Each time I read some article commenting that the emails were just taken out of context, my first response is to consider them liars — a word I don’t use without consideration. Sometimes they are just stupid people, but there is simply no way to be familiar with the emails and not recognize the fraud which was exposed. It isn’t like the context of ‘hide the decline’ didn’t exist and it isn’t like there is any possibility of rational explanation for the behavior within the bounds of science.
The Air Vent practically became a climate blog because I couldn’t believe that Mann was simply pasting data on the end of proxies – well before climategate. When I first saw that the Shweingruber/Briffa series of ‘hide the decline’ was chopped off and replaced – the relevant quote from Mann08 became my favorite at tAV. I repeated it half a dozen times in my posts:
Because of the evidence for loss of temperature sensitivity after 1960 (1), MXD data were eliminated for the post-1960 interval. The RegEM algorithm of Schneider (9) was used to estimate missing values for proxy series terminating before the 1995 calibration interval endpoint, based on their mutual covariance with the other available proxy data over the full 1850–1995 calibration interval.
You might think that was disclosure but the DATA was not publicly available at this time. This is exactly the main climategate issue discussed pre-climategate and described with every word except fraud prior to climategate at the Air Vent.
I totally flipped out over this back then:
http://noconsensus.wordpress.com/2008/10/03/the-hockey-stick-data-hoax/
20 percent of Mann08′s results were from the hide the decline data handled quite similarly to climategate! Looking back, there are some great quotes which directly mirror the sane worlds reaction to ‘hide the decline’.
Out of context —- bull!