"Hiding the decline' in this email refers to omitting data from some Siberian trees after 1960. This omission was openly discussed in the latest climate science update in 2007 from the IPCC, so it is not "hidden' at all.
Why Siberian trees? In the Yamal region of Siberia, there is a small set of trees with rings that are thinner than expected after 1960 when compared with actual thermometer measurements there. Scientists are still trying to figure out why these trees are outliers. Some analyses have left out the data from these trees after 1960 and have used thermometer temperatures instead. Techniques like this help scientists reconstruct past climate temperature records based on the best available data."
Another email from scientist Kevin Trenberth laments that "we can't account for the lack of warming at the moment", describing this as a "travesty" due to the fact that "Our observing system is inadequate".
UCS points out that he is talking about short-term internal climate variability, in particular the year 2008 "which was cooler than scientists expected, but still among the 10 warmest years on record."
Yet another email by Jones, construed by "sceptics' as evidence of scientists manipulating peer review to squeeze out legitimate climate dissenters, objects to a paper on solar variability in the climate published in Climate Research, and calls for scientists to boycott the journal until it effects a change in editorship. Yet as UCS clarifies:
"Half of the editorial board of Climate Research resigned in protest against what they felt was a failure of the peer review process. The paper, which argued that current warming was unexceptional, was disputed by scientists whose work was cited in the paper. Many subsequent publications set the record straight, which demonstrates how the peer review process over time tends to correct such lapses. Scientists later discovered that the paper was funded by the American Petroleum Institute."
Thus, UCS rightly concluded that whoever stole the emails "could only produce a handful of messages that, when taken out of context, might seem suspicious to people who are not familiar with the intimate details of climate science."
The idea that these emails constitute evidence of a "scientific conspiracy' to engineer evidence to support a fraudulent theory of man-made global warming is, in this context, preposterous.
No wonder then that three separate independent inquiries into the whole University of East Anglia email fiasco have unequivocally and thoroughly cleared the climate scientists of any wrong-doing or deception, vindicated the integrity of the scientific methods and evidence they used, and re-instated them back into their jobs. The parliamentary science and technology select committee, a university-commissioned independent inquiry by Lord Oxburgh (a former chair of that committee), and finally a comprehensive six-month Independent Review chaired by Sir Muir Russell, all concluded that the so-called "scandal' was a non-entity, and confirmed the "rigour and honesty" of the scientists involved. Pretty much the most they criticized the scientists for was for being "unhelpful and defensive" in communication with people requesting information.
About the only people who insisted on questioning these findings as part of a "whitewash' were Lord Nigel Lawson and friends from the fossil fuel industry-connected Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF). Lawson himself chairs and holds shares in the Central European Trust, whose clients include oil and gas lobby giants like BP Amaco, the Royal Dutch/Shell Group, and Texaco. Of course, the fact that the GWPF shares offices with the Institute of Materials, Minerals and Mining, which in turn shares employees from BP, is nothing more than a coincidence.
So please, dear "sceptics'. Stop regurgitating dead "news', which we now know to be false.
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