disproved.
This is a recurring and appalling leitmotif: the data doesn’t matter. (See also the words of a British Met Office man down below, and… etcetera and etcetera.)
I certainly don’t think the issue of whether anthropogenic influences are a serious concern should be settled by looking at any single data set.
It cannot be refuted or disproved by attacking any single data set.
I know unicorns exist because
A) We find hoofprints.
B) I found a horn. You can’t see it, unfortunately, I threw it out by mistake, but trust me.
C) Only virgins can see them, so the dearth of reliable sightings fits perfectly when you factor in youth promiscuity.
Terrible sacrifices must be enacted to the unicorns or they will kill us all with their magic powers. Which can do anything.
You can’t attack me on A because I still have B and C, and you can’t attack me on B because I still have A and blah blah blah. If you try to you are wicked and are putting the world in jeopardy. You must have been bribed and are callously irresponsible about the risk of the unicorns wiping us out.
If anyone questions this, don’t get bogged down in facts, just refer them to the recent definitive pronouncement by the Unicorn-Hunters’ Federation.
There’s more: he believes that the many things they don’t know, the fact that they can prove so little, actually strengthen their case.
‘I also think people need to come to understand that the scientific uncertainties work both ways.’ Like a proud boast, like a stirring declaration of principles, like a political leader setting out his stall at a conference in a rousing peroration, he declares: ‘We don’t understand cloud feedbacks. We don’t understand air-sea interactions. We don’t understand aerosol indirect effects. The list is long.’ Then: ‘It is just as likely a priori that a poorly understood bit of physics might be a positive as a negative feedback.’
Might. Might. Just as likely. Might.
It cannot be refuted or disproved by…
Time and again one wants to yell: listen to yourselves. Listen to yourselves, and try to remember the scientific principles you were presumably taught in college, and look at what’s become of you.
Plaintively Richard (Somerville?) goes on to muse, ‘I have often wondered how our medical colleagues manage to escape the trap of having their entire science dismissed because there are uncured diseases and other remaining uncertainties. Maybe we can learn from the physicians.’
What? What? What? I don’t know where to begin. How is that remotely comparable? Maybe the physicians can learn from you. ‘The patient is getting better, his temperature has dropped.’ ‘Nonsense. Don’t believe it. According to my models he should be close to death. Really I cannot explain what is going on but unless he gives me huge amounts of money and avoids car and plane travel for the foreseeable future the consequences will be fatal.’
Richard winds up by saying, ‘People on airplanes, when they find out what I do for a living, usually ask me if I “believe in” global warming.’
I bet they bloody do. And if just one of these bastards could stay off a plane for one single year, I might start to believe – not in their theory, but that they actually, honestly, deep down believed it.
Well. All in all, I would say the protagonists appear to have reached the hubris stage at this point. Oh look, here comes nemesis.
In February 2004 a man named Steve McIntyre sends Phil Jones of CRU a request for copies of some datasets. [1076359809] ‘Wonder what he’s up to?’ says Phil.
‘Personally, I wouldn’t send him anything,’ replies Michael Mann. ‘I have no idea what he’s up to, but you can be sure it falls into the “no good” category. … I would not give them *anything*. I would not respond or even acknowledge receipt of their emails. There is no reason to give them any data, in my opinion, and I think we do so at our own peril!’
He is right, if unethical. It is no damn good from their point of view. For McIntyre is our hero. In the film he will be played by … Gary Cooper and Jimmy Stewart are dead and no-one nowadays specializes in quiet but dogged decency. Perhaps he must remain an unseen presence off camera, like film portrayals of Mohammed. Do it as a sort of remake of ‘Phone Booth’: Phil Jones cornered in his office, slowly crumbling from regent to wreck, Kiefer Sutherland reading out McIntyre’s mails as a voice-over.
I have skipped ahead here. This is not McIntyre’s first appearance in the mails or on the scene and they already know the peril he represents. He has come out of nowhere in 2003 with a paper refuting Mann’s hockey-stick and they have instinctively closed ranks against him.
