Prior to the publication of McIntyre and McKitrick (2003), there are two references to me in the Climategate 2 dossier.
June 2003
In June 2003, Timothy Carter, a Climate Research editor then embroiled in the Soon-Baliunas dispute, sent Jones (CG2 – 2064) a copy of my June 15, 2003 post at a climate chat group on different versions of the Tornetrask (“Fennoscandia”) chronology, noting, in particular, the Tornetrask chronology then in use in the reconstructions contained a material “fudge” (my term; “bodge” is the CRU term) that (in my words) “hardly seems like a justifiable statistical procedure”. Jones replied:
Tim,
Thanks for this. I’ve been in touch with this guy (Steve McIntyre) before. I think he works in the US. He asked me a few things about the instrumental data, then more, then more and asked for more data. I eventually gave up but he is quite able.
The Finn is Timo Hameranta (or something like that) and is right of right field!
Cheers, Phil
My records of the correspondence are quite different, but that’s another story.
Oct 19-20, 2003
CG2 (1566) also contains a discussion among Mann and the inner team that sheds an interesting light on some long-standing disinformation disseminated by Mann at the time of the publication of MM2003 (which was released one week later.)
On October 17, Bradley, Hughes and Diaz had published a sort of response to Soon and Baliunas (2003). They selected 21 series with properties that by that time were well-known (Yamal, Mann’s PC1, Thompson’s tropical ice cores, etc.) and asserted that a majority had modern “warmth” exceeding levels in the MWP. (Since the properties of the selected series were known in advance of their selection, it was hardly surprising that Bradley, Hughes and Diaz would pick ones where the modern warm period exceeded the medieval warm period, but, again, that is a different story.)
I commented at Timo Hameranta’s chat group as follows:
[Quoting from Bradley et al 2003] Since Lamb’s analysis, many new paleotemperature series have been produced. However, well-calibrated data sets with decadal or higher resolution are still only available for a few dozen locations (see the figure).
A few points:
1)the selection of datasets in these little data-mining exercises always seems arbitrary to me. It’s hard to know how these datasets were selected based on the assertion above.
2) the use of digitally unpublished data is highly frustrating. Of the 23 datsets referred to here, I can only locate 7 at the World Data Center for Paleoclimatology. www.ngdc.noaa.gov/paleo/ . Some of the worst offenders in this respect include Mosley-Thompson, Cook, Hughes and Briffa.
3) I looked at series 13, the China speleotherm which I haven’t looked at before and which is at WDCP. The start date is shown incorrectly in this article (the series begins in -665. The data is transformed (in the original article) to remove a “trend” and transformed again to estimate “temperature”. On the actual data, values in early periods are higher than 20th century values. Only after 2 transformations do high 20th century values emerge.
I followed up by writing to the criticized authors, receiving a response only from Cook who affirmed his intention to archive the then recent Oroko data. My initiative also resulted in Konrad Hughen archiving his data. I reported on this initiative a few days later, exempting Cook (who is consistently the most “scientific” of the Climategate correspondents) from my previous criticism. (Many of these series have subsequently become available, in part, because of my criticism of practices in the field.)
Either Mann was monitoring Hameranta’s chat group (unsurprising given his paranoia about “skeptics”) or my comment was passed to him. In any event, on October 19, Mann alerted Jones, Briffa, Bradley, Hughes, Diaz and Rutherford to “McIntyre”. Mann characterized me as “yet another shill for industry”, one who had made “scurrilous” criticisms of the recent Bradley paper.
FYI–thought you guys should have this (below). This guy “McIntyre” appears to be yet another shill for industry–he appears to be the one who forwarded the the scurrilous “climateskeptic” criticisms of the recent Bradley et al Science paper.
Precisely what was “scurrilous” about my observations about the Bradley paper remains unclear to me. Other than, perhaps, the temerity of daring to criticize Bradley. Mann’s email to the others also included our Sept 25, 2003 correspondence, in which I had sent him the file to which I had been directed at his website (pcproxy.txt) as being the proxy data used in MBH98, asking him to verify that this was the version that had been used in the paper. Mann had blown off my request and in his Oct 19 email to Jones and Briffa, notified them that he had done so.
An interesting passing comment in the email is Mann’s observation that I had “been trying to break into” their server. (Only two weeks later, a different version of Mann’s proxy data was made public. Mann claimed that it had been “publicly available” all the time, but Mann’s comment here clearly shows the opposite.)
