claim: A subsequent study by Dessler (2011) found that Spencer's paper was not a test of climate sensitivity or feedbacks, and his assumptions do not match empirical observational data.
evidence: The email was widely misquoted as a "trick" to "hide the decline" as though it referred to a decline in measured global temperatures, but this was obviously untrue as when the email was written temperatures were far from declining: 1998 had been the warmest year recorded.