From: Phil Jones To: mann@snow.geo.umass.edu Subject: Straight to the Point Date: Thu, 06 May 1999 17:37:34 +0100 Cc: k.briffa@uea.ac.uk,t.osborn@uea.ac.uk,mhughes@ltrr.arizona.edu, rbradley@geo.umass.edu Mike, Just back from two weeks away and from discussions with Keith and Tim and some emails you seem quite pissed off with us all in CRU. I am somewhat at a loss to understand why. It is clear from the emails that this relates to the emphasis placed on a few words/phrases in Keith/Tim's Science piece. These may not be fully resolved but the piece comes out tomorrow. I don't want to open more wounds but I might by the end of the email. I've not seen the censored email that Ray has mentioned but this doesn't, to my way of working, seem to be the way you should be responding - ie slanging us all off to Science. We are all trying to work together for the good of the 'Science'. We have disagreements - Ray, Malcolm, Keith and me have in the past, but they get aired and eventually forgotten. We have never resorted to slanging one another off to a journal ( as in this case) or in reviewing papers or proposals. You may think Keith or I have reviewed some of your papers but we haven't. I've reviewed Ray's and Malcolm's - constructively I hope where I thought something could have been done better. I also know you've reviewed my paper with Gabi very constructively. So why all the beef now ? Maybe it started with my Science piece last summer. When asked to do this it was stressed to that I should discuss how your Nature paper fitted in to the current issues in paleoclimatology. This is what I thought I was doing. Julia Uppenbrink asked me to do the same with your GRL paper but I was too busy and passed it on to Keith. Again it seems a very reasoned comment. I would suspect that you've been unhappy about us coming out with a paper going back 1000 years only a few months after your Nature paper (back to 1400). Ray knew all about this as he was one of the reviewers. Then the second Science comment has come out with a tentative series going back 2000 years. Both Science pieces give us a chance to discuss issues highly relevant to the 'science', which is what we have both tried to do. Anyway that's enough for now - I'll see how you'll respond, if at all. There are two things I'm going to say though : 1) Keith didn't mention in his Science piece but both of us think that you're on very dodgy ground with this long-term decline in temperatures on the 1000 year timescale. What the real world has done over the last 6000 years and what it ought to have done given our understandding of Milankovic forcing are two very different things. I don't think the world was much warmer 6000 years ago - in a global sense compared to the average of the last 1000 years, but this is my opinion and I may change it given more evidence. 2) The errors don't include all the possible factors. Even though the tree-ring chronologies used have robust rbar statistics for the whole 1000 years ( ie they lose nothing because core numbers stay high throughout), they have lost low frequency because of standardization. We've all tried with RCS/very stiff splines/hardly any detrending to keep this to a minimum, but until we know it is minimal it is still worth mentioning. It is better we ( I mean all of us here) put the caveats in ourselves than let others put them in for us. 3) None of us here are trying to get material into IPCC. I've given you my input through the review of the chapter in Asheville. I may get a chance to see the whole thing again at some stage, but I won't be worried if I don't. I can't think of a good ending, but hoping for a favourable response, so we can still work together. Cheers Phil 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 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------