Climategate: The Real Story - The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars - page 145

was the smoking gun, climate change deniers clamored. Climate scientists had finally been caught
cooking the topics: They were using “a trick to hide the decline in global temperatures,” 13 a nefarious
plot to hide the fact the globe was in fact cooling, not warming! Conservative firebrand Sarah Palin
was on it, declaring in a December 9 op-ed in the Washington Post that “The e-mails reveal that
leading climate 'experts' … manipulated data to 'hide the decline' in global temperatures.” 14
Note here how the climategate claim was being tied to the climate change denial fascinations of
the moment, in this case that “the globe is cooling”—a myth fueled by a winter (late 2009) that had
thus far seen cold temperatures and unusual snowfalls in the eastern United States, though other
regions, such as the Arctic and Southern Hemisphere, had been unusually warm. 15 In fact, the WMO
had—just a day before Palin's op-ed appeared—reported that 2009 would end up as one of the ten
warmest years on record globally, and that the first decade of the new millennium (2000-2009)
would go down as the warmest decade on record. 16 Some decline to hide! Nonetheless, following
one particularly heavy snowstorm that winter, James Inhofe built an igloo on the National Mall with
signs reading “Al Gore's New Home” and “Honk if you ♥ Global Warming” to mock concern over
climate change. 17 Funny how silent he and other deniers went the following summer when D.C., like
many cities around the United States and the world, were experiencing record-setting heat.
A little more than a week after the Washington Post had run Palin's op-ed claiming that
scientists had been hiding a decline in global temperature, the paper allowed me to respond with an
op-ed of my own. 18 I pointed out that Jones had written the e-mail in question in early 1999. He
therefore could not have been referring to global temperature trends during the most recent decade
(2000-2009) as Palin and others seemed to imply. Moreover, the e-mail had been written on the heels
of the warmest year (1998) ever recorded in the instrumental record. It therefore could not have been
referring to a supposed decline in temperature during that decade either! So what was Jones actually
talking about?
The full quotation from Jones's e-mail was (emphasis added), “I've just completed Mike's
Nature trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years (i.e. from 1981 onwards)
and from 1961 for Keith's to hide the decline. ” Only by omitting the twenty-three words in between
“trick” and “hide the decline” were change deniers able to fabricate the claim of a supposed “trick to
hide the decline.” No such phrase was used in the e-mail nor in any of the stolen e-mails for that
matter. Indeed, “Mike's Nature trick” and “hide the decline” had nothing to do with each other.
In reality, neither “trick” nor “hide the decline” was referring to recent warming, but rather the
far more mundane issue of how to compare proxy and instrumental temperature records. Jones was
using the word trick in the same sense—to mean a clever approach—that I did in describing how in
high school I figured out how to teach a computer to play tic-tac-toe or in college how to solve a
model for high temperature superconductivity. He was referring, specifically, to an entirely legitimate
plotting device for comparing two datasets on a single graph, as in our 1998 Nature article (MBH98)
—hence “Mike's Nature trick.”
The MBH98 proxy reconstruction ended in 1980, since many of our key proxy records had been
developed in the late 1970s and early 1980s, and did not extend to the present. As a result, the
reconstruction did not cover the critical last two decades of the twentieth century during which
substantial additional warming had taken place. At the suggestion of the reviewers (as mentioned in
the Prologue), we supplemented our plot of reconstructed temperatures in MBH98 by additionally
showing the instrumental temperatures, which extended through the 1990s. That allowed our