cc: "Cotter, Rosalind" , "Campbell, Philip" , rbradley@geo.umass.edu, mhughes@ltrr.arizona.edu, Tim Osborn , Phil Jones , Keith Briffa , Scott Rutherford date: Thu, 20 Nov 2003 07:16:20 -0500 from: "Michael E. Mann" subject: RE: Energy and Environment Paper to: "Langenberg, Heike" 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not be made available until a few years after the '98 study, because we had to give various researchers who provided us unpublished data on a proprietary basis the opportunity to publish those data first.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 ******************************************************************************** DISCLAIMER: This e-mail is confidential and should not be used by anyone who is not the original intended recipient. If you have received this e-mail in error please inform the sender and delete it from your mailbox or any other storage mechanism. Neither Macmillan Publishers Limited nor any of its agents accept liability for any statements made which are clearly the sender's own and not expressly made on behalf of Macmillan Publishers Limited or one of its agents. Please note that neither Macmillan Publishers Limited nor any of its agents accept any responsibility for viruses that may be contained in this e-mail or its attachments and it is your responsibility to scan the email and attachments (if any). No contracts may be concluded on behalf of Macmillan Publishers Limited or its agents by means of e-mail communication. Macmillan Publishers Limited Registered in England and Wales with registered number 785998 Registered Office Brunel Road, Houndmills, Basingstoke RG21 6XS ******************************************************************************** ______________________________________________________________ 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