The Hockey Stick was never accurate—and CRU knew it

By News on the Net —— Bio and Archives November 23, 2009

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The infamous "hockey stick" temperature graph purporting to show a runaway acceleration in global temperatures beginning in 1850 was never accurate--and the Climatic Research Unit knew it wasn't accurate when they published it.

This is the only reasonable conclusion from an analysis of another data set, sent in 1999 by Tim Osborne to Michael Mann, and copied to Phil Jones and Keith Briffa, the director and associate director of the CRU. The "hockey stick" graph, which appeared on the cover of the WMO Statement on the Status of the Global Climate in 1999, is now known to have its basis in this e-mail (File 0942777075.txt) from Phil Jones to Ray Bradley, Michael Mann, and Malcolm Hughes:

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

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