cc: rbradley@geo.umass.edu, mhughes@ltrr.arizona.edu, Scott Rutherford <srutherford@rwu.edu>, raymo@bu.edu
date: Wed, 01 Sep 2004 16:21:52 -0400
from: "Michael E. Mann" <mann@virginia.edu>
subject: Re: New Scientist climate piece - copy of email from
to: David Paterson <cairdpaterson@cs.com>

   Hi David,
   I've begun teaching for the semester now, so my comments necessarily must be brief. I hope
   you will rely not just on my comments, but on the broader perspective provided by my
   co-authors and other scientists in my field, for responses on some of these issues. I
   appreciate the work you've done thus far, and the obvious effort you've taken to get a
   handle on the underlying issues. I did, however, want to express a bit of concern that I
   have, based on your editor's comments, that this could be shaping up  as a he said/she
   said, between us and McIntyre and Mckitrick. I really hope that isn't the case--I don't
   believe that couching this in those terms will serve your readership well. This is truly
   about
   (A) a consensus view of the community of legitimate researchers in our field based on
   similar findings from numerous independent studies suggesting that  late 20th century
   hemispheric-mean warmth is anomalous in the context of the past millennium,
   vs.
   (B) spurious claims made in a social science journal w/ an editor possessing an anti-Kyoto
   agenda,  based on an analysis by two contrarians (at least one w/ noted industry ties, and
   another who is in the mining industry) without any scientific training, that have been
   successfully rebutted in  papers soon to appear in legitimate venues (that is peer-reviewed
   scientific  journals such as the American Meteorological Society journal "Journal of
   Climate").
   I apologize if my tone above is a bit strong, but I want to make sure to clarify the way
   that my colleagues and I view this whole affair, in the hope that your article will deal
   with our concerns that "New Scientist" not fall into the common trap of placing the views
   of a minority of contrarians (often w/out scientific credentials) on an equal footing with
   those of the legitimate community of scientific researchers in the field. I trust that you
   will be sensitive to our concerns.
   I hope my responses are helpful, and thanks for your continued efforts to get all of the
   facts...
   Specific responses below...
   best regards,
   Mike
   At 03:10 PM 9/1/2004, David Paterson wrote:

     Mike,
     I've finally about to my old Compuserve email account - persistent trouble over the last
     few months! - so I hope this gets by your gatekeepers.  {But as belt and braces I'll
     also copy it on the Compuserve system one last time}
     I'm just back from a couple of weeks in Peru up in the Andes and had on my return on
     Monday some questions from the New Scientist editor looking after my piece.  They want
     to run the article in a few weeks time, so I'd appreciate any responses you have by this
     Friday - I can get my modified copy to them on Monday.
     1)      She would like a comment from you vis a vis McIntyre and McKitrick saying that
     when they first asked your group for data, they got the response that it would take a
     few days to get it all together since it resided in a variety of sites - M & M drew the
     inference that no-one had previously asked for this data from yourselves.  Is that the
     case?

   I did not deal with them directly. I referred their request to my associate Scott
   Rutherford, who was a post-doc working w/ me at the time. You should discuss with him to
   get further details (srutherford@rwu.edu). Our data had been placed on a public ftp server
   more than a year before M&M ever even contacted us, so the issue is a red herring.  My
   understanding from  Scott is that they were told the data was already available through our
   public ftp site, but that they  wanted the data in a particular format (spreadsheet), and
   were not clear to him about what exactly they were looking for. Again, you would need to
   discuss w/ Scott for further details.

     2)      And she would like to know further whether its a commonplace in this kind of
     science for raw data, methodology, source codes etc used in the drafting of a
     publication to be taken 'on trust' by the rest of the palaeoclimate community

   I'm a bit concerned about a couple of false suppositions upon which this question appears
   to be premised. Our methodology was described in enough detail for others (e.g. Zorita et
   al ) to independently implement it, and all of our data was available online publicly for
   more than a year before MM ever even requested it. If you are asking about whether
   scientists in my field typically publicly post their *source codes* for performing
   statistical analyses, etc. I would say this is very rare indeed in my experience. But I
   would suggest you contact other researchers in the paleoclimate field to get a sense of
   this.

     3)      I know I touched on this question when I first talked with you, but Eugenie
     asked me if you had any sense at the time of the writing of the  98 and 99 papers that
     IPCC would use the findings so extensively in its then upcoming report.

