McIntyre: The deleted data from the “Hide the Decline” trick

Watts Up With That?
Friday, Nov 27th, 2009

By Steve McIntyre from his camirror.wordpress.com site.

For the very first time, the Climategate Letters “archived” the deleted portion of the Briffa MXD reconstruction of “Hide the Decline” fame – see here. Gavin Schmidt claimed that the decline had been “hidden in plain sight” (see here. ). This isn’t true.

The post-1960 data was deleted from the archived version of this reconstruction at NOAA here and not shown in the corresponding figure in Briffa et al 2001. Nor was the decline shown in the IPCC 2001 graph, one that Mann, Jones, Briffa, Folland and Karl were working in the two weeks prior to the “trick” email (or for that matter in the IPCC 2007 graph, an issue that I’ll return to.)

A retrieval script follows.

For now, here is a graphic showing the deleted data in red.
Figure 1. Two versions of Briffa MXD reconstruction, showing archived and climategate versions. The relevant IPCC 2001 graph, shown below, clearly does not show the decline in the Briffa MXD reconstruction.

Contrary to Gavin Schmidt’s claim that the decline is “hidden in plain sight”, the inconvenient data has simply been deleted.

The reason, as explained on Sep 22, 1999 by Michael Mann to coauthors in 938018124.txt, was to avoid giving “fodder to the skeptics”. Reasonable people might well disagree with Gavin Schmidt as to whether this is a “a good way to deal with a problem” or simply a trick.

• A d v e r t i s e m e n t

Figure 2. IPCC 2001 Fig 2.21 showing Briffa, Jones and Mann reconstructions together with HadCRU temperature.

Retrieval script:

##COMPARE ARCHIVED BRIFFA VERSION TO CLIMATEGATE VERSION

#1. LOAD ARcHIVED DATA

url<-"ftp://ftp.ncdc.noaa.gov/pub/data/paleo/treering/reconstructions/n_hem_temp/briffa2001jgr3.txt"
 #readLines(url)[1:50]
 Briffa<-read.table(url,skip=24,fill=TRUE)
 Briffa[Briffa< -900]=NA
 dimnames(Briffa)[[2]]<-c("year","Jones98","MBH99","Briffa01","Briffa00","Overpeck97","Crowley00","CRU99")
 sapply(Briffa, function(x) range( Briffa$year[!is.na(x)]) )
 #      year Jones98 MBH99 Briffa01 Briffa00 Overpeck97 Crowley00 CRU99
 #[1,] 1000    1000  1000     1402     1000       1600      1000  1871
 #[2,] 1999    1991  1980     1960     1993       1990      1987  1997
 Briffa= ts(Briffa,start=1000)

#2. LOAD CLIMATEGATE VERSION
 loc="http://www.eastangliaemails.com/emails.php?eid=146&filename=939154709.txt"
 working=readLines(loc,n=1994-1401+104)
 working=working[105:length(working)]
 x=substr(working,1,14)
 writeLines(x,"temp.dat")
 gate=read.table("temp.dat")
 gate=ts(gate[,2],start=gate[1,1])

#Comparison
 briffa=ts.union(archive= Briffa[,"Briffa01"],gate )
 briffa=window(briffa,start=1402,end=1994) #
 plot.ts(briffa)

X=briffa

par(mar=c(2.5,3,2,1))
 plot( c(time(X)),X[,1],col=col.ipcc,lwd=2,ylim=c(-1.2,.5),yaxs="i",type="n",axes=FALSE,xlab="",ylab="")
 for( i in 2:1) lines( c(time(X)),X[,i],col=i,lwd=1)
 axis(side=1,tck=.025)
 labels0=seq(-1,1,.1);labels0[is.na(match(seq(-1,1,.1),seq(-1,1,.5)))]=""
 axis(side=2,at=seq(-1,1,.1),labels=labels0,tck=.025,las=1)
 axis(side=4,at=seq(-1,1,.1),labels=labels0,tck=.025)
 box()
 abline(h=0)
 title("Hide the Decline")
 legend("topleft",fill=2:1,legend=c("Deleted","Archived"))

This article was posted: Friday, November 27, 2009 at 4:59 am

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