cc: Tim Osborn <t.osborn@uea.ac.uk>, Phil Jones <p.jones@uea.ac.uk>, Keith Briffa <k.briffa@uea.ac.uk>, rbradley@geo.umass.edu, mhughes@ltrr.arizona.edu, Michael Oppenheimer <omichael@Princeton.EDU>, Tom Wigley <wigley@meeker.ucar.edu>, tom crowley <tom@ocean.tamu.edu>, Gabi Hegerl <hegerl@duke.edu>, Jonathan Overpeck <jto@u.arizona.edu>, Steve Schneider <shs@stanford.edu>
date: Thu, 06 Nov 2003 09:30:48 -0700
from: Tom Wigley <wigley@ucar.edu>
subject: Re: Fwd: McIntyre and McKintrick  paper
to: "Michael E. Mann" <mann@virginia.edu>

   Mike,
   Yes -- ignore Sonja. Poor woman, she can't even write or spell properly.
   Mrs Malaprop would be proud of her.
   Another sad aspect is the strong hint of paranoia in her letter to you. It
   is laced with implications that scientists are distorting their science, that we
   are subservient to political agendas, and so on. Nothing new, of course,
   but she really seems to believe it. I suspect there is a psychology PhD here.
   I must commend you on the detective work you did to figure out what
   M&M did wrong. Perhaps the focus of any 'response' could be on
   elucidating the details of and justifications for your methods, using M&M
   as an example of how not to do it? In this way the paper would be a
   direct contribution to the science, with the rebuttal of M&M coming as
   a byproduct. I have said this before, but this is how Ben Santer, Karl
   Taylor and I responded to some junk criticism of our detection work by
   Legates (in GRL). This puts the science first and relegates the criticism
   to its proper place as not worth making a direct response to. (Hmmm, is
   that good grammar?)
   Tom.
   ++++++++++++++++++++++
   Michael E. Mann wrote:

     Dear all,
     Thought you'd all be interested in this email.
     Of course, we have no intention to respond to this, or other further emails from the
     contrarians.
     We're working on a full response that will be formally published. We'll let you know the
     venue when its confirmed,
     mike m

