Hi Keith,

Of course, I agree with you. We both know the probable flaws in Mike's recon, particularly as it relates to the tropical stuff. Your response is also why I chose not to read the published version of his letter. It would be too aggravating. The only way to deal with this whole issue is to show in a detailed study that his estimates are clearly deficient in multi-centennial power, something that you actually did in your Perspectives piece, even if it was not clearly stated because of editorial cuts. It is puzzling to me that a guy as bright as Mike would be so unwilling to evaluate his own work a bit more objectively.

Ed [Cook]

I have just read this lettter - and I think it is crap. I am sick to death of Mann stating his reconstruction represents the tropical area just because it contains a few (poorly temperature representative ) tropical series. He is just as capable of regressing these data again any other "target" series , such as the increasing trend of self-opinionated verbage he has produced over the last few years , and ... (better say no more) Keith [Briffa]

At every meeting I go to where Mike gives a talk, he always presents more on why his series is correct. Honestly, most people I talk to think that he is being way too defensive (as we all know too well). In any case, he is coming out with a new NH reconstruction. It will be interesting to see what it looks like. One problem is that he will be using the RegEM method, which provides no better diagnostics (e.g. betas) than his original method. So we will still not know where his estimates are coming from. Cheers, Ed [Cook]

[Met Office/Hadley's Simon Tett] 1) Didn't see a justification for use of tree-rings and not using ice
cores -- the obvious one is that ice cores are no good -- see Jones et
al, 1998.

2) No justification for regional reconstructions rather than what Mann et al did (I don't think we can say we didn't do Mann et al because we think it is crap!)