Monday, August 05, 2013

Revisiting bombshell ClimateGate email 207 from hockey stick co-author Raymond Bradley: "it may be that Mann et al simply don't have the long-term trend right"

Email 207
[Hocky stick co-author Raymond Bradley in July 2000] there are real questions to be asked of the paleo reconstruction...Indeed, in the verification period, the biggest "miss" was an apparently very warm year in the late 19th century that we did not get right at all. This makes criticisms of the "antis" difficult to respond to (they have not yet risen to this level of sophistication, but they are "on the scent"). Furthermore, it may be that Mann et al simply don't have the long-term trend right, due to underestimation of low frequency info...Whether we have the 1000 year trend right is far less certain (& one reason why I hedge my bets on whether there were any periods in Medieval times that might have been "warm", to the irritation of my co-authors!). So, possibly if you crank up the trend over 1000 years, you find that the envelope of uncertainty is comparable with at least some of the future scenarios, which of course begs the question as to what the likely forcing was 1000 years ago. (My money is firmly on an increase in solar irradiance...)

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