From	Phil Jones	Date	Fri Aug 6 09:26:49 2004
To	Janice Lough
Subject	Re: liked the paper
Janice, Most of the data series in most of the plots have just appeared on the CRU web site. Go to data then to paleoclimate. Did this to stop getting hassled by the skeptics for the data series. Mike Mann refuses to talk to these people and I can understand why. They are just trying to find if we've done anything wrong. I sent one of them loads of series and he barely said a thankyou. It seems they are now going for Tom Crowley, Lonnie Thompson and Gordon Jacoby as most of their series are not on web sites. Below is a link to an awful piece by Legates. He told me he is a writing a paper, but wrote the press release first ! The pdf is worth getting for a couple of sentences, when he said that MJ restricted their use of paleo series to those that had correlations with instrumental data ! It is a classic. 'Our uncertainty estimates are based solely on how well the proxy records match the observed data' ! The Legates piece must have been sent to loads of environment correspondents across the world and a number of op-ed pieces appeared. Some were awful. Most have had responses from Ray Bradley, Caspar Amman and others. Hope all is well with you and all the best to all. Glad you enjoyed the paper. Cheers Phil PS Do you want to get involved in IPCC this time? I'm the CLA of the atmospheric obs. chapter with Kevin Trenberth and we'll be looking for Contributing Authors to help the Lead Authors we have. Paleo is in a different section this time led by Peck and Eystein Janssen. Keith is a lead author as well. Phil Jones has made a valid point in that some of the articles cited in my critique do not 'directly' address problems with Mann and Jones (MJ) but rather, address problems with earlier works by Mann, Bradley, and Hughes (MBH) and other colleagues. Fair enough - I have changed the critique to reflect that fact. The revised version has been posted since July 19 at: [1]http://www.ncpa.org/pub/ba/ba478/ba478.pdf However, I still contend that most of my original arguments - namely, the problems with the shaft, blade, and sheath - apply equally to Mann and Jones as well as the other Mann et al. manifestations of the 'hockey stick'. MJ incorporate data from a number of the same sources as those used by MBH; for example, Mann's unpublished PC1 from the western North American tree-ring data, Cook's Tasmanian tree rings, Thompson's Quelccaya and Dunde ice core oxygen isotope records (the latter embedded in Yang's Chinese composite), and Fisher's stacked Greenland ice core oxygen isotope record. Calibration and verification of MJ includes the flawed MBH curve. Thus, any errors in MBH effectively undermine the calibration-verification results of MJ, leaving this study unsupported and any problems with the underlying common proxies identified in critiques of MBH will also result in identical problems in MJ. My criticism regarding the blade is that 0.6 deg C warming for the last century is noted by the IPCC whereas MJ (and other M et al representations) have up to 0.95 deg C warming in their observed record. See MJ's figure 2 where for the global and NH reconstruction, their estimates for 2000 exceed +0.4 and +0.5 (nearly +0.6), respectively. MJ's NH curve is included in the attached graph. Thus, I stand by my criticism of MJ on this point, which is more egregious in MJ than other M et al representations. >From Jones: "The trend over the 20th century in the Figure and in the instrumental data. IPCC quotes 0.6 deg C over the 1901-2000 period. Fact - but Legates is eyeballing the curve to get 0.95 deg C. A figure isn't given in Mann and Jones (2003). Take it from me the trend is about the same as the instrumental record." Funny, but there IS a figure in MJ - see their Figure 2. As for me 'eyeballing' an apparently non-existent curve, I attach a figure from Soon et al. (2004) that contains a portion of MJ's Figure 2 to allow others to decide for themselves whether MJ suggest a twentieth century warming of 0.6 deg C or 0.95 deg C. Moreover, maybe someone can explain why every time Mann and his colleagues draft another curve, the temperature in 2000 gets warmer and warmer after the fact... My criticisms regarding the sheath (largely from a paper on which I am working) stem from the characterization of the uncertainty by MJ that arises solely from the 'fit' statistics to the 1600-1855 period using cross-validation with, not observations, but composites of three previously compiled reconstructions, including that developed by MBH - the focus of known flaws and errors in the shaft. Note that some of the same data are used in both MBH and MJ, which doesn't allow for a truly independent cross-validation. My rather obvious point was not that fit statistics should not be included (as Jones asserts) but that MJ included no errors in either input realization (observations or proxy data) or other obvious sources of error. The claim by MBH and MJ is that only the model lack-of-fit contributes to uncertainty is inherently flawed. Considerable errors exist in the representation of both fields - annual temperatures from both observations and proxy records - and must be incorporated. Clearly, there is a spatial bias associated with observations that are biased away from the oceans, high latitudes, and high altitudes. The spatial problem is far more pronounced when only a handful of proxies are used to represent the global temperatures at earlier time periods. Both MBH and MJ are equally guilty in this regard. David R. Legates At 15:55 06/08/2004 +1000, you wrote: Dear Phil Just finished reading your paper with Mike M in Rev of Geophysics which I very much enjoyed - will let you know when it hits the Mission Beach Chronicle! Hope all is well best wishes Janice Janice M. Lough Principal Research Scientist Australian Institute of Marine Science PMB 3, Townsville MC Queensland 4810 Australia email: j.lough@aims.gov.au Tel: (07) 47 534248 Fax: (07) 47 725852 ------------------------------------------------------------------------ The information contained within this transmission is for the use of the intended recipient only and may contain confidential and/or legally privileged material and/or material the subject of copyright and/or personal information and/or sensitive information that is subject to the Privacy Act 1988. Any review, re-transmission, disclosure, dissemination or other use of, or taking of any action in reliance upon this information by persons or entities other than the intended recipient is prohibited. If you have received this email in error please notify the AIMS Privacy Officer on (07) 4753 4444 and delete all copies of this transmission together with any attachments. ------------------------------------------------------------------------- Prof. Phil Jones Climatic Research Unit Telephone +44 (0) 1603 592090 School of Environmental Sciences Fax +44 (0) 1603 507784 University of East Anglia Norwich Email p.jones@uea.ac.uk NR4 7TJ UK ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- References 1. http://www.ncpa.org/pub/ba/ba478/ba478.pdf