cc: Malcolm Hughes , Tim Osborn , Keith Briffa , "Raymond s.bradley" , Phil Jones , Scott Rutherford date: Wed, 12 Nov 2003 13:19:12 -0700 from: Tom Wigley subject: Re: fine to: "Michael E. Mann" I will check out possibilities here. My thinking is that the only way to truly squash M&M is to have an independent third party come along and say ... I used exactly the same data and method as MBH and got exactly the same results, and, furthermore, I endorse the method. I will read your paper with interest -- this will be a good putdown, but M&M may still say that you are a mutual admiration society. Tom. +++++++++++++++++= Michael E. Mann wrote: Thanks Tom, Fair enough on all counts. You know how this works--hard to get every single nitty gritty detail in the short Nature space, then someone comes along, obviously w/ hostile intent, and your inclination to help them is limited--then they turn around and say you didn't disclose the data, methods, etc. (which is at least partly an outright lie, though there is a minor kernal to the claim that they can try to grab on to, because the methodological description was terse). Actually, Tim, Keith, Phil, Ray, Malcolm, Scott and I are all planning to pursue a much more careful intercomparsion of results, methods, etc. We have a paper, the draft of which I'm forwarding separately as it is pretty big (in review J. Climate) which should go a long way in this regard. It controls for different datesets and methodologies, and shows that the results are basically robust, with the conclusion that spatial and seasonal sampling seems to matter (as we would expect) the most, but results seem pretty robust with respect to statistical methodology (if you've done it right!). Would have been nice if this were in the press right now, but alas its still in review... Nonetheless, wouldn't be a bad idea to have some graduate students, or some NCAR postdocs(?) try this--I'd be happy to help out where I can, but be hands off too to keep the effort independent. Let me know what you think... Thanks again, mike At 12:36 PM 11/12/2003 -0700, Tom Wigley wrote: OK, Mike. So you are choosing my option 2 (rightly so). But there are broader issues, and it may still come down to option 3. Perhaps a middle ground would be to try to get one of the people I named to get the data and do an honest and informed version of what M&M tried to do? It would be a nice student's warm up exercise, at the beginning grad student level in a stats dept. >From the flurry of emails, there may still be some things about the method that you would have to pass on. I must admit that, having read the papers, I don't think there is enough information for *me* to reproduce what you have done. I could certainly do something similar, and I might discover the nuances as I proceded. But it would still be tough. I still don't think that hard-earned data needs to be made freely available. Tom. ______________________________________________________________ Professor Michael E. Mann Department of Environmental Sciences, Clark Hall University of Virginia Charlottesville, VA 22903 _______________________________________________________________________ e-mail: [1]mann@virginia.edu Phone: (434) 924-7770 FAX: (434) 982-2137 [2]http://www.evsc.virginia.edu/faculty/people/mann.shtml