Compare and contrast. Here is a math teacher describing a technique in algebra:
The trick to deriving the quadratic equation is remembering to complete the square.
You probably remember that from junior high school. Now, here is climate scientist Phil Jones describing a statistical technique in an email to another climate scientist that was recently hacked and stolen from the University of East Anglia webmail server:
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) and from 1961 for Keith’s to hide the decline.
Climate skeptics have gone gaga over this, of course, insisting that the word “trick” means something nefarious designed to pull the wool over the eyes of the world. But it’s not. RealClimate explains:
The paper in question is the Mann, Bradley and Hughes (1998) Nature paper on the original multiproxy temperature reconstruction, and the ‘trick’ is just to plot the instrumental records along with reconstruction so that the context of the recent warming is clear. Scientists often use the term “trick” to refer to a “a good way to deal with a problem”, rather than something that is “secret”, and so there is nothing problematic in this at all. As for the ‘decline’, it is well known that Keith Briffa’s maximum latewood tree ring density proxy diverges from the temperature records after 1960 (this is more commonly known as the “divergence problem”–see e.g. the recent discussion in this paper) and has been discussed in the literature since Briffa et al in Nature in 1998 (Nature, 391, 678-682). Those authors have always recommend not using the post 1960 part of their reconstruction, and so while ‘hiding’ is probably a poor choice of words (since it is ‘hidden’ in plain sight), not using the data in the plot is completely appropriate, as is further research to understand why this happens.
This won’t slow down the skeptics for a millisecond, of course, but there you have it. The rest of the email stash contains plenty of examples of scientists being annoyed with skeptics and wishing them ill, but that’s about it. For the record, though, I also find skeptics annoying and wish them ill, so the only surprise to me is that the scientists managed to restrain themselves so well even in private. I don’t think I could have kept things so civil.
