The Hockey Stick was never accurate--and CRU knew it
November 22, 11:34 PM
Essex County Conservative Examiner
Terry Hurlbut
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Hockey Stick graph (WMO)
The infamous "hockey stick" temperature graph purporting to show a runaway acceleration in global temperatures beginning in 1850 was never accurate--and the
Climatic Research Unit knew it wasn't accurate when they published it.
This is the only reasonable conclusion from an analysis of another data set, sent in 1999 by Tim Osborne to Michael Mann, and copied to Phil Jones and Keith Briffa, the director and associate director of the CRU.
The "hockey stick" graph (above), which appeared on the cover of the
WMO Statement on the Status of the Global Climate in 1999, is now
known to have its basis in this e-mail (File 0942777075.txt) from Phil Jones to Ray Bradley, Michael Mann, and Malcolm Hughes:
Dear Ray, Mike and Malcolm,
Once Tim's got a diagram here we'll send that either later today or first thing tomorrow.
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. Mike's series got the annual land and marine values while the other two got April-Sept for NH land N of 20N. The latter two are real for 1999, while the estimate for 1999 for NH combined is +0.44C wrt 61-90. The Global estimate for 1999 with data through Oct is +0.35C cf. 0.57 for 1998.
Thanks for the comments, Ray.
Cheers
Phil
But what most readers do not generally appreciate is that, one month earlier, Dr. Tim Osborn, also of the CRU, sent an e-mail to Michael Mann (File 0939154709.txt) containing two columns of data from his study of tree-ring densities. That e-mail begins thus:
Keith has asked me to send you a timeseries for the IPCC multi-proxy reconstruction figure, to replace the one you currently have. The data are attached to this e-mail. They go from 1402 to 1995, although we usually stop the series in 1960 because of the recent non-temperature signal that is superimposed on the tree-ring data that we use. I haven't put a 40-yr smoothing through them - I thought it best if you were to do this to ensure the same filter was used for all curves.
After the last paragraph, his data set appears. Associated with each year is a quantity called a temperature anomaly, which was the difference between the average temperature in that year from a baseline average of temperatures in the period 1961-1990. Note carefully the emphasized line about stopping the series in 1960.
Average temps from Tim Osborn's tree-ring data
A line graph of those data, prepared by this Examiner using the OpenOffice spreadsheet program and employing cubic-spline smoothing from one year to the next, appears at right. This graph shows a clear decline in temperatures beginning in 1960, to a low reached in 1978, followed by an uptrend, and then another downtrend.
Residents of New England should remember that the winter of 1977-78 was especially severe. Indeed, then-Governor Ella Grasso of Connecticut declared a total ban on motorized traffic on the streets and highways of Connecticut, that lasted for a day and a half and forced a cancellation of most classes during the full day at Yale College, where this Examiner was then a sophomore student. While most students lived on campus in those days, most faculty did not, and they found themselves unable to travel to the campus to teach their classes--except for graduate-student teaching assistants who also lived on campus, and at least one instructor who, on the morning of the second day, traveled from Hartford, CT, to New Haven, CT, wearing cross-country skis. The travel ban ended in the late morning of the second day, and one other instructor who had managed to travel to New Haven in time to teach a noon class, memorably quoted Herodotus' famous description of the Persian postal express, which may be seen along the roofline of the New York City Post Office:
Climatic Research Unit (Photo courtesy CRU)
Neither snow, nor rain, nor heat, nor gloom of night stays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds.
That this winter corresponded exactly to the low point of the Osborn data set can scarcely be coincidental. Thus the Osborn data set is entirely in accord with this 1977-78 experience and utterly belies the "Hockey Stick." And as mentioned, the records show that Phil Jones was copied on that data set one month before he sent his e-mail describing the production of the Hockey Stick.
This, even more than the dubious choice-of-phrase used by Jones in his e-mail, constitutes clear evidence of wrongful data manipulation. Both Jones and Osborn, not to mention Mann, Briffa, Bradley, and Hughes, have a lot of explaining to do.
theory will receive no benefit of the doubt. Wanton extrapolations, reliance on models in which data can be endlessly readjusted to fit the thesis, and attempts to stigmatize critics as scientifically illiterate will have to stop. Ad hominem attacks on critics suggesting that they are in the hire of “big oil” or other interests will be seen for the shabby evasions they always were. Let’s hope that the result of this scandal is a restoration of principled inquiry to an important public policy debate.
lol
deleted some raw temperature data used to construct the aggregate temperature data CRU distributed. If you believe that, you're probably watching too many Al Gore videos. 