*
McIntyre is not a professional scientist, but a retired Canadian mining engineer. Neither is he – not that it should matter; play the ball, not the man – an oil-industry lobbyist, or career contrarian, or knee-jerk libertarian, or right-winger of any kind. ‘In American terms,’ he will let slip once, ‘Canada would be a blue state along the lines of Massachusetts; Toronto would be a liberal city in a blue state; and I live downtown in one of the most liberal constituencies in the city. None of this is unrelated to my political views.’
His expertise being in mining, he knows a dodgy prospectus when he sees one. He sees one in the Mann paper that provided the infamous hockey stick. Out of curiosity at first, for the hell of it, he decides to ‘audit’ the numbers behind the AGW theory, and finds himself carrying on when he realises to his concern that no-one else is.
He is the perfect foil for these rude, arrogant, amour-propre-sensitive, increasingly macho men. He is unfailingly, superhumanly polite – confirming my theory that politeness is actually a great way of annoying people, in particular the people who don’t deserve any. At times he will show the humility of a monk in his dealings with the AGW proponents – or perhaps say that of Chesterton’s Father Brown. In contrast to the policy on Real Climate, the pro-AGW website the Mann-CRU gang will set up to respond to him and others, where opposing views disappear into a memory-hole [see below], the only people he censors on his website Climate Audit are his own supporters, when he feels they have transgressed the rules of polite debate and are insulting his opponents. No invective. No venting. Just the facts, Ma’am. Once in a long while when particularly frustrated and goaded he will indulge briefly in satire, calm but lacerating; when he does it’s like when you punch a Buddhist monk in the face, thinking they won’t hit you back, and they just nod and smile, so you keep punching them, and they keep smiling, and then you punch once too often and all of a sudden there’s a blur of movement and they’ve kicked one of your kidneys out, still smiling.
Of course, in obedience to Gore Vidal’s dictum that the ascetic is always accused of licentiousness, the philanthropist of being a miser, the Mann-CRU axis – the Hockey Team, as they dub themselves – will with a straight face and perfect indignation accuse McIntyre of being unmannerly and impudent in his pronouncements and his communications with them, his terse calm formal requests for data to enable him to replicate their work, a basic requirement of respectable science. He will be called a gadfly, a dilettante. His Majesty James Hansen, originator of the theory of manmade global warming, will say, of his refusal to engage with him and his like, that he will not ‘joust with jesters’.
They will refuse his requests for data. They will stall and give him the runaround. They will use every excuse in the book, break the rules of scientific ethics and the laws of the land. They will call him names and spread lies about him. It doesn’t matter. He wins in the end and will kill their hockey-stick, the forged sole fingerprint of man’s responsibility for fluctuations in the mighty machine of nature, the badge of breath-taking arrogance and breast-beating species guilt, not once but, due to its continued miraculous resurrection, again and again and again.
And for the sake of the example to future generations, if we win this fight, we should take an infinitesimal fraction of the money we would have pissed away chasing a demon that is one of the basic building blocks of life and erect a statue to him somewhere, on the burned-out ruins of the CRU campus would be good, slapping him briskly across his blushing Canadian face every time he says no.
*
Back to the mails. 1077829152. Jones reviews and spikes a skeptic article, ‘It is having a go at the CRU temperature data – not the latest vesion, but the one you used in MBH98 !!’ Then some shenanigans of some sort I don’t quite get: ‘Can I ask you something in CONFIDENCE – don’t email around, especially not to Keith and Tim here. Have you reviewed any papers recently for Science that say that MBH98 and MJ03 have underestimated variability in the millennial record – from models or from some low-freq proxy data. Just a yes or no will do. Tim is reviewing them – I want to make sure he takes my comments on board, but he wants to be squeaky clean with discussing them with others. So forget this email when you reply.’
They have suspicions of the American Geophysical Union journal GRL. Too many Contrarian viewpoints getting through.
