Claim: "Mike's Nature trick" has nothing to do with "hide the decline", instead refering to a technique by Michael Mann to plot instrumental temperature along with past reconstructions.

Relevance (1 = gold evidence, 0 = mined hard negative): 1
Passage: "Mike's Nature trick" referred to Michael E. Mann's paper on temperature trends published by Michael Mann in Nature in 1998, which combined various proxy records and related them to actual temperature records: it included a figure later dubbed the ""hockey stick" graph, which clearly distinguished between the proxy and instrumental data.

Relevance (1 = gold evidence, 0 = mined hard negative): 1
Passage: Many commentators quoted one email in which Phil Jones said that he had used "Mike's Nature trick" in a 1999 graph for the World Meteorological Organization "to hide the decline" in proxy temperatures derived from tree-ring analyses when measured temperatures were actually rising.

Relevance (1 = gold evidence, 0 = mined hard negative): 0
Passage: 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.

Relevance (1 = gold evidence, 0 = mined hard negative): 0
Passage: Several scientific sources state that the decline being referred to is a decline in tree ring climate proxy metrics, not temperature.

Relevance (1 = gold evidence, 0 = mined hard negative): 0
Passage: 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.

Relevance (1 = gold evidence, 0 = mined hard negative): 0
Passage: "A controversy over leaked e-mails exchanged among global warming scientists is part of a 'smear campaign' to derail next month's United Nations climate summit in Copenhagen, one of the scientists, meteorologist Michael Mann, said Tuesday...Climate change sceptics 'don't have the science on their side any more, so they've resorted to a smear campaign to distract the public from the reality of the problem and the need to confront it head-on in Copenhagen' said Mann"; Feldman, Stacy (25 November 2009).

Relevance (1 = gold evidence, 0 = mined hard negative): 0
Passage: This "decline" referred to the well-discussed tree-ring divergence problem, but these two phrases were taken out of context by global warming sceptics, including US Senator Jim Inhofe and former Governor of Alaska Sarah Palin, as though they referred to some decline in measured global temperatures, even though they were written when temperatures were at a record high.

Relevance (1 = gold evidence, 0 = mined hard negative): 0
Passage: He is quoted as being skeptical of global warming, and is described by Michael E. Mann as a "prominent climate change contrarian.

Relevance (1 = gold evidence, 0 = mined hard negative): 0
Passage: Paleoclimatology (in British spelling, palaeoclimatology) is the study of climates for which direct measurements were not taken.

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Passage: Michael Mann, director of Pennsylvania State University's Earth System Science Center, said that sceptics were "taking these words totally out of context to make something trivial appear nefarious" and called the entire incident a careful, "high-level, orchestrated smear campaign to distract the public about the nature of the climate change problem".