Climategate: Hide the Decline

This is unbelievable. Apparently the big deal in the “hide the decline” infamous email had to do with what tree ring shows about climate change.  The Daily Mail checked the graphs produced by the UN’s IPPC, and it shows they did just that: When the tree rings (in green) showed warming, they charted it.  But when the tree rings showed real cooling, the graph line mysteriously disappeared and stopped being counted.  From the story:

According to his tree rings, the period since 1960 had not seen a steep rise in temperature, as actual temperature readings showed – but a large and steady decline, so calling into question the accuracy of the earlier data derived from tree rings. This is the context in which, seven weeks later, Jones presented his ‘trick’ – as simple as it was deceptive. All he had to do was cut off Briffa’s inconvenient data at the point where the decline started, in 1961, and replace it with actual temperature readings, which showed an increase. On the hockey stick graph, his line is abruptly terminated – but the end of the line is obscured by the other lines.

Ooh. That’s dishonest. And it is a betrayal of science’s responsibility to present all the facts, let the chips fall where they may.