cc: "Cotter, Rosalind" <R.Cotter@nature.com>, "Campbell, Philip" <P.Campbell@nature.com>, rbradley@geo.umass.edu, mhughes@ltrr.arizona.edu, Tim Osborn <t.osborn@uea.ac.uk>, Phil Jones <p.jones@uea.ac.uk>, Keith Briffa <k.briffa@uea.ac.uk>, Scott Rutherford <srutherford@rwu.edu>
date: Thu, 20 Nov 2003 07:16:20 -0500
from: "Michael E. Mann" <mann@virginia.edu>
subject: RE: Energy and Environment Paper
to: "Langenberg, Heike" <H.Langenberg@nature.com>

   Dear Heike,
   Thanks for your message.  We're happy to help Nature out in any way we can here...
   First a little more background. McKitrick and McIntyre have been deliberately trying to
   create a controversy where there is none. They know that their own published "correction"
   has been shown to be total nonsense as demonstrated by a paper in submission (a preliminary
   version of which was made for distribution after their study came out), and also this very
   nice article published in "USA Today" by their staff science writer Dan Vergano the other
   day:
   [1]http://www.usatoday.com/weather/climate/2003-11-18-warming-debate_x.htm
   So instead they've been trying to manufacture a controversy about data availability where
   there is none (incidentally, they have been making similar false threats against NSF
   program directors--I won't go into the politics behind this, but its pretty transparent
   what they're up to).
   The have been intentionally misleading about the availability of our  proxy data. The data
   have all been available on our public ftp site since July 2002 here:
   [2]ftp://holocene.evsc.virginia.edu/pub/MBH98/
   and other scientists have successfully acquired that data. This forced USA to publish a
   retraction of the claim made by McKitrick and McIntyre that we hadn't made our data
   publicly available last week:

          c) USA TODAY - THURSDAY - November 13, 2003 - 14A

          Corrections & Clarifications
          In an Oct. 29 Forum article about new research that challenges the findings of an
          earlier study on global warming, the writer said the data on the original study by
          University of Virginia assistant professor Michael Mann aren't available online. The
          data can be accessed at [3]ftp://holocene.evsc.virginia.edu/pub/MBH98/

   Note that the full data set could not be made available until a few years after the '98
   study, because we had to give various researchers who provided us unpublished data on a
   proprietary basis the opportunity to publish those data first.
   The description of the methodology used in our analysis in the MBH98 paper is complete
   enough that other researchers have independently reproduced it without any additional
   information from us:
   Zorita, E., F. Gonzalez-Rouco, and S. Legutke, Testing the Mann et al. (1998) approach to
   paleoclimate reconstructions in the context of a 1000-yr control simulation with the ECHO-G
   Coupled Climate Model, J. Climate, 16, 1378-1390, 2003.
   so we see no need to expand on it.
   The only potential exception is the description of how some of the proxy indicator
   sub-groups were represented in the data set, and that is actually a "data set" issue which
   we will clarify (see below).
   The data is available in a particular directory tree structure (see sub-directories) of the
   above ftp directory.  This is related to the fact that different groups of data were used
   over different time intervals owing to the stepwise nature of the reconstruction which was
   described in our article.
   We agree that some additional descriptive files in each directory and/or a reorganization
   of the directory structure might have helped to clarify precisely which data were used over
   precisely which time intervals, and had we known that a concerted effort was going to be
   made to mispresent our study and our dataset, we would have put more effort into this.
   Conveniently enough, we had planned to create a simpler reorganized directory structure of
   the data anyway, to address these sorts of scurrilous accusations, especially since the
   same dataset (and other dataset) are used in a paper co-authored by Scott Rutherford, Ray
   Bradley, Malcolm Hughes, Phil Jones, Keith Briffa, and Tim Osborn which we expect to be
   published sometime in the near future.
   So we will create ASAP a new version of the dataset organized in a simpler manner--it will
   simply contain all of the series (and only the seies) that were used for each sub-interval
   in our reconstruction separately. As indicated in our original Nature supplementary
   information (we have kept a mirror here:
   ftp://eclogite.geo.umass.edu/pub/mann/ONLINE-PREPRINTS/MultiProxy/stats-supp.html) this
   involves the following number of distinct indicators over the various sub-intervals:
   Back to 1820: 112
   Back to 1800: 102
   Back to 1780:  97
   Back to 1760:  93
   Back to 1750:  89
   Back to 1730:  79
   Back to 1700:  74
   Back to 1600:  57
   Back to 1500:  28
   Back to 1450:  24
   Back to 1400:  22
   So the easiest way to provide the full data set used is in terms of 11 matrices of data
   containing the precise set of indicators used, and a "README" file describing the data
   format in detail, to make sure there can be *no* uncertainty as to precisely how these data
   were used in the MBH98 study. This was also include a short description of the procedure
   (used to represent subgroups of certain proxy data networks by a smaller number of "PCs"
   (and the objective criterion used to determine how many PCs were kep) which we agree was
   terse in the original paper and supplementary information.
   I will work with our associate Scott Rutherford who has handled the data for over the past
   few years to create the above version of the dataset and README file ASAP and will be in
   contact with Nature as soon as soon as this is available, which should be shortly.
   Is there a particular individual on the technical staff at Nature that we should be
   communicating with directly?
   Thanks for your help,
   Mike
   At 11:23 AM 11/20/2003 +0000, Langenberg, Heike wrote:

     Dear Mike,

     In the wake of the debate started by the publication of the Energy and Environment
     paper, we have had a request from McKitrick and McIntyre for a full list of the data
     sets and the computational procedures used in your 1998 Nature paper.

     In line with our policy that data and methods of a paper published in Nature must be
     available to academic researchers for their own use
     (http://www.nature.com/nature/submit/policies/index.html#6 ) and in order to put an end
     to any discussion about the data sets and methods used, we decided that it would be best
     for us to publish an addendum to the paper (just saying that interested readers can find
     the data on our website), with a link to the full set of data and methods as
     Supplementary Information.

     Could you therefore please supply the full set of data series and a description of the
     procedures used to us?

     Best regards,
     Heike


      -----Original Message-----
     From: Michael E. Mann [[4]mailto:mann@virginia.edu]
     Sent: 06 November 2003 02:49
     To: Langenberg, Heike
     Subject: RE: Energy and Environment Paper

          ;Hi Heike,
          Just a followup to my terse email earlier (sent it from a plane).
          As I mentioned before, I understand the decision--I think its probably a wise
          decision.
          If Nature does decide to do a story on this, please let me know if I can be of any
          help.
          Thanks again for your consideration of the issue. We'll let you know when our formal
          response to the paper is published (probably in "Climatic Change").
          best regards,
          mike
          At 05:26 PM 11/5/2003 +0000, Langenberg, Heike wrote:

          Dear Mike,

          Thanks again for the information you provided to us on the debate.

          As mentioned on the phone, we have discussed the issue at length, but have now
          decided not to publish your rebuttal of the E&E paper. Obviously, this decision is
          editorial and does not reflect in any way on its scientific quality.

          We might still take up the issue elsewhere in the journal, but nothing definitive is
          planned at this stage.

          I just wanted to let you know about our decision regarding your rebuttal as soon as
          possible, so that you can pursue publicaton elsewhere.

          Best wishes,
          Heike

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   ______________________________________________________________
                       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

