date: Thu Jan 29 09:37:26 2004 from: Phil Jones subject: Re: MBH Submission (fwd) to: pgleick@pipeline.com, Stephen H Schneider , Editorial Board--Ann Henderson-Sellers , barrie.pittock@dar.csiro.au, Christian Azar , Cynthia Rosenzweig , d.camuffo@isac.cnr.it, Danny Harvey , Dave Pollard , "David G. VICTOR" , Diana Liverman , F.I.Woodward@sheffield.ac.uk, gary yohe , "H.J. Schellnhuber" , j.salinger@niwa.co.nz, Jon Foley , Katarina Kivel , leonid@atmosp.physics.utoronto.ca, lindam@atd.ucar.edu, mccarl@tamu.edu, N.W.Arnell@soton.ac.uk, ogilvie@spot.colorado.edu, "Peter H. Gleick" , pfister@hist.unibe.ch, pmfearn@inpa.gov.br, rik.leemans@rivm.nl, rmoss@usgcrp.gov, "Rosenberg, Norm J" , rwk@ucar.edu, Stewart Cohen , Thomas R Karl Steve, Peter et al, I totally agree with Peter on Yuck. The tone of the email from Reviewer A indicates the sorts of issues we would be in. Here are my thoughts: If you accede to this request the whole peer-review process goes down the tubes. Reviewers will be able to request the earth from authors. If we all started doing this the number of reviews we could do would dramatically reduce. I currently do about 20-30 reviews a year. If I began asking for this sort of information from journals (AMS, AGU, RMS etc) I would be laughed out of court. I guess it would stop the papers to review coming. The whole system would grind to a halt. I've never requested data/codes to do a review and I don't think others should either. I do many of my reviews on travel. I have a feel for whether something is wrong - call it intuition. If analyses don't seem right, look right or feel right, I say so. Some of my reviews for CC could be called into question! I've just been told that a paper will be appearing in GRL soon (by some of the skeptic crowd - not McIntyre). Paper was obviously reviewed. It commented upon some aspects of the TAR, data on CRU's web pages and of some of Mike Mann's work. It didn't go to review to me, Mike Mann, Chris Folland or Tom Karl. I am currently marking 5 U/G theses. Most are better than this GRL paper. The students put in references to justify statements - this GRL paper doesn't. We are trying to be fair, yet they are clearly not. So is there a compromise. What if Mike sent them his data/codes - the data is there on a web site - and they sent Mike their data and codes. As Ben pointed out Mike's code will not be simple. There are at least 50, maybe more, combinations of proxies used for different periods in the past. Cheers Phil At 21:45 28/01/2004 -0800, Peter Gleick wrote: I find Reviewer A's email a pretty convincing indication of what CC and Mann will face if the code isn't released. Yuck. Peter ===== Dr. Peter Gleick President Pacific Institute Oakland, California [1]www.pacinst.org [2]www.worldwater.org Prof. Phil Jones Climatic Research Unit Telephone +44 (0) 1603 592090 School of Environmental Sciences Fax +44 (0) 1603 507784 University of East Anglia Norwich Email p.jones@uea.ac.uk NR4 7TJ UK ----------------------------------------------------------------------------