What is "Mike's Nature Trick" and why should you care?

If you don't know this one thoroughly, you really should never, ever, be telling anyone you know anything about global warming, AKA "climate change".

First of all, “Mike” is Michael Mann, who is Mr. Hockey Stick temperature graph. Way back in 1998, Mann, working with a couple other guys named Bradley and Hughes, wrote a “scientific” paper showing that temperatures had skyrocketed since about 1980. Supposedly due to man made CO2 emissions, of course. The graph for this paper was the scary thing, and it’s what Al Gore used in his 2006 crockumentary “An Inconvenient Truth”. (No he did not use “Dr. Thompson’s thermometer”.)

The term “Mike’s Nature Trick” was actually coined by Phil Jones in an email. (This email was among thousands of others released in something dubbed ‘ClimateGate’, which is worthy of many more posts.) Phil Jones is another of the leading members of the warmists, and yet he still saw what Mann did for what it was. The full sentence in the email is “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) amd from 1961 for Keith’s to hide the decline.” I left in the typo on the word “and”.

Those last 3 words should pique your interest. Hide the decline? Yep, hide the decline. Mann, Bradley, and Hughes (MBH) had used tree rings going back hundreds of years as temperature proxies. ‘Treemometers’ is as good a term as any. The huge problem for MBH, was that after 1980 the treemometers showed temperatures declining!! That would not work at all, so MBH spliced in what was in the global temperature record for those years, including whatever arbitrary “corrective adjustments” it had at the time, to create a big scary temperature increase on the graph and thus the “hockey stick” shape.

You’ll note that there is no mention of this change in the underlying data for the graph, and there’s no real justification for it, thus Phil Jones’s use of the word “trick”. I’ve got an even better word for it that I’ll hold off on for now, as Mann has been quite the litigator against a number of people who have dared to point out what this really is.

A super detailed and often complicated explanation can be found at Climate Audit, for Mike’s Nature Trick and much, much more:

https://climateaudit.org/2009/11/20/mike%E2%80%99s-nature-trick/