From	Phil Jones	Date	Tue Sep 29 09:17:12 2009
To	Tim Osborn, Michael E. Mann, Gavin Schmidt
Subject	Re: attacks against Keith
Mike, Gavin, As Tim has said Keith is making a good recovery and hopes to be back in soon, gradually during October and hopefully full time from November. I talked to him by phone yesterday and sent him and Tom Melvin the threads on CA. As you're fully aware, trying to figure out what McIntyre has done is going to be difficult. It would be so much easier if they followed normal procedure and wrote up a comment and submitted it to a journal. I looked through the threads yesterday trying to make sense of what he's done. My suspicion is that he's brought in other tree ring series from more distant sites, some of which may not even be larch. There are two chronologies that have been used - one called the Polar Urals and one called Yamal. PU is a Schweingruber site with density as well as ring width. The PU reconstruction is therefore not a chronology, but a regression based reconstruction from both MXD and TRW. Yamal is just a ring width series (with lots of sub-fossil material, so much older) from an area some distance (at least 500km) north of PU. It was developed by Hantemirov and Shiyatov and was poorly standardized - corridor method. I also don't think McIntyre understands the RCS method even though he claims to have a program. The ends and the age structure of the samples are crucial in all this, but I think he just throws series in. I totally agree that these attacks (for want of a better word) are getting worse. Comments on the thread are snide in the extreme, with many saying they see no need to submit the results to a journal. They have proved Keith has manipulated the data, so job done. Hadn't thought of Senate debates. I'd put this down to the build up to Copenhagen, which is sort of the same. [1]http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/09/24/a-look-at-the-thompson-et-al-paper-hi-tech-wiggle- matching-and-removal-of-natural-variables/ is a complete reworking of Dave Thompson's paper which is in press in J. Climate (online). Looked at this, but they have made some wrong assumptions, but someone has put a lot of work into it. [2]http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/09/24/ooops-dutch-meteorological-institute-caught-in-wea ther-station-siting-failure-moved-station-and-told-nobody/ This one is a complete red herring - nothing wrong with De Bilt measurements. This is what it is about according to someone at KNMI The issue you refer to is causing a lot of noise in the Netherlands (even MP's asking questions to the minister). It seems this is not at all about the observational series (nothing strange is going on), but more related to the "Law on KNMI" and the division of tasks between commercial providers and KNMI to be discussed by parliament soon. Cheers Phil At 08:46 29/09/2009, Tim Osborn wrote: Hi Mike and Gavin, thanks for your emails re McIntyre, Yamal and Keith. I'll pass on your best wishes for his recovery when I next speak to Keith. He's been off almost 4 months now and won't be back for at least another month (barring a couple of lectures that he's keen to do in October as part of a gradual return). Hopefully he'll be properly back in November. Regarding Yamal, I'm afraid I know very little about the whole thing -- other than that I am 100% confident that "The tree ring data was hand-picked to get the desired result" is complete crap. Having one's integrity questioned like this must make your blood boil (as I'm sure you know, with both of you having been the target of numerous such attacks). Though it would be nice to shield Keith from this during his recovery, I think Keith will already have heard about this because he had recently been asked to look at CA in relation to the Kaufman threads (Keith was a co-author on that and Darrell had asked Keith to help with a response to the criticisms). Apart from Keith, I think Tom Melvin here is the only person who could shed light on the McIntyre criticisms of Yamal. But he can be a rather loose cannon and shouldn't be directly contacted about this (also he wasn't involved in the Yamal chronology being discussed, though he has been involved in a regional reconstruction that we've recently been working towards that uses these -- and more -- data). Perhaps Phil and I should talk with Tom and also see if Keith is already considering a response. Off to lecture for a couple of hours now... Cheers Tim Dr Timothy J Osborn, Academic Fellow Climatic Research Unit School of Environmental Sciences University of East Anglia Norwich NR4 7TJ, UK e-mail: t.osborn@uea.ac.uk phone: +44 1603 592089 fax: +44 1603 507784 web: [3]http://www.cru.uea.ac.uk/~timo/ sunclock: [4]http://www.cru.uea.ac.uk/~timo/sunclock.htm 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://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/09/24/a-look-at-the-thompson-et-al-paper-hi-tech-wiggle-matching-and-removal-of-natural-variables/ 2. http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/09/24/ooops-dutch-meteorological-institute-caught-in-weather-station-siting-failure-moved-station-and-told-nobody/ 3. http://www.cru.uea.ac.uk/~timo/ 4. http://www.cru.uea.ac.uk/~timo/sunclock.htm