Cowardly Furtiveness

The Wahl-Briffa correspondence contains many marks of furtiveness, due, in my opinion, to the fact that the AR4 document was now in its final stages and Wahl, who was not an IPCC contributing author or even reviewer, was now both editing the language of the final AR4 document and the responses to reviewers on an issue in which he was a disputant. The emails were all headed “confidential”, with the word “confidential” recurring in the emails. Briffa asked Wahl to “PLEASE REMEMBER that this is ‘for your eyes only’” and “Please do not pass these on to anyone at all”. Briffa asked reassurance from Wahl that the language that he had “borrowed (stolen)” from Wahl was “OK (and will not later be obvious) hopefully”.