A while later, another fired revolver the non-internet media appear to find completely uninteresting:
1089318616
From: Phil Jones To: “Michael E. Mann” Subject: HIGHLY CONFIDENTIAL Date: Thu Jul 8 16:30:16 2004
… [Rubbishes a paper that's bad for them]
The other paper by MM [McIntyre & McKitrick] is just garbage – as you knew. De Freitas again.
… I can’t see either of these papers being in the next IPCC report. Kevin and I will keep them out somehow – even if we have to redefine what the peer-review literature is ! Cheers
Phil
He also says that fellow scientist Roger Pielke is ‘losing all credibility’ by deiging to reply to a skeptic.
This one made me laugh:
1091798809
From: Phil Jones
To: “Janice Lough”
Subject: Re: liked the paper
Date: Fri Aug 6 09:26:49 2004
Janice,
Most of the data series in most of the plots have just appeared on the CRU web site. Go to data then to paleoclimate. Did this to stop getting hassled by the skeptics for the data series. Mike Mann refuses to talk to these people and I can understand why. They are just trying to find if we’ve done anything wrong.
Damn them! Damn their impudence!
In February 2005 Jones will respond to a request by Australian scientist Warwick Hughes for his raw data with the words: ‘We have 25 or so years invested in the work. Why should I make the data available to you, when your aim is to try and find something wrong with it?’ [Not in the leaked mails, but see here, for example.]
1092167224
Michael E. Mann wrote:
Dear Phil and Gabi,
I’ve attached a cleaned-up and commented version of the matlab code that I wrote for doing the Mann and Jones (2003) composites. I did this knowing that Phil and I are likely to have to respond to more crap criticisms from the idiots in the near future, so best to clean up the code and provide to some of my close colleagues in case they want to test it, etc. Please feel free to use this code for your own internal purposes, but don’t pass it along where it may get into the hands of the wrong people. In the process of trying to clean it up, I realized I had something a bit odd, not necessarily wrong, but it makes a small difference. …
1092433030. Grant business. 17 million Euros up for grabs. Not enough for Keith. ‘While this is a large sum, I am sure you will appreciate that when distributed among many partners and stretched over five years it imposes a severe limitation on the total number of partners that can be feasibly included.’
1092581797 made me chuckle with its tales of urgent meetings in Geneva, Trieste, Marrakech and Potsdam. I expect it will seem less amusing when the rest of us aren’t allowed or can’t afford to go there.
Oh next is something from the Russians again. They’re probably still in Siberia. That makes me feel better.
But a few mails later Phil Jones is off to Delhi and Seattle. This makes me unhappy again. No, it makes me laugh. People flying all over the planet on an urgent quest to stop other people flying all over the planet always do. [1097159316]
Shit, now Keith is going to Austria in a few days, after having just returned from some other unspecified travels. I am happy for him. All right, I resent it. I shouldn’t be reading this. This is like one of the books my mum reads about glamorous people going to glamorous places.
Fuck, the next one from Phil Jones: ‘I met this guy in Utrecht last week … ‘ Can’t they stay put for a single frigging minute? I am glad their theory is a crock of shit, because if it was true, the irony of their single-handedly having doomed us all flying around the world spreading the word about it would be unbearable. Mind you, have you seen the pictures of the UEA campus? I wouldn’t spend a minute there either. I hope the poor Russians are getting some money, that’s all I hope. Freezing their gonads off prodding trees while the rest of them gad about the playgrounds of the well-heeled and tenured.
Concentrate. He’s bad-mouthing Von Storch, a scientist who has gone off-piste, for bad-mouthing the Mann Bradley Hughes papers. I have never badly wanted to go to Utrecht anyway.
Next [1098294574] Keith is back. He has brought home the bacon. He has scored a grant of 10 million Euros for something. Break out the travel brochures. Save some for the Russians, you bastard. Wait, no. Not 10 million. Brussels has ‘given a (very unofficial) hint’ that they should ask for 17 million, thereby enabling Brussels to look tough (I assume) when they only give them 15 million. Venice is lovely in October, or so I’ve heard. He could afford blankets for the Russians too. At least Keith appears to be staying home this week. Ha. Feel the East Anglian wind and look at the neo-brutalist architecture and suffer, dog.
