Memorandum submitted by J Ronan (CRU 56)
With respect to the oral submissions and questions
taken on 1st March, I would like to make the following comment.
Dr Evan Harris had an interesting line of questioning
concerned with the "Hide the Decline". In his questions
he was probing whether the information on how the splicing was
done was covered in the literature. Prof Jones' reply indicated
that the information was there if you knew where to look for it.
Dr Harris and the committee may not be aware
that the main importance of this spliced data was that the diagrams
generated were used extensively in the IPCC reports, in other
presentations by, for example, Al Gore, and most importantly in
the IPCC Summary for Policy Makers. In none of those cases would
it be easy for the interested parties to be aware of what had
been done in disguising the lack of matching between the tree
ring record and the instrumental record.
Thus the great importance of the "hidden
decline" is not that any interested scientist could not have
dug up the information (although a fair amount of digging would
be required even then) but that it was used to mislead policy
makers and politicians, who would not have been aware of the "trick"
in the data.
March 2010
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