Date: Tue, 16 Nov 1999 13:31:15 +0000
Dear Ray, Mike and Malcolm,
...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) and from 1961 for Keith's to hide the decline.
... note the date of the email: 1999. It came at the end of a decade of exceptional warmth, in which 1998 was the warmest year on record. There was no decline to hide. And note the words about "adding in the real temperatures". Jones and Mike Mann had been adding real temperatures to the end longer graphs of temperature estimates based on tree rings ...
Conflict of interest:
From: Phil Jones <p.jones@xxxxxxxxx.xxx>
To: "Michael E. Mann" <mann@xxxxxxxxx.xxx>
Date: Wed Mar 31 09:09:04 2004
Mike,
... Recently rejected two papers (one for JGR and for GRL) from people saying CRU has it wrong over Siberia. Went to town in both reviews, hopefully successfully. If either appears I will be very surprised, but you never know with GRL.
Cheers
Phil
Jones did not specify which papers he had rejected. But one appears to have been by Lars Kamel. He claimed to find much less warming in Siberia than Jones. It was a rare example of someone trying to replicate Jones's analysis – one of the key ways in which science validates itself. So on the face of it, there was good reason to publish, even if flaws needed correcting. But the paper was rejected by Geophysical Research Letters ... This raises important questions about conflict of interest in scientific peer review, and how Jones wielded his power as a reviewer.
Mike,
... 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
Jones is writing about two new papers. One, from two known sceptics Ross McKitrick and Pat Michaels, claimed to show a correlation between the geographical patterns of warming and of industrialisation, suggesting that local urbanisation rather than the global influence of greenhouse gases were often key in warming on land.
Jones evidently wanted to use his position as a lead author to keep the paper out of the IPCC report. In the event, the paper was not mentioned in early chapter drafts, but was added to a final version, where its findings were dismissed as "not statistically significant". Critics say that by keeping it out of early drafts, Jones prevented reviewers scrutinising his conclusion.
Cheers
Phil
Climate Audit is the web site run by Steve McIntyre, a Canadian mathematician peppering Jones with requests for his data. There is no legal basis for rejecting FOI requests on the basis of the "types of people" they are. The records show that the university turned down most FOI requests, from McIntyre and others, for CRU data. Of 105 requests concerning CRU submitted up to December 2009, the university had by late January 2010, acceded in full to only 10.
Mike,
Can you delete any emails you may have had with Keith re AR4? Keith will do likewise... Can you also email Gene and get him to do the same? I don't have his new email address. We will be getting Caspar to do likewise...
Cheers
Phil
British sceptic David Holland had recently asked CRU for all emails sent and received by its tree-ring specialist Keith Briffa about the recently published IPCC report, of which Briffa was a lead author. Briffa had been in correspondence with Mann and two American researchers, Gene Wahl and Caspar Ammann, who had a forthcoming paper defending Mann's controversial "hockey stick" graph. This secret correspondence was outside the IPCC's formal review process and seemed to break its rules.
Clearly, CRU people wanted to hide this correspondence from FOI requests. This email persuaded the UK's Information Commissioner's Office that the university was "acting so as to prevent intentionally the disclosure of requested information", and thus requests were "not dealt with as they should have been under the legislation".