From	Keith Briffa	Date	Wed Feb 20 16:25:46 2002
To	Tim Osborn
Subject	Fwd: Re: SCIENCE review
Date: Fri, 30 Nov 2001 13:48:13 +0000 To: "Jesse Smith" From: Keith Briffa Subject: Re: SCIENCE review Dear Jesse I am sorry for messing you about with this but I really am leading a complicated life at the moment. I am attaching my comments on The Esper et al manuscript . You will see that I think the work is genuinely interesting and potentially of wide significance. The bottom line is that you should publish this but the way the authors have chosen to present their results smacks of a lack of clarity of thought (and a lot of fudging!) . I believe that they are more concerned with trying to temper their ideas so as not to "offend" Mann et al. They choose to present their work as a generalised demonstration of how to process a tree-ring data set merely to argue against an unjustified remark made by Broecker about tree-ring reconstructions in general. This simply devalues the significance of their work as this refutation is out their in the literature already if only Broecker bothered to check. By trying to skate around the real questions that Broecker was implying - i.e. is the methodology removing the true low-frequency variance in the Mann et al curve and is the magnitude of the Medieval warmth understated ? - Esper et al are obscuring the real message of their results - namely that Mann et al do most likely loose the low frequency variance in their reconstruction and they may very well be underestimating the Medieval warmth . To get at this the authors need to be honest about what their data represent (probably summer and certainly not hemispheric wide coverage ) and is this really that different from what Mann et al actually represent (even though they believe their's is a mean annual Hemispheric record). I think the authors present a too-simplistic discussion of their curve and then gloss over these difficult but important issues. So I really think they should be published , but they should think again about the interpretation and message . At 09:25 AM 11/27/01 -0500, you wrote: Dear Keith, No, it is not too late, so please send your review. Thanks a million. Sincerely, Jesse ======================= Dr. Jesse Smith Associate Editor ---------------------------------------------- Science 1200 New York Avenue, NW Washington, DC 20005 USA ---------------------------------------------- (202) 326-6556 (202) 408-1256 (FAX) hjsmith@aaas.org ======================= >>> Keith Briffa 11/27/01 09:17AM >>> Is it too late for this or should I send a review by tomorrow? Keith -- Professor Keith Briffa, Climatic Research Unit University of East Anglia Norwich, NR4 7TJ, U.K. Phone: +44-1603-593909 Fax: +44-1603-507784 [1]http://www.cru.uea.ac.uk/cru/people/briffa/ -- Professor Keith Briffa, Climatic Research Unit University of East Anglia Norwich, NR4 7TJ, U.K. Phone: +44-1603-593909 Fax: +44-1603-507784 [2]http://www.cru.uea.ac.uk/cru/people/briffa[3]/ References 1. http://www.cru.uea.ac.uk/cru/people/briffa/ 2. http://www.cru.uea.ac.uk/cru/people/briffa/ 3. http://www.cru.uea.ac.uk/cru/people/briffa/