Prior to the publication of McIntyre and McKitrick (2003), there are two references to me in the Climategate 2 dossier.

June 2003

In June 2003, Timothy Carter, a Climate Research editor then embroiled in the Soon-Baliunas dispute, sent Jones (CG2 – 2064) a copy of my June 15, 2003 post at a climate chat group on different versions of the Tornetrask (“Fennoscandia”) chronology, noting, in particular, the Tornetrask chronology then in use in the reconstructions contained a material “fudge” (my term; “bodge” is the CRU term) that (in my words) “hardly seems like a justifiable statistical procedure”. Jones replied:

Tim,

Thanks for this. I’ve been in touch with this guy (Steve McIntyre) before. I think he works in the US. He asked me a few things about the instrumental data, then more, then more and asked for more data. I eventually gave up but he is quite able.

The Finn is Timo Hameranta (or something like that) and is right of right field!

Cheers, Phil

My records of the correspondence are quite different, but that’s another story.



Oct 19-20, 2003

CG2 (1566) also contains a discussion among Mann and the inner team that sheds an interesting light on some long-standing disinformation disseminated by Mann at the time of the publication of MM2003 (which was released one week later.)

On October 17, Bradley, Hughes and Diaz had published a sort of response to Soon and Baliunas (2003). They selected 21 series with properties that by that time were well-known (Yamal, Mann’s PC1, Thompson’s tropical ice cores, etc.) and asserted that a majority had modern “warmth” exceeding levels in the MWP. (Since the properties of the selected series were known in advance of their selection, it was hardly surprising that Bradley, Hughes and Diaz would pick ones where the modern warm period exceeded the medieval warm period, but, again, that is a different story.)

I commented at Timo Hameranta’s chat group as follows:

[Quoting from Bradley et al 2003] Since Lamb’s analysis, many new paleotemperature series have been produced. However, well-calibrated data sets with decadal or higher resolution are still only available for a few dozen locations (see the figure). A few points: 1)the selection of datasets in these little data-mining exercises always seems arbitrary to me. It’s hard to know how these datasets were selected based on the assertion above. 2) the use of digitally unpublished data is highly frustrating. Of the 23 datsets referred to here, I can only locate 7 at the World Data Center for Paleoclimatology. http://www.ngdc.noaa.gov/paleo/ . Some of the worst offenders in this respect include Mosley-Thompson, Cook, Hughes and Briffa. 3) I looked at series 13, the China speleotherm which I haven’t looked at before and which is at WDCP. The start date is shown incorrectly in this article (the series begins in -665. The data is transformed (in the original article) to remove a “trend” and transformed again to estimate “temperature”. On the actual data, values in early periods are higher than 20th century values. Only after 2 transformations do high 20th century values emerge.

I followed up by writing to the criticized authors, receiving a response only from Cook who affirmed his intention to archive the then recent Oroko data. My initiative also resulted in Konrad Hughen archiving his data. I reported on this initiative a few days later, exempting Cook (who is consistently the most “scientific” of the Climategate correspondents) from my previous criticism. (Many of these series have subsequently become available, in part, because of my criticism of practices in the field.)

Either Mann was monitoring Hameranta’s chat group (unsurprising given his paranoia about “skeptics”) or my comment was passed to him. In any event, on October 19, Mann alerted Jones, Briffa, Bradley, Hughes, Diaz and Rutherford to “McIntyre”. Mann characterized me as “yet another shill for industry”, one who had made “scurrilous” criticisms of the recent Bradley paper.

FYI–thought you guys should have this (below). This guy “McIntyre” appears to be yet another shill for industry–he appears to be the one who forwarded the the scurrilous “climateskeptic” criticisms of the recent Bradley et al Science paper.

Precisely what was “scurrilous” about my observations about the Bradley paper remains unclear to me. Other than, perhaps, the temerity of daring to criticize Bradley. Mann’s email to the others also included our Sept 25, 2003 correspondence, in which I had sent him the file to which I had been directed at his website (pcproxy.txt) as being the proxy data used in MBH98, asking him to verify that this was the version that had been used in the paper. Mann had blown off my request and in his Oct 19 email to Jones and Briffa, notified them that he had done so.

An interesting passing comment in the email is Mann’s observation that I had “been trying to break into” their server. (Only two weeks later, a different version of Mann’s proxy data was made public. Mann claimed that it had been “publicly available” all the time, but Mann’s comment here clearly shows the opposite.)