From: Phil Jones <p.jones@uea.ac.uk>
To: Tim Osborn <t.osborn@uea.ac.uk>, Michael Mann <mann@meteo.psu.edu>,Gavin Schmidt <gschmidt@giss.nasa.gov>
Subject: Re: attacks against Keith
Date: Tue Sep 29 09:17:12 2009

    Mike, Gavin,
       As Tim has said Keith is making a good recovery and hopes to be back in soon, gradually
   during October and hopefully full time from November.
       I talked to him by phone yesterday and sent him and Tom Melvin the threads on CA. As
   you're fully aware, trying to figure out what McIntyre has done is going to be difficult.
   It would be so much easier if they followed normal procedure and wrote up a comment and
   submitted it to a journal. I looked through the threads yesterday trying to make sense of
   what he's done. My suspicion is that he's brought in other tree ring series from more
   distant sites, some of which may not even be larch. There are two chronologies that have
   been used - one called the Polar Urals and one called Yamal. PU is a Schweingruber site
   with density as well as ring width. The PU reconstruction is therefore not a chronology,
   but a regression based reconstruction from both MXD and TRW. Yamal is just a ring width
   series (with lots of sub-fossil material, so much older) from an area some distance (at
   least 500km) north of PU. It was developed by Hantemirov and Shiyatov and was poorly
   standardized - corridor method. I also don't think McIntyre understands the RCS method even
   though he claims to have a program.  The ends and the age structure of the samples are
   crucial in all this, but I think he just throws series in.
      I totally agree that these attacks (for want of a better word) are getting worse.
   Comments on the thread are snide in the extreme, with many saying they see no need to
   submit the results to a journal. They have proved Keith has manipulated the data, so job
   done.
       Hadn't thought of Senate debates. I'd put this down to the build up to Copenhagen,
   which is sort of the same.

   [1]http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/09/24/a-look-at-the-thompson-et-al-paper-hi-tech-wiggle-
   matching-and-removal-of-natural-variables/
     is a complete reworking of Dave Thompson's paper which is in press in J. Climate
   (online). Looked at this, but they have made some wrong assumptions, but someone has put a
   lot of work into it.

   [2]http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/09/24/ooops-dutch-meteorological-institute-caught-in-wea
   ther-station-siting-failure-moved-station-and-told-nobody/
    This one is a complete red herring - nothing wrong with De Bilt measurements. This is what
   it is about according to someone at KNMI
    The issue you refer to is causing a lot of noise in the Netherlands (even MP's asking
   questions to the minister). It seems this is not at all about the observational series
   (nothing strange is going on), but more related to the "Law on KNMI" and the division of
   tasks between commercial providers and KNMI to be discussed by parliament soon.
    Cheers
    Phil
   At 08:46 29/09/2009, Tim Osborn wrote:

     Hi Mike and Gavin,
     thanks for your emails re McIntyre, Yamal and Keith.
     I'll pass on your best wishes for his recovery when I next speak to Keith.  He's been
     off almost 4 months now and won't be back for at least another month (barring a couple
     of lectures that he's keen to do in October as part of a gradual return).  Hopefully
     he'll be properly back in November.
     Regarding Yamal, I'm afraid I know very little about the whole thing -- other than that
     I am 100% confident that "The tree ring data was hand-picked to get the desired result"
     is complete crap.  Having one's integrity questioned like this must make your blood boil
     (as I'm sure you know, with both of you having been the target of numerous such
     attacks).  Though it would be nice to shield Keith from this during his recovery, I
     think Keith will already have heard about this because he had recently been asked to
     look at CA in relation to the Kaufman threads (Keith was a co-author on that and Darrell
     had asked Keith to help with a response to the criticisms).
     Apart from Keith, I think Tom Melvin here is the only person who could shed light on the
     McIntyre criticisms of Yamal.  But he can be a rather loose cannon and shouldn't be
     directly contacted about this (also he wasn't involved in the Yamal chronology being
     discussed, though he has been involved in a regional reconstruction that we've recently
     been working towards that uses these -- and more -- data).
     Perhaps Phil and I should talk with Tom and also see if Keith is already considering a
     response.
     Off to lecture for a couple of hours now...
     Cheers
     Tim
     Dr Timothy J Osborn, Academic Fellow
     Climatic Research Unit
     School of Environmental Sciences
     University of East Anglia
     Norwich  NR4 7TJ, UK
     e-mail:   t.osborn@uea.ac.uk
     phone:    +44 1603 592089
     fax:      +44 1603 507784
     web:      [3]http://www.cru.uea.ac.uk/~timo/
     sunclock: [4]http://www.cru.uea.ac.uk/~timo/sunclock.htm

   Prof. Phil Jones
   Climatic Research Unit        Telephone +44 (0) 1603 592090
   School of Environmental Sciences    Fax +44 (0) 1603 507784
   University of East Anglia
   Norwich                          Email    p.jones@uea.ac.uk
   NR4 7TJ
   UK
   ----------------------------------------------------------------------------

References

   1. http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/09/24/a-look-at-the-thompson-et-al-paper-hi-tech-wiggle-matching-and-removal-of-natural-variables/
   2. http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/09/24/ooops-dutch-meteorological-institute-caught-in-weather-station-siting-failure-moved-station-and-told-nobody/
   3. http://www.cru.uea.ac.uk/~timo/
   4. http://www.cru.uea.ac.uk/~timo/sunclock.htm

