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Alleged CRU Emails - 1252154659.txt

The below is one of a series of alleged emails from the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia, released on 20 November 2009.

From: Darrell Kaufman To: Nick McKay , Caspar Ammann , David Schneider , Jonathan Overpeck , “Bette L. Otto-Bliesner” , Raymond Bradley , Miller Giff , Bo Vinther , Keith Briffa Subject: Arctic2k update? Date: Sat, 5 Sep 2009 08:44:19 -0700 Cc:

All:

I received my first hate mail this AM, which helped me to realize that I shouldn’t be

wasting time reading the blogs.

Regarding the “upside down man”, as Nick’s plot shows, when flipped, the Korttajarvi series

has little impact on the overall reconstructions. Also, the series was not included in the

calibration. Nonetheless, it’s unfortunate that I flipped the Korttajarvi data. We used the

density data as the temperature proxy, as recommended to me by Antii Ojala (co-author of

the original work). It’s weakly inversely related to organic matter content. I should have

used the inverse of density as the temperature proxy. I probably got confused by the fact

that the 20th century shows very high density values and I inadvertently equated that

directly with temperature.

This is new territory for me, but not acknowledging an error might come back to bite us. I

suggest that we nip it in the bud and write a brief update showing the corrected composite

(Nick’s graph) and post it to RealClimate. Do you all agree?

There’s other criticisms that have come up by McIntyre’s group:

(1) We cherry-picked the tree-ring series in Eurasia. Apparently this is old ground, but do

we need to address why we chose the Yamal record over the Polar Urals? Apparently, there’s

also a record from the Indigirka River region, which might not have been published and

doesn’t seem to be included in Keith’s recent summary. If we overlooked any record that met

our criteria, I suggest that we explain why. Keith: are you back? Can Ray or Mike provide

some advise?

(2) The correction for Dye-3 was criticized because the approach/rationale had not been

reviewed independently on its own. Bo: has this procedure now been published anywhere?

(3) We didn’t publish any error analysis (e.g., leave-one-out ), but I recall that we did

do some of that prior to publication. Would it be worthwhile including this in our update?

The threshold-exceedence difference (O&B-style) does include a boot-strapped estimate of

errors. That might suffice, but is not the record we use for the temperature calibration.

(4) We selected records that showed 20th century warming. The only records that I know of

that go back 1000 years that we left out were from the Gulf of Alaska that are known to be

related strongly to precipitation, not temperature, and we stated this upfront. Do we want

to clarify that it would be inappropriate to use a record of precip to reconstruct

temperature? Or do we want to assume that precip should increase with temperature and add

those records in and show that the primary signals remain?

(5) McIntyre wrote to me to request the annual data series that we used to calculate the

10-year mean values (10-year means were up on the NOAA site the same AM as the paper was

published). The only “non-published” data are the annual series from the ice cores

(Agassiz, Dye-3, NGRIP, and Renland). We stated this in the footnote, but it does stretch

our assertion that all of the data are available publicly. Bo: How do you want to proceed?

Should I forward the annual data to McIntyre?

Please let me — better yet, the entire group — know whether you think we should post a

revision on RealScience, and whether we should include a reply to other criticism (1

through 5 above). I’m also thinking that I should write to Ojala and Tiljander directly to

apologize for inadvertently reversing their data.

Other thoughts or advise?

Darrell

On Sep 4, 2009, at 5:24 PM, Nick McKay wrote:

The Korttajarvi record was oriented in the reconstruction in the way that McIntyre said.

I took a look at the original reference - the temperature proxy we looked at is x-ray

density, which the author interprets to be inversely related to temperature. We had

higher values as warmer in the reconstruction, so it looks to me like we got it wrong,

unless we decided to reinterpret the record which I don’t remember. Darrell, does this

sound right to you?

This dataset is truncated at 1800, so it doesn’t enter the calibration, nor does it

affect the recent warming trend.

The attached plot (same as before) shows the effect of re-orienting the record on the

reconstruction. It doesn’t change any of our major or minor interpretations of course.

Nick

On Thu, Sep 3, 2009 at 4:45 PM, Nick McKay <[1]nmckay@xxxxxxxxx.xxx> wrote:

Hi all,

I haven’t checked the original reference for it’s interpretation, but I checked the code

and we did use it in the orientation that he stated. He’s also right that flipping

doesn’t affect any of the conclusions. Actually, flipping it makes it fit in better with

the 1900-year trend.

I’ve attached a plot of the original, and another with Korttajarvi flipped.

Nick

[cid:2D818DBD-2A02-494E-B050-C1C5BACE9984@xxxxxxxxx.xxxdsltmp] Embedded Content: Effect of

flipping Korttajarvi.jpg: 00000001,0da94ca9,00000000,00000000

References

It gets better........

Kevin Trenberth wrote:

Hi all

Well I have my own article on where the heck is global warming? We are asking that here in Boulder where we have broken records the past two days for the coldest days on record. We had 4 inches of snow. The high the last 2 days was below 30F and the normal is 69F, and it smashed the previous records for these days by 10F. The low was about 18F and also a record low, well below the previous record low. This is January weather (see the Rockies baseball playoff game was canceled on saturday and then played last night in below freezing weather).

Trenberth, K. E., 2009: An imperative for climate change planning: tracking Earth’s global energy. /Current Opinion in Environmental Sustainability/, *1*, 19-27, doi:10.1016/j.cosust.2009.06.001. [PDF]

<[1]http://www.cgd.ucar.edu/cas/Trenberth/trenberth.papers/EnergyDiagnostics09final.pdf>

(A PDF of the published version can be obtained from the author.)

The fact is that we can’t account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can’t. The CERES data published in the August BAMS 09 supplement on 2008 shows there should be even more warming: but the data are surely wrong. Our observing system is inadequate.

That said there is a LOT of nonsense about the PDO. People like CPC are tracking PDO on a monthly basis but it is highly correlated with ENSO. Most of what they are seeing is the change in ENSO not real PDO. It surely isn’t decadal. The PDO is already reversing with the switch to El Nino. The PDO index became positive in September for first time since Sept 2007. see

[2]http://www.cpc.ncep.noaa.gov/products/GODAS/ocean_briefing_gif/global_ocean_monitoring_current.ppt

Kevin

..... I love it.

Best quote so far: “The fact is that we can’t account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can’t. The CERES data published in the August BAMS 09 supplement on 2008 shows there should be even more warming: but the data are surely wrong.”