cc: k.briffa@uea.ac.uk, "Phil Jones" , "raymond s.bradley" , mhughes@ltrr.arizona.edu date: Thu, 30 Oct 2003 06:22:50 -0500 from: "Michael E. Mann" subject: Re: Fwd: op ed for USA Today to: Tim Osborn Thanks a bunch Tim, Well, we didn't add your name because we weren't sure, but USA Today probably won't publish it--if not we may try to distribute it. But more importantly, as we speak, I am drafting a long description of what they done wrong. Just over the last 24 hours I've discovered something extremely dishonest that it appears they did. In their reconstruction based on their 'redo' of the MBH98 proxy network, the one that shows the ridiculous warming in the early centuries, it appears that they eliminated all of our ITRDB Western North American (and Stahle max latewood chronologies) from our network. As you guys know, the ITRDB WNA data are fairly important to our reconstruction. Based on Table 7.5 in their paper, if you read the fine details, it looks like they've just eradicated the earlier data because they claim they couldn't find it on the NGDC website--even though we all know the data are there. And more importantly, all of those data were on our public ftp site on holocene. So in one extremely dishonest stroke of data eradication, they removed the most important indicators from our network from 1400-1600--and I'm pretty sure that's how they get their spike. Would be interesting to see what cross-validation they get using *their* network available from 1400-present. I bet we're talking REs approaching negative infinity... So I think that is what they did! Do you guys have the paper--does anyone mind double-checking, and assuring that I'm correct about this. If I am, this is really scandalous, and it should be as broadcast as widely as possible. Note that they don't even report how many proxy data were available in their network back in time, they only show the # of reported/found proxies in the Mann et al network (apparently our data site was missing a few of the series). This is probably intentional as well--they didn't want to show how many series they had actually eliminated from the set. And of course, if they're using a completely different set of proxies, then the would have to reapply the selection rules, they can't just use the basis set that we had determined, based on application of the selection rules to the data at hand... So its looking increasingly dishonest, deceptive, and intentionally so. I've identified other problems, they used an incorrect version of the the Mann et al proxy dataset that Scott had put into excel format, so the early PC proxy series were overprinted w/ later ones kept in the same column. And they used inconsistent CRU surface temperature datasets and inconsistent normalization conventions to un-normalize the Mann et al EOFs, etc. And all of this could lead to significant differences. But I think its the dropping of the key predictors w/ barely a mention, that gives them the AD 1400-1600 spike Second opinions--am I imagining this? Thanks, mike At 10:44 AM 10/30/2003 +0000, Tim Osborn wrote: At 17:45 29/10/2003, you wrote: We need to submit within the next hour or so, so its really do-or-die time! Mike, was away yesterday, so I missed all the fun-and-games! If you went ahead and submitted it with my name on anyway, then that's fine because I would have agreed had I been here. If you dropped me in my absence, then fine too - you had enough co-signees, I'm sure. Going back to an earlier email when you were asking whether anyone had reviewed the E&E piece by M&M (have I got the initials correct? have to avoid confusion with M&M sweets - do you get them in the US? some are nuts, which seems appropriate!). Anyway, just wanted to confirm that I did not review it. Despite the hard and time consuming work that it evidently took you to get to the bottom of their work's problems, I think it was essential to get this cleared up so soon. It's important to get this information out as publicly as possible, so that nobody who wants to push the M&M conclusions can do so while claiming ignorance of the fact that data problems make their conclusions baseless and wrong. If you want to avoid the climatesceptics list then perhaps one of us (or all of us?) here in CRU could circulate a note to that list, hence the cc to Keith and Phil. Let us know. Do you ever use the CLIMLIST mailing list? It's not generally a debating type list, but I'm sure it would be relevant to post something there that makes clear the M&M conclusions are invalid - as a public information service? Cheers Tim 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: [1]http://www.cru.uea.ac.uk/~timo/ sunclock: [2]http://www.cru.uea.ac.uk/~timo/sunclock.htm ______________________________________________________________ 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 [3]http://www.evsc.virginia.edu/faculty/people/mann.shtml