From	Michael E. Mann	Date	Fri, 22 Mar 2002 12:39:38 -0500
To	Keith Briffa, Tim Osborn, Phil Jones, Tom Crowley, ray bradley, Malcolm K. Hughes, Edward R. Cook, rkerr@aaas.org, Brooks Hanson
Subject	Briffa & Osborn piece
Keith and Tim, Sadly, your piece on the Esper et al paper is more flawed than even the paper itself. Ed, the AP release that appeared in the papers was even worse. Apparently you allowed yourself to be quoted saying things that are inconsistent with what you told me you had said. You three all should have known better. Keith and Tim: Arguing you can scale the relationship between full Northern Hemisphere and extratropical Northern Hemisphere is *much* more problematic than even any of the seasonal issues you discuss, and this isn't even touched on in your piece. The evidence of course continues to mount (e.g., Hendy et al, Science, a couple weeks ago) that the tropical SST in the past centuries varied far more less in past centuries. Hendy et al specifically point out that there is little evidence of an LIA in the tropics in the data. The internal inconsistency here is remarkably ironic. The tropics play a very important part in our reconstruction, with half of the surface temperature estimate coming from latitudes below 30N. You know this, and in my opinion you have knowingly misrepresented our work in your piece. This will be all be straightened out in due course. In the meantime, there is a lot of damage control that needs to be done and, in my opinion, you've done a disservice to the honest discussions we had all had in the past, because you've misrepresented the evidence. Many of us are very concerned with how Science dropped the ball as far as the review process on this paper was concerned. This never should have been published in Science, for the reason's I outlined before (and have attached for those of you who haven't seen them). I have to wonder why the functioning of the review process broke down so overtly here, Mike _______________________________________________________________________ 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 [1]http://www.evsc.virginia.edu/faculty/people/mann.[2]shtml Attachment Converted: "c:\eudora\attach\treerings-comments1.doc" References 1. http://www.evsc.virginia.edu/faculty/people/mann.shtml 2. http://www.evsc.virginia.edu/faculty/people/mann.shtml