cc: mhughes <mhughes@ltrr.arizona.edu>
date: Fri, 31 Oct 2003 11:20:03 +0000
from: Tim Osborn <t.osborn@uea.ac.uk>
subject: RE: CLIMLIST
to: "Michael E. Mann" <mann@virginia.edu>,"p.jones" <p.jones@uea.ac.uk>, "raymond s. bradley" <rbradley@geo.umass.edu>, Keith Briffa <k.briffa@uea.ac.uk>

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Dear all,

you're up early, Mike.  I was hoping to have sent out my thoughts on the 
latest draft before you got back to your email, but you beat me to it!

I think that this is much improved, and (as I said last thing last night) I 
find the figure extremely convincing, especially the timing and occurrence 
of the two big peaks in the first 120 years - they match very closely with 
the MM03 peaks.  This has now removed many of the doubts that I still had 
over whether the real reason for their different results had been 
identified - it certainly looks like the lack of early tree-ring PCs in 
their data.

I'm still thinking that this should be an MBH response for reasons I gave 
in my last email.  Once you have made such a response, then we (and others) 
can certainly join in and strongly support your stance on this in any 
ensuing wrangling that takes place.

Finally, even though the latest version is much improved, I still urge you 
to consider the points I made in my email.  Some are already dealt with 
(e.g. the saga of the ftp and excel data is not in your latest draft), but 
some are still relevant.  For example, if my understanding is correct, then 
they did include the WNA and Tex-Mex trees, but when they did the PCA they 
only used the period for which they had full data - read carefully the bit 
about PCA in the presence of missing data to see if I'm interpreting this 
correctly.  This may have the same effect as eliminating the series early 
on, but is not at all to do with the data not being in the public domain - 
hence all that stuff can be removed and simply replaced by some sentences 
explaining that they did not use these early values because they didn't do 
PCA on the subset that exists earlier - which is a valid thing to do given 
that the whole calibration is done separately for each period anyway.  See 
also my

I agree with the latest suggestions about more minor wording changes to 
avoid alienating readers in various places.

Best regards

Tim

P.S. With regard to where to send this, I agree with the various 
suggestions about mailing lists, and trying to get a news item in Nature, 
plus all the other media outlets that are interested.  But are you planning 
a formal rebuttal submitted to the journal?  Or to EOS?  To have a 
peer-reviewed response that can be cited in the scientific literature seems 
important.

Dr Timothy J Osborn
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:      http://www.cru.uea.ac.uk/~timo/
sunclock: http://www.cru.uea.ac.uk/~timo/sunclock.htm

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