Understanding “Hide the Decline”

Thanks to Kate over at SDA for this:  Understanding Climategate’s Hidden Decline.  As she said – a MUST READ.

Key to the problem is:

The truth is that the proxy data was scrapped because unlike those measured, reconstructed temperatures showed a marked decline after 1980.  And, as the chart plotted temperature anomalies against what the plotters selected as the “normal” period and temperatures of 1961 to 1990, the reconstruction would have been quite unremarkable otherwise.  So at the 1980 mark, the actual post-1980 measurements were actually attached to the truncated proxy series to create the illusion they were one.

So not only did conspirators cherry-pick the one series of the four that approximated measured temperatures the longest, they also terminated that series at the point that it too, began to trend down.  They then joined it to the actual 1980-1999 temperatures to “hide the decline” in the final product, as that decline created an inexplicable divergence between the reconstructed and measured temperatures.   The existence of which challenges the entire series dating back to 1000 AD.

This invalidates the idea that the warming of the last 150 years (up to 1998) was unprecedented.  Which means that trying to blame human activity for it is ridiculous.  And it is even more ridiculous to think we can change it.