Here is an email I sent him a few weeks ago in response to an inquiry. It appears, by the way, that he has been trying to break into our machine (“multiproxy”). Obviously, this character is looking for any little thing he can get ahold of. The irony here, of course, is that simple composites of proxy records (e.g. Bradley and Jones; Mann and Jones, etc) give very similar results to the pattern reconstruction approaches (Mann et al EOF approach, Rutherford et al RegEM approach), so anyone looking to criticize the basic NH temperature history based on details of e.g. the Mann et al ’98 methodology are misguided in their efforts…
The best that can be done is to ignore their desperate emails and, if they manage to slip something into the peer-reviewed literature, as in the case of Soon & Baliunas, deal w/ it as we did in that case–i.e., the Eos response to Soon et al—they were stung badly by that, and the bad press that followed.For those of you who haven’t seen it, I’m forwarding an interesting email exchange from John Holdren of Harvard that I got the other day. He summarized the whole thing very nicely, form an independent perspective…
Cheers,
mike
p.s. I’m setting up my email server so that it automatically rejects emails from the “usual suspects”. You might want to do the same. As they increasingly get automatic reject messages from the scientists, they’ll start to get the picture…
Date: Thu, 25 Sep 2003 18:53:33 -0400
To: “Steve McIntyre”
From: “Michael E. Mann”
Subject: Re: MBH98
Bcc: Scott Rutherford , mann@virginia.edu
Dear Mr. McIntyre,
A few of the series terminate prior to the nominal 1980 termination date of the
calibration period (the earliest such instance, as you note, is 1971). In such cases, the data were continued to the 1980 boundary by persistence of the final available value. These details in fact, were provided in the supplementary information that accompanied the Nature article. That information is available here (see first paragraph):
[1]ftp://eclogite.geo.umass.edu/pub/mann/ONLINE-PREPRINTS/MultiProxy/data-supp.html
and here:
[2]http://www.ngdc.noaa.gov/paleo/ei/data_supp.html
The results, incidentally, are insensitive to this step; essentially the same
reconstruction is achieved if a calibration period terminating in 1970 (prior to the termination of any of the proxy series) was used instead.
Owing to numerous demands on my time, I will not be able to respond to further
inquiries. Other researchers have successfully implemented our methodology based on the information provided in our articles [see e.g. 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.]. I trust, therefore, that you will find (as in this case) that all necessary details are provided in the papers we have published or the supplementary
information links provided by those papers.
Best of luck with your work.
Sincerely,
Michael E. Mann
At 05:28 PM 9/25/2003 -0400, Steve McIntyre wrote:
Dear Prof Mann,
Here is the pcproxy.txt file sent to me last April by Scott Rutherford at your
direction. It contains some missing data after 1971. Your 1998 paper does not describe how missing data in this period is treated and I wanted to verify that it is the correct file.
How did you handle missing data in this period? In earlier periods, it looks like you changed the roster of proxies in each of the periods described in the Supplementary Information using only proxies available throughout the entire period.
I have obtained quite close replication of the rpc1 in the 20th century by calculating coefficients for the proxies and then calculating the rpc’s using the minimization procedures described in MBH98 and the selection of PCs in the Supplementary Information. The reconstruction is less close in earlier periods. I also don’t understand the reasoning for reducing the roster of eigenvectors in earlier periods. The description in MBH98 was necessarily
very terse and is still very terse in the Supplementary Information; is there any more detailed description of the reconstruction methodology to help me resolve this?
Thank you for your attention.
Yours truly,
Steve McIntyre,
Toronto, Canada
Jones replied to the group, mentioning that he had sent me “some station temperature data in the past”. (This was an earlier version of the station data that Jones subsequently claimed to be top secret.) Jones sneered at the naivete of my criticisms of non-archiving, saying that there were many authors far worse than the ones that I had criticized. (Perhaps so, but they weren’t cited in the Bradley et al paper.)
Dear All,
I’ve had several emails from Steve McIntyre. He comes across in these as friendly, but then asks for more and more. I have sent him some station temperature data in the past, but eventually had to stop replying to me. Last time he emailed me directly was in relation to the Mann/Jones GRL paper. That time he wanted the series he used. I suspect that he is the person who sent the email around about only 7 of the 23 series used by Ray et al. being in WDC-Paleo. I told him then that he needs to get in contact with the relevant paleo people. It seems only Mike, Ray and me got this email from Timo, so I’ll forward it.
He names the worst offenders (ie those not putting data on WDC-Paleo) as being Cook, Mosley-Thompson, Hughes and Briffa !! He clearly should go to a few paleo meetings to find out what is really out there. Last week I saw the Patzold Bermuda coral record again. It is now 1000 years long and all there is an unwritten paper !
The second email I’m forwarding is one from Bill Kininmonth. I’ve met Bill several times at WMO meetings and in Australia. Bill has retired now. When I knew him he knew very little about paleo. I wouldn’t bother replying, unless you want to go into chapter and verse and don’t think through Timo. I would like to believe Bill would be receptive, but it would take time. You could suggest, Ray, he reads your book rather than Lamb’s, but from his tone that might not go down too well ! Both Hubert’s books in the early 1990s are basically updates of his 1974/77 books, with more references and in a chattier style.
Cheers, Phil
It’s interesting to see that Mann, who at that time knew nothing about me, was nonetheless quick to portray me as a “shill” and had recommended strategies for rejecting emails.
