cc: Tim Osborn , Phil Jones , Keith Briffa , rbradley@geo.umass.edu, mhughes@ltrr.arizona.edu, Michael Oppenheimer , Tom Wigley , tom crowley , Gabi Hegerl , Jonathan Overpeck , Steve Schneider date: Thu, 06 Nov 2003 09:30:48 -0700 from: Tom Wigley subject: Re: Fwd: McIntyre and McKintrick paper to: "Michael E. Mann" Mike, Yes -- ignore Sonja. Poor woman, she can't even write or spell properly. Mrs Malaprop would be proud of her. Another sad aspect is the strong hint of paranoia in her letter to you. It is laced with implications that scientists are distorting their science, that we are subservient to political agendas, and so on. Nothing new, of course, but she really seems to believe it. I suspect there is a psychology PhD here. I must commend you on the detective work you did to figure out what M&M did wrong. Perhaps the focus of any 'response' could be on elucidating the details of and justifications for your methods, using M&M as an example of how not to do it? In this way the paper would be a direct contribution to the science, with the rebuttal of M&M coming as a byproduct. I have said this before, but this is how Ben Santer, Karl Taylor and I responded to some junk criticism of our detection work by Legates (in GRL). This puts the science first and relegates the criticism to its proper place as not worth making a direct response to. (Hmmm, is that good grammar?) Tom. ++++++++++++++++++++++ Michael E. Mann wrote: Dear all, Thought you'd all be interested in this email. Of course, we have no intention to respond to this, or other further emails from the contrarians. We're working on a full response that will be formally published. We'll let you know the venue when its confirmed, mike m Delivered-To: [1]mem6u@virginia.edu From: "Sonja.B-C" [2] Date: Thu, 6 Nov 2003 14:30:42 +0000 To: "Michael E. Mann" [3] Subject: McIntyre and McKintrick paper Cc: [4]L.A.Love@hull.ac.uk, Steve McIntyre [5], Ross McKitrick [6], timo hameranta [7], Reto Knutti [8], "David R. Legates" [9], George Kukla [10], Hans von Storch [11], John Christy [12], "Keith R. Briffa <[13]k.briffa@uea.ac.uk, Madhav L. Khandekar" [14], "Rajendra K. Pachauri" [15], Ulrich Cubasch [16], "Spencer R. Weart" [17], Aynsley Kellow [18], Bjorn Lomborg [19], Bob Foster [20], Chris de Freitas [21], Christopher Essex [22], "Craig D. Idso" [23], Curt Holder [24], "David E. Wojick" [25], Henrik Svensmark [26], Hugh W Ellsaesser [27], [28]ian.castles@anu.edu.auKirill.Ya.Kondratyev Priority: NORMAL X-Mailer: Execmail for Win32 5.1.1 Build (10) Dear Professor Mann I have found a list of scientists which contained you email address, hence I am able to communicate with you directly. As you already know, a paper by McIntyre and McKintrick analysing your famous 'Hockey stick' paper is now available to everybody at [29]www.multi-science.co.uk. The printed version is due later this month. Your, via the attention it received by the IPCC, is currently widely used by social scientists and many researchers in the energy policy community as 'the' proof for anthropogenic dangerous warming. Humanity should now act, it argued, on the basis of fact rather than the rather suspect 'precautionary principle'. I would respectfully like to explain to you and other scientistst who may feel offended by the publication from outside 'their' domain, why I have published this and other 'attacks' and why I would appreciate a publishable reply from you and your colleagues. You may yet win the argument! Who knows, but an open debate is overdue. I do not claim that I or my reviewers can arbitrate on the 'scientific' truth of publications that the IPCC selects as most relevant, but your 1998 certainly was selected as such and as far as I know, there was no protest against its use in global policy advocacy. I may be wrong, for I am more in contact with research that is based on worse case scenarios (from IPCC) than with basic climate scince research. ENERGY&ENVIRONMENT has paid attention to the 'science' and 'social science' controversies associated with the IPCC for over a decade and has done so not in order to advance (natural) scientific understanding, but with reference to the profound policy relevance of this understanding and hence of any controversy about the nature of climate and the causes of its variability over time, as well as attempts, in some circles, to stifle associated controversies, presumably to make life easier for policy and policy relevant research. I am fully aware of the policy significance of the debate between 'you, the IPCC and so-called climate skeptics, and its funding implications for so many. But the implications for humanity are even greater. ( In fact, most of the papers I have published in recent years have used the IPCC 'consensus' as baseline.) I have been an energy policy researcher writing and now editing with an international relations/ political science bias; I have a strong research history in environmental politics, and a basic education in physical geography as well as German literature. (Remember acid rain, the death of Europ'es forests in a few deacdes? Or the death of the global ocean from pollution in the 1970s, the subject of my PhD? Environmental threats have long serves many other agendas, and natural scientists may at least be aware of this.) I have published 'outsiders' whom I trust because I no longer fully trust many 'research products' - not because of any failings because of individual researchers , but because of the nature of much contemporary research funding, see [30]http://www.john-daly.com/sonja-bc.htm. I do know about research funding from bureaucracies - the importance of the right buzzwords, policy visions, legal commitments and political ambitions. I simply believe that research controversies related to global warming (science, social science, and technology) should be heard by policy-makers and NGOs in a world were vast amounts of limited finance are about to be spend on 'decarbonisation' on the assumption made by most social scientists and many policy people that IPCC summary pronouncements are undisputed and hence are acceptable as uncontroversial baseline for their work on decarbonisation economics, 'clean' technologoly, carbon finance, Kyoto mechanisms etc). I am encouraging research controversy in the public arena rather than editorial boardrooms. For example and to my considerable regret, even the UK Foreign Office and many of my colleaugues in the energy policy research (not in the earth sciences by the way) now believe that they need not pay any attention to scientific issues because all climate skeptics are funded by the oil industry. If this slur is permitted to stand, as it seems to be, then journals like mine are surely permitted to ask and who is funding the 'global warming' modelling community if not governments committed to the UNFCCC, and to explore what agendas have attached themselves to the warming threat. If I have offended against the ethics of natural science publication, which I am not sure of given cases that have been reported to me, I apologise and plead ignorance. I forward to hearing from you not via a web site, but in the form of a paper or view point that I can published for libraries and readers. Best wishes Sonja Boehmer-Christiansen ---------------------- Dr.Sonja Boehmer-Christiansen Reader,Department of Geography, Editor, Energy & Environment (Multi-science,[31]www.multi-science.co.uk) Faculty of Science University of Hull Hull HU6 7RX, UK Tel: (0)1482 465349/6341/5385 Fax: (0)1482 466340 [32]Sonja.B-C@hull.ac.uk ______________________________________________________________ Professor Michael E. Mann Department of Environmental Sciences, Clark Hall University of Virginia Charlottesville, VA 22903 _______________________________________________________________________ e-mail: [33]mann@virginia.edu Phone: (434) 924-7770 FAX: (434) 982-2137 [34]http://www.evsc.virginia.edu/faculty/people/mann.shtml