cc: t.osborn@uea.ac.uk date: Fri, 03 Dec 1999 13:40:40 -0500 from: "Michael E. Mann" subject: Re: Fwd: Comments on Nov 23 USGCRP seminar to: Phil Jones HI Phil, > Mike, > I read the subject title and said to myself - you'll regret this Mike ! > I got involved a year or two ago and after countless emails I got nowhere > and gave up. I hope you manage to stick to this being your only response. > I've been in Dietz's email list for a while - normally I just trash them, but > I didn't get the one you're responding to. > Anyway your responses were clear and succinct. Past experience, however, > tells me they won't have the desired effect, but at least you've got >something > off your chest ! Whatever you do, don't respond again at least for a few > months. > > Cheers > Phil Thanks for the advice Phil. I'm aware that these guys would like nothing better than to trap me in an ongoing back-and-forth, waste my time, and use anything I say against me later on. So, I responded only after careful consideration, and intend to follow through on my vow to not engage in further exchanges. My words were quite measured (as I'm sure you're aware, knowing the kinds of emails I'm capable of firing off!), and I hope I corrected the record for those who are willing to listen. Unfortunately, many of them aren't I'm sure. But at least we've put the truth out there. There were some influential types in that list (e.g., congressional senate committee advisers) so in part, I wanted to make sure they knew that these guys are distorting the truth. Chick Keller and others have been helpful in taking up some of the slack too, but it's easy to waste one's time with this. I'll need every minute I've got next month when I begin to teach my course, and the avalanche of IPCC reviews is upon me! talk to you soon, mike > > PS I noticed you said 'Our proxy network made use of *all* ... which were > available in the public domain/published literature at the time' . > Does this mean we can gain access to all the series you used in your 1998 > and 1999 papers ? > As you aptly note, the converse of the statement I made isn't quite true. ie, not all records that we did use *were* in the public domain, although I believe we used just about all of the records that were (which is the statement I was making). I think you guys know that I find the "data witholding" silly, and if it were up to me you would have every single record we have. It is particularly irking to me to not be able to give them to you, because I know that the key ones you're thinking of (morroccan dendro) don't amount to a hill of beans in the end [I did the reconstructions ommitting those data a couple years back, to convince myself that the difference was negligible], and until we have access to identical datasets, our comparisons are going to be apples-and-oranges, which helps nobody. So I'm going to push Malcolm on this. Perhaps, over beers next week at AGU, and I can convince him to convince Stockton to allow these to be distributed. That having been said, when Tim comes to visit (hopefully in June--need to get back to him!) and works on our computer, and on the planned cross-comparisons, I'm not going to be policing what data he does and doesn't have access to. So it will be in his hands, and he'll be able to do with it what he may. It's just that, for cover, I cannot have officially "given him" the data... mike > >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 > >---------------------------------------------------------------------------- > > > > _______________________________________________________________________ Professor Michael E. Mann Department of Environmental Sciences, Clark Hall University of Virginia Charlottesville, VA 22903 _______________________________________________________________________ e-mail: mann@virginia.edu Phone: (804) 924-7770 FAX: (804) 982-2137 http://www.evsc.virginia.edu/faculty/people/mann.html