cc: rbradley@geo.umass.edu, mhughes@ltrr.arizona.edu, Scott Rutherford , raymo@bu.edu date: Wed, 01 Sep 2004 16:21:52 -0400 from: "Michael E. Mann" subject: Re: New Scientist climate piece - copy of email from to: David Paterson Hi David, I've begun teaching for the semester now, so my comments necessarily must be brief. I hope you will rely not just on my comments, but on the broader perspective provided by my co-authors and other scientists in my field, for responses on some of these issues. I appreciate the work you've done thus far, and the obvious effort you've taken to get a handle on the underlying issues. I did, however, want to express a bit of concern that I have, based on your editor's comments, that this could be shaping up as a he said/she said, between us and McIntyre and Mckitrick. I really hope that isn't the case--I don't believe that couching this in those terms will serve your readership well. This is truly about (A) a consensus view of the community of legitimate researchers in our field based on similar findings from numerous independent studies suggesting that late 20th century hemispheric-mean warmth is anomalous in the context of the past millennium, vs. (B) spurious claims made in a social science journal w/ an editor possessing an anti-Kyoto agenda, based on an analysis by two contrarians (at least one w/ noted industry ties, and another who is in the mining industry) without any scientific training, that have been successfully rebutted in papers soon to appear in legitimate venues (that is peer-reviewed scientific journals such as the American Meteorological Society journal "Journal of Climate"). I apologize if my tone above is a bit strong, but I want to make sure to clarify the way that my colleagues and I view this whole affair, in the hope that your article will deal with our concerns that "New Scientist" not fall into the common trap of placing the views of a minority of contrarians (often w/out scientific credentials) on an equal footing with those of the legitimate community of scientific researchers in the field. I trust that you will be sensitive to our concerns. I hope my responses are helpful, and thanks for your continued efforts to get all of the facts... Specific responses below... best regards, Mike At 03:10 PM 9/1/2004, David Paterson wrote: Mike, I've finally about to my old Compuserve email account - persistent trouble over the last few months! - so I hope this gets by your gatekeepers. {But as belt and braces I'll also copy it on the Compuserve system one last time} I'm just back from a couple of weeks in Peru up in the Andes and had on my return on Monday some questions from the New Scientist editor looking after my piece. They want to run the article in a few weeks time, so I'd appreciate any responses you have by this Friday - I can get my modified copy to them on Monday. 1) She would like a comment from you vis a vis McIntyre and McKitrick saying that when they first asked your group for data, they got the response that it would take a few days to get it all together since it resided in a variety of sites - M & M drew the inference that no-one had previously asked for this data from yourselves. Is that the case? I did not deal with them directly. I referred their request to my associate Scott Rutherford, who was a post-doc working w/ me at the time. You should discuss with him to get further details (srutherford@rwu.edu). Our data had been placed on a public ftp server more than a year before M&M ever even contacted us, so the issue is a red herring. My understanding from Scott is that they were told the data was already available through our public ftp site, but that they wanted the data in a particular format (spreadsheet), and were not clear to him about what exactly they were looking for. Again, you would need to discuss w/ Scott for further details. 2) And she would like to know further whether its a commonplace in this kind of science for raw data, methodology, source codes etc used in the drafting of a publication to be taken 'on trust' by the rest of the palaeoclimate community I'm a bit concerned about a couple of false suppositions upon which this question appears to be premised. Our methodology was described in enough detail for others (e.g. Zorita et al ) to independently implement it, and all of our data was available online publicly for more than a year before MM ever even requested it. If you are asking about whether scientists in my field typically publicly post their *source codes* for performing statistical analyses, etc. I would say this is very rare indeed in my experience. But I would suggest you contact other researchers in the paleoclimate field to get a sense of this. 3) I know I touched on this question when I first talked with you, but Eugenie asked me if you had any sense at the time of the writing of the 98 and 99 papers that IPCC would use the findings so extensively in its then upcoming report. Frankly, how would we have any idea of that? As scientists, we of course hoped that the community would find our research relevant and important. When we set out on this research in the mid 1990s, we had no reason to believe that our results would yield the conclusion they ultimately did (i.e., that late 20th century warmth is anomalous in the context of our long-term reconstruction), although previous work (e.g. Bradley and Jones, 1993; Hughes and Diaz, 1994) was suggestive of this possibility. But your editor's question seems to imply that our research, which had begun years before the '2001 IPCC process was even underway, might have in some way guided by some sort of IPCC agenda. I really hope that isn't what your editor means to imply! 4) You mentioned to me that the editor of E&E - Sonia Boehmer Christiansen (maybe not the correct spelling - I'll check) had made explicit ( and public) her opposition to the Kyoto Protocol - is that position laid out anywhere I could reach it - ie do you have a reference, or even a pdf file of her spelling out that position. I will write to her separately asking for elucidation on this point. At first I thought you might be kidding. These are almost too numerous to list. She has written a book on her opposition to the Kyoto Protocol!! [1]http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/184064818X/wwwlink-software-21/202-4014417-5157 429 I haven't bothered reading it. This turned up as the first link in a google web search I did on the string "Boehmer Christiansen Kyoto". Other relevant links that turned up were: [2]http://www.hull.ac.uk/geog/staff/Boehmer.htm [3]http://sth.sagepub.com/cgi/content/refs/28/1/69 [4]http://www.electromagnetism.demon.co.uk/z011.htm these include numerous opinion pieces she has written on the issue. There appear to be hundreds of similar links on the web. 5) My question - has Eugene Wahl's re-capitulation of your work been published {if so please supply me with a reference or emailed file) - I tried to contact him again at ENCAR before I went to Peru, but he's no longer there and the phone number I was given as his new contact detail doesn't respond. I believe that they it was submitted to Nature, and not published, probably because Nature had decided that the whole issue was a red herring, after having rejected the MM comment. I believe they have resubmitted or are about to submit, elsewhere. Eugene Wahl has moved to alfred university now. His email there wahle@alfred.edu. You should really discuss this with him. I don't have much further information. 6) Finally, please email me a copy of the Zorita paper - I'd like to mention it in my piece - but clearly need to be able to refer to it correctly. I've attached a reprint. Apologies for being burdensome - but its important to get this stuff right and in the proper perspective. No problem, its important to get the facts right and I appreciate your earnest efforts to do so. I hope my responses above are of further assistance in that regard. Knowing that you have contacted numerous other scientists in our field at this stage, I'm confident that you should have the proper perspective at this point to characterize this whole issue in an appropriate context. By the way, I have written into the piece that it was always your intention to capture the richness of the dynamic behaviour of climate over the whole NH over the thousand year time scale - not simply to derive a graph of mean temperature. thanks. To expand a bit on that, it was not just our intention, I think its fair to say that our research was successful in doing precisely that! Most of the analysis in the 20+ papers my collaborators and I have published in the past few years on this work emphasize spatial patterns of behavior and large-scale dynamics (ENSO, the NAO, etc.), rather than hemispheric mean temperature. There are, as you know, more than a dozen different estimates of the latter quantity now by other groups published since ours, and all of which are consistent within estimated uncertaintaines and when accounting for different spatial or seasonal emphasis. And the conclusion of anomalous late 20th century warmth is a robust finding of the broader community of researchers. With relative concensus on these broader issues, the real emphasis actual scientists working in this field is now on the detailed spatial patterns of change and underlying dynamical mechanisms. McIntyre and McKitrick are 6 years behind the times. Regards David ______________________________________________________________ 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 Attachment Converted: "c:\eudora\attach\Zoritaetal-Jclim03.pdf"