cc: mann@virginia.edu date: Mon, 19 Jan 2004 08:25:24 -0500 from: "Michael E. Mann" subject: Re: J. Climate reviews to: Tim Osborn , Scott Rutherford , Bradley Raymond , Hughes Malcolm , Jones Phil , Briffa Keith Dear Tim, Thanks for your very thoughtful comments. I'm in full agreement w/ everything you say below, and had many of the same precise thoughts as I've begun to work through this and make preliminary revisions before sending on to Scott. I agree that SB03 doesn't deserve mention at all, and upon greater thought, that we do indeed need to discuss MM03 in proper context, and address the issues of purported errors in the dataset (there are no real errors, w/ one or two potential minor exceptions, as noted in your Climatic Change response). It will help *a lot* if the Clim. Chng paper is provisionally accepted before we finalize the J. Climate paper. I'm tentatively operating under this assumption, as I add some text on the issue. You as you say, Scott is already performing an experiment where the MBH98 network is only used through 1971, so that infilled proxy values (really, the only potentially legitimate complaint by MM03) are not used at all. Also, Scott is doing a "late verification" experiment to address the concerns of reviewer #1, and we're grudgingly going to calculate r^2 values for verification too (although I think we all agree that this is a very limited metric of reconstructive fidelity--but a concession to the reviewer, who is clearly trying to be helpful in his/her comments)... The Pauling et al paper is relevant where we discuss pseudoproxy experiments, etc. so I've added that reference as well as a Gonzalez-Rouco et al reference, and a few other relevant recently published refs (Jones et al JGR paper '03, Mann and Jones, GRL paper '03)... I'm finding that lots and lots of text of redundant or largely irrelevant text can be eliminated as we work through this, so we should be able to get it to an acceptable length (I think we can move Figure 2 to a "supplementary information" format to help out w/ length too). Hope to have something to send on to Scott shortly, then we can send to you guys, and everyone else can make comments, additional revisions, etc. I think we should be able to turn this around pretty quickly Thanks again for your quick response. More soon, mike At 11:34 AM 1/19/2004 +0000, Tim Osborn wrote: Hi Scott and Mike, thanks for forwarding the reviews - and thanks, Mike, for proposing that you and Scott take the first stab at revising/responding. In the meantime, here are some (random) comments: (1) Do not cite S&B03. Justify this to the editor by citing the exchange in EOS - especially the second EOF piece, which I believe is more damming to them than the first! (2) For M&M03 it's a little harder, since their work relates directly to the MBH data set used here, and because a response is not yet in the peer-reviewed literature. If your response is accepted by Climatic Change before the Rutherford et al. paper is revised, that will help. Yet, as I understand it, the point you make in your response is not that the data "problems" pointed out by M&M03 are *all* incorrect/misleading (though some/many may be), but that the NH temperature results are *unaffected* by them, even if a few are indeed in error. If so, might we need to correct the few errors that M&M03 did find, state that we have been done this in the paper, and then show the revised RegEM results (presumably almost as they are now?). Please correct me if I'm wrong about M&M03, or if the work/time involved in re-running RegEM with very slightly revised multi-proxy input is prohibitive. (3) As Mike says, the 2nd review still needs to be dealt with, despite being rather unfocussed. I would say that (in response to the final paragraph of reviewer B) that a detailed paper *is* necessary that dots the 'i's and crosses the 't's - not to re-inforce the conventional wisdom but to demonstrate that the "conventional wisdom" is relatively insensitive to methodological choices. By the way, the Pauling et al. paper is from Andreas Pauling and others at Heinz Wanner's group rather than Hamburg. The Pauling et al. paper does look at seasonality, but contributes little to the issue in my opinion. Nevertheless, we might cite it anyway, as a concession to the reviewer - while avoiding some of their other requests. I'll probably send more comments after I've talked with Keith and Phil (Phil is away at present). Cheers Tim At 20:07 16/01/2004, Michael E. Mann wrote: Dear All, The first review is insightful and helpful, the 2nd review provides relatively little insight. It promotes a number of myths, and plays gratuitous homage to the work of the Hamburg group (a hint as to where the reviewer might be from!). However, where reasonable points are raised by this reviewer, too they should be dealt with too. I don't think the paper can be split up, but it can probably be shortened a bit. I propose Scott and I take the first stab at revising and responding to reviewer comments, and then send it on to the others. Scott and I had discussed plan to make the matlab codes and data used available in a website mentioned in the paper, to avoid any possible criticisms of availability. Is there any problem in posting the version of the MXD data set used publiclly (Tim, Keith?), and any other thoughts on this? Please feel free to send any comments, while Scott and I begin to work on the revised version... Thanks, mike I At 02:25 PM 1/16/2004 -0500, Scott Rutherford wrote: Dear All, Attached are the reviews from the Journal of Climate manuscript. One generally good, one generally weird. Scott ______________________________________________ Scott Rutherford Assistant Professor Dept. of Natural Sciences Roger Williams University e-mail: srutherford@rwu.edu phone: (401) 254-3208 snail mail: One Ferry Road Bristol, RI 02809 ______________________________________________________________ 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.shtml Dr Timothy J Osborn 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: [2]http://www.cru.uea.ac.uk/~timo/ sunclock: [3]http://www.cru.uea.ac.uk/~timo/sunclock.htm ______________________________________________________________ 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 [4]http://www.evsc.virginia.edu/faculty/people/mann.shtml