Breaking: Climategate Two

Anthony Watts and Jeff Id — and I don’t know how many others — got links this morning to a new bundle of 170 megabytes (compressed) of new emails from the same old people. Apparently FOIA.org has taken the position that these people are consuming money that could be better used.

I haven’t managed to download the files myself yet (it was 4AM, I was asleep, I’m sorry) but Jeff and others have identified some, ahem, interesting emails. The selections I’ve read so far suggest, again, that the “consensus” is political, not scientific: there is a lot more controversy than we hear about, and in several cases people raise or confirm the same objections that people like Steve McIntyre have been making for years.

It also explains why Michael Mann is so anxious not to have his emails released to Chris Horner.

On temperature reconstruction a la Mann’s “hockey stick”:

Wilson:

any method that incorporates all forms of uncertainty and error will
undoubtedly result in reconstructions with wider error bars than we currently
have. These many be more honest, but may not be too helpful for model
comparison attribution studies. We need to be careful with the wording I think.
Jones:

what he [Zwiers] has done comes to a different conclusion than Caspar and Gene!
I reckon this can be saved by careful wording.
Mitchell/MetO

Is the PCA approach robust? Are the results statistically significant? It seems
to me that in the case of MBH the answer in each is no
Wilson:

I thought I’d play around with some randomly generated time-series and see if I
could ‘reconstruct’ northern hemisphere temperatures.
[…] The reconstructions clearly show a ‘hockey-stick’ trend. I guess this is
precisely the phenomenon that Macintyre has been going on about.
Bradley:

I’m sure you agree–the Mann/Jones GRL paper was truly pathetic and should
never have been published. I don’t want to be associated with that 2000 year
“reconstruction”.
Osborn:

Because how can we be critical of Crowley for throwing out 40-years in the
middle of his calibration, when we’re throwing out all post-1960 data ‘cos the
MXD has a non-temperature signal in it, and also all pre-1881 or pre-1871 data
‘cos the temperature data may have a non-temperature signal in it!
Esper:

Now, you Keith complain about the way we introduced our result, while saying it
is an important one. […] the IPCC curve needs to be improved according to
missing long-term declining trends/signals, which were removed (by
dendrochronologists!) before Mann merged the local records together. So, why
don’t you want to let the result into science?
Cook:

I am afraid that Mike is defending something that increasingly can not be
defended. He is investing too much personal stuff in this and not letting the
science move ahead.
Cook:

One problem is that he [Mann] will be using the RegEM method, which provides no
better diagnostics (e.g. betas) than his original method. So we will still not
know where his estimates are coming from.

PJM Flashback: Three Things You Absolutely Must Know About Climategate