Some excerpts from the NASA FOIA docs

[hosted by Anthony Watts]: NASA_FOIA_docs_OCR (PDF – warning, 10 MB file, may take awhile on slow connections)

Pg 39:

Steve McIntyre, a former mlnlng executive, now a blogger and global warming denier, is blowing a small correction in our procedure of handling US data way out of proportion. The correction has absolutely no impact on the global mean temperature time series, over the US it made a difference of .15 C. r checked what this correction does to your map and it does change the colors somewhat over parts of the US; the rest of the world is unaffected. Even the change over the US is way within the margin of error (0.5 C). So there is little need to make any changes. The timing is a bit awkward, though. Sorry for that, [Reto Ruedy, NASA]

Pg 70:

To observe that the warming accelerates would take even longer observation times, another 50-100 years. It would be bad enough if it keeps increasing at the current rate of ,2C/decade as it has since 1980. It briefly increased at almost that rate in the 1915-1945 period but then it stayed even or even decreased a little til about 1980. The period from 1880-1920 was a period of basically constant global temperatures. Again, the frightening thing about today's temperature rise is that it was predicted 25 years ago based on solid physics. So chances are it will not stop until we deal with the cause of it ! The good thing is that we know the cause, and we could use that knowledge if people just paid attention to the experts rather than to the bloggers. Reto

Pg 92: 2007, Hansen on Steve McIntyre:

Do we want to lower ourselves to debating with a court jester? Of course, that is what he wants. I don't have a strong preference as long as it is not taking a significant amount of my time.

Pg 104:

...It does however highlight the rhetorical power of saying that the code is secret and things are being kept from the public. It may still be worth putting up a clean version of the adjustment program on the website in order to have something to point to in such cases. gavin

Pg 135:

Given that the purpose of our effort is to compute long term trends, a simpler and more meaningful measure for the statistical significance is the interannual variability of the US means; its standard deviation is 0.8F (after subtracting the small linear trend). The corresponding number for the global means is 0.3F . To be remarkable, an observed change has to be a multiple of that standard deviation; compared to that, the errors caused by "bad" stations, urban heat island effect, etc. are of little importance. Reto

Pg 140:

From: Andrew Revkin To: thomas.r.karl...jay.lawrimore...jhansen...gschmidt...rruedY...Date: Sat, 25 Aug 2007
...
well, in my highly imperfect universe of limited space, tried to cut thru the caricatures and focus on what is *not* in dispute. not something i could ignore -. even after a week on a boat off central america (wish i was still out there). http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/26/us/26climate.html thanks for your input. on to more interesting issues. tom, i didn't hear back on budget for the climate reference network.« is that on track?

Pg 165:

My apologies if the quick response that I sent to Andy Revkin and several other journalists, including the suggestion that it was a tempest inside somebody's teapot dome, and that perhaps a light was not on upstairs, was immoderate. It was not ad hominem, though. Jim [Hansen]

Pg 192:

[To Gavin Schmidt] I just left you voicemaiL but also wanted to write to explore your availability to speak with me about the GISS temperature record. Bob Cahalan feels, and I agree, that given the recent turn of events it might be a good idea to educate the public _ about how these data are gathered, and why it's actually harder to calculate average temperature for, say, the continental U.S. than it is for the whole globe. Anyway, I can see the rightwing blogosphere is revving up into high gear now and so perhaps a report on NASA's Earth Observatory and seizing this opportunity to inform the public will steal most of the hot air out of their collective balloon, eh? Please advise me on your availability to bring me up to speed. I think Bob C. would like to join us in that conversation as well best regards, David Herring [NASA]

Pg 48: [Note that as of 1999, 1934 was quite a bit warmer than 1998]

I didn't keep all the data, but some of them are
1934 1998
1999 July 1.459 0.918
2000 Nov. 1.273 1.151
2001 Jan. 1.235 1.199 <= These
changes in early years may be due to different analysis
2006 Jan. 1.235 0.930 <= This
is questionable, I may have kept some data which I was checking.
2007 Jan. 1.227 1.242 <= This
is only time we had 1998 warmer than 1934, but one web for 7 months.
2007 Mar. 1.247 1.234 <= Somehow
I recomputed in March, but didn't make changes to the web page.
2007 Aug. 1.249 1.226 <= Most
recent with corrections, and with July data
I am sorry, I should have kept more data, but I
was not interested in US data after 2001 paper.
Makiko [NASA]