God hates me. Next up is Phil, 1098472400. ‘I have to go home to drive with Ruth to Gatwick for our week in Florence.’
Why can’t I join this quest to save the planet? I like trees. I can talk about weather. I would like Florence, I bet.
This mail contains some other bollocks I suspect is important. I don’t care. All I can make out through the green haze of envy is the sentence ‘The paper didn’t consider spatial autocorrelation at all.’ I would like to do a paper on the spatial correlation, or complete lack of it, of the CRU climate change team. They are never on the same landmass at the same time.
Focus. Wait, it is juicy, it is devastating, it is priceless stuff. Tom Wigley to Jones:
Phil,
I have just read the M&M stuff critcizing MBH. A lot of it seems valid to me.
At the very least MBH [the hockey stick] is a very sloppy piece of work — an opinion I have held for some time. [Although not in public.]
Presumably what you have done with Keith is better? — or is it?
I get asked about this a lot. Can you give me a brief heads up? Mike is too
deep into this to be helpful.
Tom.
Phil’s reply:
you cannot trust anything that M&M write. MBH is as good a way of putting all the data together as others. …Bottom line – their is no way the MWP (whenever it was) was as warm globally as the last 20 years. There is also no way a whole decade in the LIA period was more than 1 deg C on a global basis cooler than the 1961-90 mean. This is all gut feeling, no science, but years of experience of dealing with global scales and varaibility.
Must go to Florence now.
1101133749. Roger Pielke stands up to them over the other rogue paper Phil rubbished earlier. A back and forth as to its merits. ‘This debate,’ says Pielke, ‘should really take place in the literature. There has been, however, in my view an unfortunate change over time where reviewers who disagree with already published work recommend rejection of subsequent work rather than letting the community view and assess the different perspectives on a science issue.’
Two mails later, Phil: ‘Maybe when you all meet at the delightful Chicago Airport Hilton … ‘ This is one of my mum’s Jackie Collins books.
Enough envy, more schadenfreude. The furies are upon them. But now they start to fight back.
G. Schmidt, 1102687002, ‘No doubt some of you share our frustration with the current state of media reporting on the climate change issue.’ I think this is the first use I’ve noticed of ‘climate change’ as opposed to ‘global warming’. Did a memo go out – is it in here somewhere? – from someone brave enough to point out the planet wasn’t warming at all?
The realclimate.org website is launched to correct the terrible imbalance involved in alternative viewpoints occasionally getting reported. ‘The site will be moderated to maintain a high signal-to-noise ratio.’ Which means the comments will be censored to avoid alternative viewpoints being reported there or uncomfortable questions being asked. (1139521913, ‘going to be careful about what comments we screen through… We can hold comments up in the queue and contact you about whether or not you think they should be screened through or no.’)
1102953345. Ooh. Keith needs to phone Mann urgently. Panic setting in? Getting a story straight? Advice as to good places to eat out in Kuala Lumpur?
1102956436 makes clear he was offering Mann an ‘informal’ role contributing to the next IPCC report.
More Keith. I have failed to note the number. ‘S. America, New Zealand, Tasmania.’ Travel itinerary? No, something about their temperatures. Someone has a meeting in San Francisco. It’s probably a dreadful place and it’s right on a fault line.
Now Keith has visited his family. That’ll be nice for them, they don’t see the bastard from one year’s end to the next. It’s December, he’s writing to Mann: ‘have a great Christmas and for f..ks sake keep the right priorities to the fore as the years progress.’ Did Keith give him some kind of stern talking-to about his ethics in the phone call? Did they have some tearful drunken ‘What happened to us? It used to be about the science… we’ve turned into PR men…’? Or is he urging him to get out and travel more?
