Word: mailings
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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According to PSU's Mann, that statistical "trick" that Jones refers to in one e-mail - which has been trumpeted by skeptics - simply referred to the replacing of proxy temperature data from tree rings in recent years with more accurate data from air temperatures. It's an analytical technique that has been openly discussed in scientific journals for over a decade - hardly the stuff of conspiracy...
Perhaps most damningly, in an e-mail from 1999, Jones refers to one of Mann's studies from the prominent journal Nature in a discussion of his own data: "I've just completed Mike's Nature trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years (i.e. from 1981 onwards) and from 1961 for Keith's to hide the decline." (By the "decline," Jones is presumably referring to the fact that temperature data reconstructed from tree-ring density - a common way to estimate global temperatures before the widespread use of the thermometer - diverges somewhat from...
Many skeptics argue that the case for man-made global warming has been essentially undone, and that before the world goes any further in considering action to control greenhouse-gas emissions, all scientific evidence for warming must be reevaluated. Jones' e-mail about Mann's "trick" appears to indicate that climate researchers have been actively manipulating scientific data to better fit their models on climate change, while other e-mails seemingly confirm what skeptics had long suspected - that the globe in recent years wasn't warming as fast as theories on climate change had assumed. Most of all, the tone...
Climate scientists are taking the e-mail controversy seriously. Inquiries are under way at University of East Anglia and Penn State, and IPCC head Rajendra Pachauri has said that the controversy cannot be "swept under the carpet," promising also that the U.N. body will examine the e-mails independently. But global-warming skeptics have already declared victory. "It appears from the details of the scandal that there is no relationship whatsoever between human activities and climate change," said Mohammed Al-Sabban, Saudi Arabia's lead climate negotiator, according to the BBC. (Watch TIME's video "The Icy Clues to Global...
Ultimately, though, we need to place Climategate/Swifthack in its proper context: amidst a decades-long effort by the fossil-fuel industry and other climate skeptics to undercut global-warming research - often by means that are far more nefarious than anything that appears in the CRU e-mails. George W. Bush's Administration attempted to censor NASA climatologist James Hansen, while the fossil-fuel industry group the Global Climate Coalition ignored its own scientists as it spread doubt about man-made global warming. That list of wrongdoing goes on. One of the main skeptic groups promoting the e-mail controversy...