   Frankly, how would we have any idea of that? As scientists, we of course hoped that the
   community would find our research relevant and important. When we set out on this research
   in the mid 1990s, we had no reason to believe that our results would yield the conclusion
   they ultimately did (i.e., that late 20th century warmth is anomalous in the context of our
   long-term reconstruction), although previous work (e.g. Bradley and Jones, 1993; Hughes and
   Diaz, 1994) was suggestive of this possibility. But your editor's question seems to imply
   that our research, which had begun years before the '2001 IPCC process was even underway,
   might have in some way guided by some sort of IPCC agenda. I really hope that isn't what
   your editor means to imply!

     4)      You mentioned to me that the editor of E&E - Sonia  Boehmer Christiansen (maybe
     not the correct spelling - I'll check) had made explicit ( and public) her opposition to
     the Kyoto Protocol - is that position laid out anywhere I could reach it - ie do you
     have a reference, or even a pdf file of her spelling out that position.  I will write to
     her separately asking for elucidation on this point.

   At first I thought you might be kidding. These are almost too numerous to list. She has
   written a book on her opposition to the Kyoto Protocol!!
   [1]http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/184064818X/wwwlink-software-21/202-4014417-5157
   429
   I haven't bothered reading it.
   This turned up as the first link in a google web search I did on the string "Boehmer
   Christiansen Kyoto". Other relevant links that turned up were:
   [2]http://www.hull.ac.uk/geog/staff/Boehmer.htm
   [3]http://sth.sagepub.com/cgi/content/refs/28/1/69
   [4]http://www.electromagnetism.demon.co.uk/z011.htm
   these include numerous opinion pieces she has written on the issue. There appear to be
   hundreds of similar links on the web.

     5)      My question - has Eugene Wahl's re-capitulation of your work been published {if
     so please supply me with a reference or emailed file) - I tried to contact him again at
     ENCAR before I went to Peru, but he's no longer there and the phone number I was given
     as his new contact detail doesn't respond.

   I believe that they it was submitted to Nature, and not published, probably because Nature
   had decided that the whole issue was a red herring, after having rejected the MM comment.
   I believe they have resubmitted or are about to submit, elsewhere. Eugene Wahl has moved to
   alfred university now. His email there wahle@alfred.edu. You should really discuss this
   with him. I don't have much further information.

     6)      Finally, please email me a copy of the Zorita paper - I'd like to mention it in
     my piece - but clearly need to be able to refer to it correctly.

   I've attached a reprint.

     Apologies for being burdensome - but its important to get this stuff right and in the
     proper perspective.

   No problem, its important to get the facts right and I appreciate your earnest efforts to
   do so.  I hope my responses above are of further assistance in that regard. Knowing that
   you have contacted numerous other scientists in our  field at this stage, I'm confident
   that you should have the proper perspective at this point to characterize this whole issue
   in an appropriate context.

     By the way, I have written into the piece that it was always your intention to capture
     the richness of the dynamic  behaviour of climate over the whole NH  over the  thousand
     year time scale - not simply to derive a graph of mean temperature.

   thanks. To expand a bit on that, it was not just our intention, I think its fair to say
   that our research was successful in doing precisely that! Most of the analysis in the 20+
   papers my collaborators and I have published in the past few years on this work emphasize
   spatial patterns of behavior and large-scale dynamics (ENSO, the NAO, etc.), rather than
   hemispheric mean temperature. There are, as you know, more than a dozen different estimates
   of the latter quantity now by other groups published since ours, and all of which are
   consistent within estimated uncertaintaines and when accounting for different spatial or
   seasonal emphasis. And the conclusion of anomalous late 20th century warmth is a robust
   finding of the broader community of researchers. With relative concensus on these broader
   issues, the real emphasis actual scientists working in this field is now on the detailed
   spatial patterns of change and underlying dynamical mechanisms. McIntyre and McKitrick are
   6 years behind the times.

     Regards
     David

   ______________________________________________________________
                       Professor Michael E. Mann
              Department of Environmental Sciences, Clark Hall
                         University of Virginia
                        Charlottesville, VA 22903
   _______________________________________________________________________
   e-mail: mann@virginia.edu   Phone: (434) 924-7770   FAX: (434) 982-2137
            [5]http://www.evsc.virginia.edu/faculty/people/mann.shtml
   Attachment Converted: "c:\eudora\attach\Zoritaetal-Jclim03.pdf"