January 2005 now. 1104855751. Steve McIntyre complains that his paper debunking the hockey-stick has been falsely attacked. ‘It is false and misleading for Rutherford et al. to now allege that we used the wrong dataset. We used the dataset they directed us to at their FTP site.’ Asks Phil Jones for help: ‘I get the impression that, while you feel very strongly about your views, you are also concerned with getting to the bottom of matters and are less concerned with scoring meaningless debating points.’
Wrong. Wrong. Thinking Jones had some kind of decency and basic scientific rigour may be the one thing McIntyre has ever been wrong about. Jones promptly forwards the mail to Mann, who replies: ‘I would NOT RESPOND to this guy. As you know, only bad things can come of that’ – like the truth emerging – and then adds some allegations about McIntyre which, not for the last time in these mails, I am fairly sure must count as slander. Says he is a fraud and funded by the bad guys. [He isn't and is funded by no-one unless you count reader paypal donations on his website now.]
Next. 1104893567. ‘Hi Keith – Happy new year. ‘Criticisms of his section of the IPCC draft. ‘The biggest problem with what appears here is in the handling of the greater variability found in some reconstructions, and the whole discussion of the ‘hockey stick’. The tone is defensive, and worse, it both minimizes and avoids the problems. We should clearly say (e.g., page 12 middle paragraph) that there are substantial uncertainties … Attempting to avoid such statements will just cause more problems. … M&M claim that when they used [Mann's statistical procedure] with a red noise spectrum, it always resulted in a ‘hockey stick’. Is this true? If so, it constitutes a devastating criticism of the approach.’ It was true.
There follow lots of IPCC draft discussions that largely go over my head but I suspect are revelatory in the right quarters.
1105978592, IPCC bloke Jonathan Overpeck:
‘Hi all – attached is Keith’s MWP box w/ my edits. It reads just great – much like a big hammer. Nice job.’
More on this later. Hammer is appropriate because Overpeck has said he wants to ‘nail’ the Medieval Warm Period. (In fairness, in the context in which he says this in 1105588681 he may just mean he wants to settle the question. But it is clear from lots of other passages which way he wants it settled. And see a mail below.)
1106322460 is fun. Michael Mann frets that they are losing the AGU journal GRL to the Contrarians. Rogue research has been allowed to see the light of day. In particular, they have agreed to publish McIntyre’s debunking of Mann’s claims. So Mann suggests keeping dossiers on (I assume) the editors:
‘It’s one thing to lose “Climate Research”. We can’t afford to lose GRL. I think it would be useful if people begin to record their experiences w/ both Saiers and potentially Mackwell (I don’t know him–he would seem to be complicit w/what is going on here).
If there is a clear body of evidence that something is amiss, it could be taken through the proper channels. I don’t [sic, doubt? don't think?] that the entire AGU hierarchy has yet been compromised!’
But who knows how far this thing goes, Mike? It might go all the way to the top. Trust no-one.
This is… this is… Torquemada with a persecution complex. Beria imagining he’s being followed.
‘The contrarians now have an “in” with GRL. This guy Saiers has a prior connection w/ the University of Virginia Dept. of Environmental Sciences that causes me some unease.’
Why does that sentence tickle me so much? ‘Watch out for that nasty little toerag… he has form… a prior with the University of Virginia Department of Environmental Sciences.’ That is actually where Mann himself works at this point so I don’t even know what it means.
Tom Wigley: ‘If you think that Saiers is in the greenhouse skeptics camp, then, if we can find documentary evidence of this, we could go through official AGU channels to get him ousted.’
Next up, 1106338806, Tom Wigley frets to Phil Jones:
‘I got a brochure on the FOI Act from UEA. Does this mean that, if someone asks for a computer program we have to give it out??’
Phil replies:
‘On the FOI Act there is a little leaflet we have all been sent. It doesn’t really clarify what we might have to do re programs or data. Like all things in Britain we will only find out when the first person or organization asks. I wouldn’t tell anybody about the FOI Act in Britain.’
But… but… I’m fairly sure it was in all the papers, Phil. Facts are a lot harder to suppress in the real world than in that of climate science.
