In a recent post, I reported on the diagram in Jones 1998 (Science), which pushed hide-the-decline a year earlier than my previous inventory. (The Briffa bodge, an earlier technique, dates back to 1992 and Jones 1998 is a sort-of transition from the Briffa bodge to truncation as hide-the-decline technology.)

I’ve had a few requests for a fresh inventory of hide-the-decline incidents, updating the discussion of Oxburgh panelist Kerry Emanuel’s false claim to the US Congress that hide-the-decline had been limited to a “single lapse of judgement” in a “non peer-reviewed publication” (the WMO diagram).

However, rather than this being a “single lapse of judgement”, to my knowledge, there is NOT A SINGLE graphic in “peer reviewed literature” that shows the Briffa decline in a spaghetti graph comparison of temperature reconstructions.

I’ve done a quick inventory below (and other examples will come to mind) and re-examined the handling of the Briffa reconstruction in the spaghetti graph in each article. In 22 of the 28 diagrams listed below, the Briffa reconstruction has been truncated to hide-the-decline (following the practice of IPCC AR3 where Mann had been Lead Author.) As an alternative to showing the decline, Mann, in 1999, proposed that IPCC simply not show the Briffa reconstruction. This practice has been followed in 6 of the 28 listed below, including the influential 2006 NAS report and 2009 EPA Endangerment Finding (which used the diagram from the NAS report.) But remarkably, not a single one contains a graphic comparing the actual Briffa reconstruction to other reconstructions.

Article Figure Jones 1998 (Science) Figure captioned “Getting Warmer?” Jones et al 1999 (Rev Geophys) Figure 6 Briffa and Osborn 1999 (Science) Figure 1 IPCC FOD Figure 2.25 WMO-1999 Cover IPCC AR3 SOD Figure 2.21 Crowley and Lowery 2000 Figure 1 omits Briffa et al 2001 (JGR) Plate 3 IPCC AR3 Figure 2.21 Jones et al 2001 (Science) Figure 2A Briffa and Osborn 2002 (Science) Figure captioned “Records of Past Climate” Esper et al 2002 (Science) Figure 2 omits Bradley et al 2003 (Springer) Figure 6.5, 6.6 Mann et al 2003 (EOS) Figure 1 Briffa et al 2004 (Glob Plan Chg) Figure 8 Cook et al 2004 (QRS) Figure 1 Esper et al 2004 (EOS) Figure 1 omits Esper et al 2005 (Clim Dyn) Figure 1 omits Esper et al 2005 (GRL) omits Juckes et al 2006 (CPD) Figure 1 Hegerl et al 2007 (Nature) Figure 1 Hegerl et al 2007 (J Clim) Figure 5b IPCC AR4 2007 Figure 6.10b NAS Panel 2006 omits D’Arrigo et al 2007 (Gl Plan Chg) Figure 3 omits Mann et al 2008 (PNAS) truncated input Mann et al 2008 (PNAS) Figure 3 Kaufman et al 2009 (Science) Figure 3G omits EPA Endangerment Finding 2009 (Science) omits IPCC AR5 2013 Figure 5.7 not shown

Within the literature, there are several articles disclosing the decline, notably by Briffa himself e.g. Briffa et al 1998 (Nature 291), Briffa et al 1998 (Nature 393), Briffa 2000 (QSR) – indeed, this was how I originally noticed that the decline had been hidden in the IPCC AR3 diagram in 2005 long before Climategate – but none of these articles shows a comparison of the Briffa reconstruction to the other (Mann, Jones) reconstructions. The spaghetti graphcs of Briffa et al 2001 and Briffa et al 2004 (Glob Plan Chg) both hide-the-decline, but there are other figures that show the decline (but these other figures do not compare to other reconstructions.) Mann et al 2008 took matters to a different plane entirely: in addition to hide-the-decline in its spaghetti graph, Mann et al 2008 replaced the modern portion of Briffa MXD data with “infilled data”.

Even technical articles on the “divergence” problem do not contain diagrams showing the Briffa et a 2001 reconstruction including decline as against other reconstructions (e.g. D’Arrigo et al 2007 (Glob Plan Chg)).

In summary, far from hide-the-decline being the “single lapse of judgement” claimed by Emanuel and the Oxburgh panel, the opposite is the case: nowhere in peer reviewed academic literature can one find a diagram showing the decline in the Briffa MXD reconstruction compared to other reconstructions.



