Email 4417, Feb 2005, Warmist Peter Thorne to Phil Jones: "I don't think we should be scared of admitting that we just don't know, if indeed we just don't know (which I believe is a fair reflection of the state of the science)"

Email 4417

I don't think we should be scared of admitting that we just don't know, if indeed we just don't know (which I believe is a fair reflection of the state of the science)...I do not believe that Fu et al. weightings is some panacea nor that the "cancellation" works on all space and timescales (the statement needs to be *proved* it cannot be accepted as an article of faith - that is not the way science works). I'd be amazed if it did. The reservations raised in the peer reviewed literature need to be better articulated here for the document to be fair and balanced...My feeling is that we are missing a significant opportunity here to outline the considerable uncertainty in evolution aloft in favour of deciding one subset of approaches is right and presenting this as gospel truth. I am very uncomfortable with this....So to state boldly that trends agree and therefore all is well is again our living in a fools paradise. It is true, but it just shows that trend metrics are very dangerous beasties and should be handled with care...
Common question 3.2. You'll be unsurprised to hear that I think this paints too rosy a picture of our understanding the vertical structure of temperature changes. Observations do not show rising temperatures throughout the tropical troposphere unless you accept one single study and approach and discount a wealth of others. This is just downright dangerous. We need to communicate the uncertainty and be honest.