‘I wouldn’t worry about the code. If FOIA does ever get used by anyone, there is also IPR [intellectual property rights] to consider as well. Data is covered by all the agreements we sign with people, so I will be hiding behind them.’
He harps on this theme to Mann in 1107454306.
‘Don’t leave stuff lying around on ftp sites,’ he warns, ‘you never know who is trawling them. The two MMs [McIntyre & McKitrick] have been after the CRU station data for years. If they ever hear there is a Freedom of Information Act now in the UK, I think I’ll delete the file rather than send to anyone.’
On the brighter side, however, ‘We also have a data protection act, which I will hide behind. Tom Wigley has sent me a worried email when he heard about it – thought people could ask him for his model code. He has retired officially from UEA so he can hide behind that. IPR should be relevant here.’ He’s happy with the way a chapter of IPCC AR4 [assessment report] is shaping up: ‘MM and SB get dismissed. All the right emphasis is there, but the wording on occasions will be crucial.’
Mann is moving to Penn State. (I hope the people there aren’t made uneasy by his prior connection with the University of Virginia Department of Environmental Sciences.) He has learned his lesson ‘about FTP. We’re going to be very careful in the future what gets put there.’ Some data has fallen into the wrong hands, i.e. that of people who might use it to try to replicate his results and check he hasn’t pulled them out of his arse.
He has seen the draft of the IPCC report chapter. ‘It looks very good at present–will be interesting to see how they deal w/ the contrarian criticisms–there will be many. I’m hoping they’ll stand firm (I believe they will–I think the chapter has the right sort of personalities for that).’
Next, Phil Jones goes to Madrid, Pune, Chicago. His interlocutor Kevin Trenberth one-ups him with Beijing, Hawaii, New Zealand. I am finding this kind of thing amusing again. Laughter is really God’s way of making up to us for the scarcity of ground-to-air missiles. Pune? Pune? They are going to places I have literally never heard of. They have invented a whole country just to be able to go somewhere I never will. A special country that only climate scientists can go to. Maybe Pune is the country where all the predicted sunny weather is happening.
Enough. That isn’t the point. Boy detective hat back on. All kinds of IPCC inside info, and something called a CCSP review, but I can’t decipher the acronyms. 1107555812. ‘Apart from Lindzen the panel seem pretty good.’
Then, 1108399027, February 2005, something I do get and it’s hilarious. The Wall Street Journal is on Mann’s case: ‘Statistician Francis Zwiers of Environment Canada, a government agency, says he now agrees that Dr. Mann’s statistical method “preferentially produces hockey sticks when there are none in the data.” Dr. Mann, while agreeing that his mathematical method tends to find hockey-stick shapes, says this doesn’t mean its results in this case are wrong.’
To clarify: he used a program that was designed to produce hockey-stick shapes from almost any data. He was found out, in the McIntyre paper he has been desperately and unsuccessfully trying to rubbish. His defence now? Yes, I did do that, but the data might, coincidentally, have produced a hockey-stick shape if I hadn’t rigged it to do so.
Tom Wigley is worried and asks him some urgent questions arising out of this. Mann replies tersely with a link to the popular internet general-knowledge site Wikipedia.
It shows a graph an associate of Mann’s has put together with lots of vaguely quasi-almost not-quite-as-dramatic hockey sticks that other people have done. However, [click on 'Discussion' tab], it is pointed out that ‘of the 10 reconstructions the first 7 are by Mann himself or coauthors or direct collaborators of Mann. And so is reconstruction 9.’
Poor Tom. Poor BBC, who used this graph in their climate change programme last year and forgot to mention this caveat. Poor us, who pay for them to deceive us.
(I wonder what the principal produce of Pune is. My guess is margaritas and bare-breasted maidens.)
Next. 1107899057. Something I don’t get. A mail appearing to date from two days after the above WSJ article, but in it Mann tells Andy Revkin [see below] of the New York Times ‘The McIntyre and McKitrick paper is pure scientific fraud.’
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