IPCC and the “Trick”
The emails show that the late 20th century decline in the Briffa reconstruction was perceived by IPCC as “diluting the message”, that “everyone in the room at IPCC” thought that the Briffa decline was a “problem” and a “potential distraction/detraction”, that this was then the “most important issue” in chapter 2 of the IPCC report and that there was “pressure” on Briffa and other authors to show a “nice tidy story” of “unprecedented warming in a thousand years or more”.
Phi Beta Iota:
Steve McIntyre is one of the most dispassionate skeptics of the debate over whether measurements of temperature changes (labeled as Global Warming) is caused by human activity or reflects a normal climate variability or are too uncertain to reach any conclusion. Unlike most of the ideologues now dominating both sides of the GW debate, McIntyre lays out the facts and his interpretations of facts in a highly transparent fashion, and he even provides access to the data he uses to reach his conclusions. This makes it easy for serious reviewers to engage in legitimate efforts to falsify his hypotheses/conclusions. The attached analysis is a good case in point.
