claim: In one particularly damning email, CRU director Phil Jones said he had used ‘Mike’s Nature trick’ to ‘hide the decline’ in temperatures in the second half of the 20th century.
evidence: Despite this and the fact that 1999 had just seen record breaking global temperatures, the email was widely misquoted as a trick to hide the decline as though it referred to a decline in measured global temperatures, an accusation made publicly by the politicians Sarah Palin and Jim Inhofe.