By Steve McIntyre

One of the very first contributions to realclimate was an FAQ from Jeff Severighaus on Dec 3, 2004. A year earlier, Severinghaus attempted (unsuccessfully) to get an explanation of the “divergence” problem from Mann and the rest of the Team. Severinghaus had become interested in the question following a presentation by Tom Karl of NOAA in which he had used a figure from Briffa and Osborn 2002, in which he wondered about the “flat” response of the tree ring proxies in the last half of the 20th century.

In nearly all defences of the deletion of the decline in spaghetti graphs that yield a rhetorical effect of coherence between the Briffa and other reconstructions in the last half of the 20th century, it’s been argued that the divergence problem was fully disclosed in a couple of 1998 Briffa articles and that this disclosure in the original technical literature constituted sufficient disclosure – a point that I contested long before Climategate.

The Severinghaus exchange is highly pertinent to this issue. Severinghaus was a climate scientist who was not a specialist in the area who asked specifically about a diagram in which the decline had been hidden (though Severinghaus was unaware that the decline had been hidden.)

Severinghaus was concerned merely by the flattening of proxy response. One can only imagine how the exchange would have read had Severinghaus been aware that the Briffa reconstruction actually declined sharply. Read and see whether Mann, Jones and/or Briffa drew Severinghaus’ attention to the early articles in which the divergence problem was disclose.

On the afternoon of Feb 1, 2003 California time (emails -2545, 19, 4355 Feb 2, 2003 00:15 GMT), Severinghaus wrote to Tom Karl of NOAA about his presentation at the MIT Global Change Forum the previous day. Severinghaus asked about the “flat” response of tree rings to late 20th century warmth, referring to an article by Briffa and Osborn in Science (2002). The diagram in question would be the following:

Figure 1. Briffa and Osborn (Science 2002) Figure 1.

Severinghaus observed that this lack of response is an “embarrassment” and that it “casts doubt on the integrity of the proxy”: