Remember this? Richard Black, 2 November 2011
The original "hide the decline" claim is one of the most easily de-bunked in the entire pantheon of easily-debunkable "sceptic" claims.
Phil Jones wrote the email in 1999, immediately following what still ranks as one of the hottest years on record, and well before the idea of a "slowdown" or "hiatus" or even "decline" in warming gained currency.
So it can't have had anything to do with hiding a global temperature decline.
And this? Richard Black, 3 November 2011
A number of comments have quite rightly pointed out that the "hide the decline" email was also critiqued at the time of "ClimateGate" in its proper context - ie, reconciling a tree-ring dataset with an instrumental dataset.
This wasn't the sense in which I dealt with it in this post, obviously - I was focussing on the mis-use of the email in claims that it "hid a decline", or slowdown, in temperatures from 1998 onwards.
With hindsight I should have made that clear in the text, and I could also usefully have pointed out that some "sceptical" blogs took pains to clarify the issue at the time, such as the wattsupwiththat post reading "contrary to what you've likely read elsewhere in the blogosphere or heard from the few policymakers and pundits actually addressing the issue, it was not the temperature decline the planet has been experiencing since 1998 that Jones and friends conspired to hide".
Then cast your mind back to this: Richard Black 31 March 2010
...the most significant and potentially damaging of the accusations [was] that Professor Jones and other climate scientists sought to subvert the peer review process, and manipulated data in a manner calculated to produce a picture of rising temperatures (the infamous "trick" e-mail)
Funny how the story just never quite seems to come out right at the BBC.