     Delivered-To: [1]mem6u@virginia.edu
     From: "Sonja.B-C" [2]<Sonja.B-C@hull.ac.uk>
     Date: Thu, 6 Nov 2003 14:30:42 +0000
     To: "Michael E. Mann" [3]<mann@virginia.edu>
     Subject: McIntyre and McKintrick  paper
     Cc: [4]L.A.Love@hull.ac.uk, Steve McIntyre [5]<smcintyre@cgxenergy.com>,
        Ross McKitrick [6]<rmckitri@uoguelph.ca>,
        timo hameranta [7]<timo.hameranta@pp.inet.fi>,
        Reto Knutti [8]<knutti@climate.unibe.ch>,
        "David R. Legates" [9]<legates@udel.edu>,
        George Kukla [10]<kukla@ldeo.columbia.edu>,
        Hans von Storch [11]<Hans.von.Storch@gkss.de>,
        John Christy [12]<christy@atmos.uah.edu>,
        "Keith R. Briffa <[13]k.briffa@uea.ac.uk, Madhav L. Khandekar"
     [14]<mkhandekar@rogers.com>,
        "Rajendra K. Pachauri" [15]<chairipcc@teri.res.in>,
        Ulrich Cubasch [16]<cubasch@zedat.fu-berlin.de>,
        "Spencer R. Weart" [17]<sweart@aip.org>, Aynsley Kellow [18]<akellow@utas.edu.au>,
        Bjorn Lomborg [19]<bjorn@ps.au.dk>, Bob Foster [20]<fosbob@bigpond.com>,
        Chris de Freitas [21]<c.defreitas@auckland.ac.nz>,
        Christopher Essex [22]<essex@uwo.ca>, "Craig D. Idso" [23]<cidso@co2science.org>,
        Curt Holder [24]<cholder@uccs.edu>, "David E. Wojick" [25]<dwojick@shentel.net>,
        Henrik Svensmark [26]<hsv@dsri.dk>, Hugh W Ellsaesser [27]<hughel@comcast.net>,
        [28]ian.castles@anu.edu.auKirill.Ya.Kondratyev
     Priority: NORMAL
     X-Mailer: Execmail for Win32 5.1.1 Build (10)
     Dear Professor Mann
     I have found a list of scientists which contained you email address,
     hence I am able to communicate with you directly. As you already know, a
     paper by McIntyre and McKintrick analysing your famous 'Hockey stick'
     paper is now available to everybody at [29]www.multi-science.co.uk. The
     printed version is due later this month. Your, via the attention it
     received by the IPCC,  is currently widely used by social scientists
     and many researchers in the energy policy community as 'the' proof for
     anthropogenic dangerous warming. Humanity should now act, it argued, on
     the basis of fact rather than the rather suspect 'precautionary
     principle'.
     I would respectfully like to explain to you and other scientistst who
     may feel offended by the publication from outside 'their' domain, why
     I have published this and other 'attacks' and why I would appreciate a
     publishable reply from you and your colleagues. You may yet win the
     argument! Who knows, but an open debate is overdue.
     I do not claim that I or my reviewers can arbitrate on the 'scientific'
     truth of publications that the IPCC selects as most relevant, but
     your 1998 certainly was selected as such and as far as I know, there
     was no protest against its use in global policy advocacy. I may be
     wrong, for I am more in contact with research that is based on worse
     case scenarios (from IPCC) than with basic climate scince research.
     ENERGY&ENVIRONMENT has paid attention to the 'science' and 'social
     science' controversies associated with the IPCC for over a decade and
     has done so not in order to advance (natural) scientific understanding,
     but with reference to the profound policy relevance of this
     understanding and hence of any controversy about the nature of climate
     and the causes of its variability over time, as well as attempts, in
     some circles, to stifle associated controversies, presumably to make
     life easier for policy and policy relevant research.
     I am fully aware of the policy significance of the debate between 'you,
     the IPCC and so-called climate skeptics, and its funding implications
     for so many. But the implications for humanity are even greater. ( In
     fact, most of the papers  I have published in recent years have used
     the IPCC  'consensus' as baseline.)
     I have been an energy policy researcher writing and now editing with an
     international relations/ political science bias; I have a strong
     research history in environmental politics, and a basic education in
     physical geography as well as German literature. (Remember acid rain,
     the death of Europ'es forests in a few deacdes? Or the death of the
     global ocean from pollution in the 1970s, the subject of my PhD?
     Environmental threats have long serves many other agendas, and natural
     scientists may at least be aware of this.)
     I have published 'outsiders' whom I trust because I no longer fully
     trust many 'research products'  - not because of any failings because
     of  individual researchers , but because of the nature of much
     contemporary research funding, see
     [30]http://www.john-daly.com/sonja-bc.htm. I do know about
     research funding from bureaucracies - the importance of the right
     buzzwords, policy visions, legal commitments and political
     ambitions.
     I simply believe that research controversies related to global warming
     (science, social science, and technology) should be heard by
     policy-makers and NGOs in a world were vast amounts of limited finance
     are about to be spend  on 'decarbonisation' on the assumption made by
     most social scientists and many policy people that IPCC summary
     pronouncements are undisputed and  hence are acceptable as
     uncontroversial baseline for their work on  decarbonisation economics,
     'clean' technologoly, carbon finance, Kyoto mechanisms etc). I am
     encouraging research controversy in the public arena rather than
     editorial boardrooms. For example and to my considerable regret, even
     the UK Foreign Office and many of my colleaugues in the energy policy
     research (not in the earth sciences by the way) now believe that they
     need not pay any attention to scientific issues because all climate
     skeptics are  funded by the oil industry.  If this slur is permitted to
     stand, as it seems to be, then journals like mine are surely permitted
     to ask and who is funding the 'global warming' modelling community if
     not governments committed to the UNFCCC, and to explore what agendas
     have attached themselves to the warming threat.
     If I have offended against the ethics of natural science publication,
     which I am not sure of  given cases that have been reported to me, I
     apologise and plead ignorance. I forward to hearing from you  not via
     a  web site, but in the form of a paper or view point that I can
     published for libraries and readers.
     Best wishes
     Sonja Boehmer-Christiansen
      ----------------------
     Dr.Sonja Boehmer-Christiansen
     Reader,Department of Geography,
     Editor, Energy & Environment
     (Multi-science,[31]www.multi-science.co.uk)
     Faculty of Science
     University of Hull
     Hull HU6 7RX, UK
     Tel: (0)1482 465349/6341/5385
     Fax: (0)1482 466340
     [32]Sonja.B-C@hull.ac.uk

     ______________________________________________________________
                         Professor Michael E. Mann
                Department of Environmental Sciences, Clark Hall
                           University of Virginia
                          Charlottesville, VA 22903
     _______________________________________________________________________
     e-mail: [33]mann@virginia.edu   Phone: (434) 924-7770   FAX: (434) 982-2137
              [34]http://www.evsc.virginia.edu/faculty/people/mann.shtml

