cc: mhughes date: Fri, 31 Oct 2003 11:20:03 +0000 from: Tim Osborn subject: RE: CLIMLIST to: "Michael E. Mann" ,"p.jones" , "raymond s. bradley" , Keith Briffa 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