Those of use that have Twitter accounts know that in the past couple of weeks, Dilbert creator and cartoonist Scott Adams has been delving into the question of who has the more credible arguments: Climate Alarmists or Climate Skeptics? One of the issues being discussed was “Mikes Nature Trick” and Steve McIntyre of ClimateAudit tried to help Scott Adams understand what actually happened.

Unfortunately, like many issues in the climate world, unless you have some “inside baseball” knowledge, such things often cause eyes to glaze over as is the case with Scott Adams.

Mann manipulated data in ways both large and small. Mann’s Nature trick was to splice proxy data to 1980 with instrumental data after 1980 to calculate the smoothed value. This was different trick to brute deletion of adverse data as in IPCC diagram.

— Stephen McIntyre (@ClimateAudit) January 17, 2019

clearly tastes vary. This post, which you described as one of your favorites, was described by Scott Adams as “impenetrable nonsense” – a little unfairly IMO.

— Stephen McIntyre (@ClimateAudit) January 17, 2019

I don’t blame Scott Adams for finding the issue impenetrable, it’s an obscure trick, whcih is why it got past peer review in the first place and ended up in the IPCC report as “the hockey stick”.

When I read the “impenetrable” comment, I immediately thought that wee need to do a better job of communicating the issue, and taking a cue from the beloved “Dilbert” way of doing so, I worked directly with our resident cartoonist, Josh, to do just that.

What follows is the result of that collaboration, along with some relevant links.

It is important to note that in the above cartoon, Josh focuses on the “near present” part of the hockey stick, and it’s not the entire graph with the long flat blade going back to the Medieval Warm Period and before. It focuses entirely on the fact that the tree ring temperature proxy data in modern times (from about 1960 onward) didn’t cooperate with the viewpoint of the science paper authors (it went in the wrong direction) so they truncated it and used an entirely different dataset in it’s place – surface thermometer readings. Imagine the penalties that would occur in the stock market and financial world if somebody pulled a trick like that to present data for public consumption.

The cartoon is entirely for helping Scott Adams see what we do, it is presented with respect, and in a visual language that I hope helps.

Here is the famous Climategate email that revealed what was going on:

From: Phil Jones
To: ray bradley ,mann@xxxxx.xxx, mhughes@xxxx.xxx
Subject: Diagram for WMO Statement
Date: Tue, 16 Nov 1999 13:31:15 +0000
Cc: k.briffa@xxx.xx.xx,t.osborn@xxxx.xxx

Dear Ray, Mike and Malcolm,
Once Tim’s got a diagram here we’ll send that either later today or
first thing tomorrow.
I’ve just completed Mike’s Nature trick of adding in the real temps
to each series for the last 20 years (ie from 1981 onwards) amd from
1961 for Keith’s to hide the decline. Mike’s series got the annual
land and marine values while the other two got April-Sept for NH land
N of 20N. The latter two are real for 1999, while the estimate for 1999
for NH combined is +0.44C wrt 61-90. The Global estimate for 1999 with
data through Oct is +0.35C cf. 0.57 for 1998.
Thanks for the comments, Ray.

Cheers
Phil

Prof. Phil Jones
Climatic Research Unit Telephone +44 (0) xxxxx
School of Environmental Sciences Fax +44 (0) xxxx
University of East Anglia
Norwich Email p.jones@xxxx.xxx
NR4 7TJ
UK

Links:

Keith’s Science Trick, Mike’s Nature Trick and Phil’s Combo

Mike’s Nature trick