February 9, 2004: email 1076336623

Steve McIntyre has been trying to get raw data, and writes to Australian Antarctic scientist Tas van Ommen:

Dear Dr van Ommen,

Some time ago I inquired as to the availability of the … data set which was used in the paper of Mann and Jones in 2003. Is this the same data as was used in Jones and coworkers in 1998 (in the journal The Holocene)? Do you plan to make available a public archive of this data? Otherwise, I would appreciate an email copy of the data.

Thanks for your consideration.

Stephen McIntyre.

Van Ommen forwards the ensuing email exchange to Phil Jones:

What you will find below is … an email interchange between Steve McIntyre and myself. He has been asking for Antarctic data for a while (since your Geophysical Research Letters paper came out) and to my chagrin; I have put him off once already, for reasons I spell out below. …

Anyway, I am aware of McIntyre’s controversial history and am trying to handle things in a non-inflammatory way. He seems not to be troubling me over my own delay, but has asked for data that was used in your Holocene paper of 1998. For this, I have referred him to you. I expect he wants to replicate your calculations, and so he should use the identical data set, and I give you permission to pass on whatever it was I gave you for that work—with the caveat that it is representative of where the Antarctic proxy record was in 1997, not 2004. I leave it to you to decide how to deal with this—you may prefer to ignore the issue, and I would understand.

Van Ommen clearly understands that it is crucial for McIntyre to be given the identical data set in order to replicate Jones’s calculations—but then goes on to condone what he guesses will be Jones’s likely response: to ignore the issue completely.

Phil Jones replies, copying in Mike Mann:

Thanks for the email. Steve McIntyre hasn’t contacted me directly about the Antarctic data (yet), nor about any of the data used in the 1998 Holocene paper or the 2003 Geophysical Research Letters one with Mike. I suspect (hope) that he won’t. I had some emails with him a few years ago when he wanted to get all the station temperature data we use here in Climatic Research Unit. At that time, I hid behind the fact that some of the data had been received from individuals and not directly from Met(eorological) Services through the Global Telecommunications Service (GTS) or through the Global Climate Observing System.

We here start to learn about the tricks that Jones and colleagues have used to thwart attempts to get access to the data that their published claims are based on: to “hide behind”, in Jones’s words. In this case, Jones is trying to argue that data provided by individuals does not need to be provided for independent scrutiny—yet the mathematical results obtained from that very data can be published in leading journals, which then makes it eligible to be used support their statements in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Reports!

He continues:

Emails have also been sent to some other paleoclimatology people asking for data sets used in 1998 or 2003. Keith Briffa here got a request, for example. Here, they have also been in contact with some of Keith’s Russian contacts. All seem to relate to trying to get data that we’ve used. In the Russian case, issues relate to the Russian (Rashit Hantemirov) having a paper out with the same data that Keith used …. The data are different for two reasons. One reason is that Keith used (a mathematical method on the data); and, secondly, Rashit has added some data since Keith got the data a couple of years ago.

Jones is here giving yet more reasons why the original data should be made available. So what will he do?

I’ll just sit tight here and do nothing. Mike will likely do the same, but we’ll expect another publication in the nearish future.