Arjay,

Thanks for your interpretation of what “hide the decline” means – but you make the common mistake of not ‘fact checking’ what you read in mainstream media or your favourite blog/s. You certainly don’t go to the primary source for your information, like all good sceptics would.

Hasbeen,

You on the other hand, are different. You have obviously done some homework – yet you still fail to get it right. Why?

Either you are so ignorant of the science, or you are deliberately distorting or misrepresenting what has occurred. Nevertheless, you have clearly cherry-picked phrases and taken them out of context.

_____

Everybody

“Hide the decline” refers to Keith Briffa’s maximum latewood tree-ring density proxy diverging from the temperature records after 1960 (not for the 20 years approaching 2,000 Hasbeen).

This is well known within the scientific community because, rather than “hide” the divergence, he published a paper on it for all to see in 1998 (Nature, 391, 678-682).

Briffa and his team of researchers have always recommended not using the post 1960 part of their reconstruction, the decline has never been “hidden”.

Obviously, further research into the “divergence problem” is required. In the mean time, I can only suggest to people like Arjay and Hasbeen that they take their blinkers off, put their ideological biases aside, and stop shooting from the hip

Qanda it is in exercise in masochistic futility trying to debate guys like Arjay.

Their paranoia is so extreme that they can't even properly read and more importantly comprehend a response to their ravings.

Take his last response
"Peter king tries to write off everything as a conspiracy yet fails to address the facts.Fact 1.C.Monckton found several hidden references to a world Govt in the Copenhagen treaty which Rudd was about to sign"

What I actually said was "It is hard to have a sensible debate with people like Arjay who sees a conspiracy in every piece of evidence and presumably genuinely believes all of the hard working, poorly paid, disconnected researchers around the world feel the need to lie and falsify findings to ensure their funding." No suggestion that I see any conspiracy...far from it!

Extrapolating this lack of comprehension explains the shrill posting on this site as to "climategate", "Cantcount" Monckton and any other "one line grab" that talks of world governments etc.

Your pleas for these guys to "do their homework" is lost as they would need to understand actual sentences with words of more than one syllable.

This is of course totally off topic but the frustration of ill informed people is too much to bear :)

Well done on catching Arjay out. Of course, he should know the definition of that specific statistical technique known as hide the decline:

Where there is an "obvious anomoly" but you don't know why (read "doesn't show what I want"), perform trick to make it do what I want, or similarly recommend just ignoring data. Whatever you do, don't question validity and reliability of whole proxy reconstruction, do unburden oneself from the scientific stance of unknowing, perform elaborate but artful statistical manipulation, and adopt shrill and pompous tone of qanda, Ken Fabos or Peter King to convince others that you are totally informed and that this is the reason for being perpetually frustrated.

The climatocracy is crumbling and I'm loving every minute.
Have another drink gentlemen.

Are we supposed to take Hasbeen or Arjay seriously? All the thermometer and satellite data which shows warming is wrong because of some tree ring data? Utter rubbish - the proxy data which used to follow thermometer data started diverging; which do you leave out because it's clearly wrong and which do you keep because it's clearly right? Hasbeen and Arjay want people to believe every measure that shows warming is wrong because scientist leave out stuff that's obviously wrong. The same Arjay, who thinks the planet is cooling because - "The Northern hemisphere has had record cold winters that excel records of 40 yrs or more" but who hasn't even looked at the satellite data for January or checked how much of the planet was experiencing warmer than usual temperatures during that time. You really think this shows a superior grasp of facts? There's a link in my previous comments to the satellite data that shows that January 2010 was the warmest in the 30 plus year of the RSS record. A lot of the planet including Vancouver was experiencing much warmer temperatures than average during that 'cold snap'.

Time people stop jumping to conclusions based on selected bits that suit an agenda and look at the whole of what is known and measured; temperature trends - satellite, weather station, borehole, ice loss trends, ocean heat content trends, sea level trends, . Only by being selective (with bias) can anyone even atttempt to show that warming isn't happening. Sorry guys you aren't fooling anyone but yourselves with this green conspiracy stuff.

I see the thread on my article has veered off beyond the polling issues. But qanda, if you are going to jump on Arjay, you might as well get your facts straight. It was Phil Jones who used the phrase about Mike Mann's "trick" in Nature. As I googled to find the correct email I came across this entry on Climateaudit. http://climateaudit.org/2009/11/20/mike%E2%80%99s-nature-trick/ Not only does it have the primary source (which appears to have eluded qanda despite his lecture to Arjay about primary sources), but it gives some good descriptions of what was being done.

And this is where we bring it back to polling. It is quite outrageous for anyone to suggest that the proxy data is obviously wrong and so needs to be adjusted. The proxy data is measuring whatever it is that it is measuring, but it is obviously not temperature because when you match it against the temperature record it doesn't fit. In which case all of these reconstructions are useless as they are just as likely to diverge from temperature in the past as they have in the present.

It is not a matter of "further research".

I would regard it as fraudulent to do anything like this with my data. No pollster worth their salt would fiddle with things in this way. You can't excuse what has been done here by saying that someone did a paper explaining it, so that makes it OK. It doesn't. It is a good demonstration of how degraded climate "science" is that anyone would accept that as reasonable.

Graham, I was not referring to Phil Jones at all, despite your protestations to the contrary.

I was referencing Keith Briffa, specifically Nature (391, 678-682).

Indeed, I did not even raise the "emails" that a lot of people (you now included) seem to want to focus on.

Proxy reconstructions are ok if they support anti-AGW, strange that.