Came up empty and got dissed

The great thing about the comments at Rabett Run, is Eli learns a lot. A lot of the time Eli is not paying attention so that is a good thing. For example the great GISS Email dump. Turns out that Judicial Watch was pulling a Mo on CEI, which played Curley's nose.

The obvious back story now that it gets pointed out is that CEI had three FOIA requests pending since 2007, one for anything having to do with the error uncovered by Steve McIntyre in how Goddard incorporated post 2000 USHCN data, one asking for all Emails about McIntyre 's correspondence with GISS about this, and one (still pending) asking for any emails mentioning Real Climate. It was these pending FOIA requests that CEI threatened to sue about in November 2009 at the height of the heavy breathing on the theft of the CRU emails.

The Email dump appeared quietly in December in the Goddard FOIA library and kind of sat there like a dead fish, because, as we said earlier, they reflect well on GISS, and poorly on McIntyre and his horde. No there there for CEI, which cut its losses, moving the bet to the third FOIA. They may be disappointed again.

However, there are all sorts of opportunists out there on the wingnut right, and Judicial Watch has a history of being slightly shifty. They found the response and put out a press release

Judicial Watch, the public interest group that investigates and prosecutes government corruption, announced today that it has obtained internal documents from NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) related to a controversy that erupted in 2007 when Canadian blogger Stephen McIntyre exposed an error in NASA's handling of raw temperature data from 2000-2006 that exaggerated the reported rise in temperature readings in the United States. According to multiple press reports, when NASA corrected the error, the new data apparently caused a reshuffling of NASA's rankings for the hottest years on record in the United States, with 1934 replacing 1998 at the top of the list.

As Hansen points out in Email specially linked to by Judicial Watch

a) the error only affected post 2000 data so it had nothing to do with data from 1934 and 1998
b) this was about US, not global temperature anomalies
c) the difference between GISSTEMP US temperatures for 1998 and 1934 was a meaninglessly small
d) as the analysis methods changed over time the difference moved around a bit, but again, not in a way that was significant.

This, of course, is the answer to carrot eater's question

Eli, they made a movie about you. Something about a gospel.

You should play a game. See if you can guess which email is going to be taken out of context as proof of ..something or other.

Eli has been thinking of packaging his essays together and selling it to Lubos and Judicial Watch as the book of Eli.

Of course, Judicial Watch was too stupid to figure out that the Emails showed GISS reacting promptly and carefully to correct the error. OK, they called McIntyre a clown, but, let's be honest here, comparing him to Judicial Watch is like comparing George W. Bush to Lyndon LaRouche.

Comments?