Is there no lie that you will not repeat jerm? You are by far the most intellectually dishonest cretin I have ever met.
The problem with the explanation for the dumb science deniers is that it uses too many words and requires some thought. So they stay with the simple one line quote. Duh.
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Much of the Climategate furor was over the use of the word "trick," specially when Phil Jones of the CRU wrote:
“”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.
While the
denialists see this as some sort of
conspiracy,
[6] it is a
mathematical way of dealing with a problem (a mathematical "trick") and reflects scientists interacting with each other (the "decline" also refers to tree ring density, not global temperatures).
[7] The quote is used out of context to alter its original meaning.
The "trick" in question is quite simple, and is the result of how to go about
time-averaging (e.g., "five year moving average") graphs and
statistical trends.
[8][9] In order to make a moving
average, it's sometimes necessary to pad out the data series beyond its end point with model statistical data to get the smoothed out average to run up to the edge of the time period. So, if a data series ends in 1980, then 4-5 years of model data, which is projected from the local statistical trends (rather than some form of
PIDOOMA method) needs to be incorporated to get a reliable moving average to end in 1980, rather than 5 years previously.
The problem faced by Michael Mann and co. back in their 1998 paper — and what Phil Jones was talking about in his email — was that with the proxy data they used there is a well-documented divergence of some tree ring density (specifically, proxies selected from high latitudes) from the recorded temperature and other proxies exists starting around 1960. The time-averaged temperature began to decline towards 1980 due to these known inaccuracies as well as some statistical outliers.
[10] Mann's solution, the "
Nature trick" was to augment this proxy data with real, and reliable, instrumental data in order to reconstruct the end series of the time averaging. There was no manipulation of actual recorded temperature data, only how the reconstructed proxy data was processed to more closely match the accurate data.
Sounds pretty sneaky, eh? In fact, the "hide the decline" issue was so
cleverly hidden that it was discussed by several authors and glaringly published in
IPCC AR4 Chapter 6 onwards.
[11] The denialists also called for the
data to be released, despite the fact that 95% of said data was already available.
http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Climategate