Confirmation bias at its worst - Climategate 2.0 edition

Phil Jones worries about "impact", not about scientific soundness, when choosing what goes into his publications:

I’m in discussion with AGU and Ellen about co-ordination as this should increase the impact of both pieces. 

And well, he (and Mike Mann) get called out for it by Bradley.

You just shouldn’t grab anything that’s in print and just use it ‘cos it’s there—that just perpetuates rubbish.

Alas, it has no lasting effect on Phil Jones.

And this by Tom Wigley is revealing:

It seems that there was a misunderstanding about what I suggested re Yang. To be more specific, I suggest adding the following to the end of the Figure 2 caption:

“….. Note that individual series are weighted according to their quality in forming a composite hemispheric-scale time series.”

The word ‘quality’ here has been chosen carefully — as something that is deliberately a bit ambiguous.

The point here is to have something that we can fall back on if anyone criticizes *any* specific input series (*not* just Yang).

These emails are amazing:

I too have expressed my concern to Phil (and Ray) over the logic that you leave all series you want in but just weight them according to some (sometimes low) correlation (in this case based on decadal values). I also believe some of the series that make up the Chinese record are dubious or obscure, but the same is true of other records Mann and Jones have used (e.g. how do you handle a series in New Zealand that has a -0.25 correlation?) .

IT IS A DIFFICULT CALL — WHETHER TO DUMP SERIES THAT HAVE NO SIGNIFICANT LINK TO TEMPERATURE AND WHICH ARE, AS WELL, DUBIOUS ON A PRIORI GROUNDS; OR TO USE A WEIGHTING SCHEME. IF ONE DID THIS BY SIMPLE MULTIPLE REGRESSION, THEN THINGS WOULD BE WEIGHTED AUTOMATICALLY. HOWEVER, STATISTICALLY ONE SHOULD STILL DUMP THE LOW CORRELATION ONES. I HAVE RESERVATIONS ABOUT WHAT MIKE AND PHIL HAVE DONE — BUT THIS IS SOMETHING WE SHOULD TALK ABOUT FACE TO FACE SOME DAY.

And suggesting to let the Mann-O-Matic fix it "AUTOMATICALLY" – nice. How would that help when:

There are problems (and limitations ) with ALL series used.