From: "Michael E. Mann" <mann@meteo.psu.

edu>
To: Tom Crowley <tcrowley@duke.edu>
Subject: Re: not so fast
Date: Tue, 02 Jan 2007 11:18:45 -0500
Reply-to: mann@psu.edu
Cc: "raymond s. bradley" <rbradley@geo.umass.edu>, rahmstorf@ozean-klima.de, Eric
Steig <steig@ess.washington.edu>, gschmidt@giss.nasa.gov,
rasmus.benestad@physics.org, garidel@marine.rutgers.edu, Caspar Ammann
<ammann@ucar.edu>, William Connelley <wmconnolley@gmail.com>, d-
archer@uchicago.edu, rtp1@geosci.uchicago.edu, p.jones@uea.ac.uk

for those who are interested, there is a paper by Goosse et al (I'm a co-author)
explaining
why parts of Europe such as central england would have experienced warmer summer
conditions
relative to present than other regions, related to early land-use change:
Goosse, H., Arzel, O., Luterbacher, J., Mann, M.E., Renssen, H., Riedwyl, N.,
Timmermann,
A., Xoplaki, E., Wanner, H., [1]The origin of the European "Medieval Warm
Period", Climate
of the Past, 2, 99-113, 2006.
paper available as pdf here:
[2]http://www.meteo.psu.edu/~mann/shared/articles/Goosseetal-CP06.pdf
meanwhile, winter warmth could have been due to a strong AO/NAO pattern
associated with
decreased volcanism and high solar, as discussed in the various Shindell et al
paper.
this simply underscores the point that we all often make, that one needs to take
into
account regional factors when interpreting regional records. This is especially
relevant to
the extrapolation of a long record from England to the entire NH (which appears
to have
been tacitly done by Jack Eddy?),
mike
Tom Crowley wrote:

we still don't have an adequat explanation as to how Jack "cooked up" that
figure - I do
not believe it was purely out of thin air - look at the attached - which I used
in the
Crowley-Lowery composite just because it was "out there" - I made no claim that
it was the
record of record, but just that it had been used beforer. the Lamb ref. is his
book dated
1966. I will have to dig up the page ref later. Dansgaard et al. 1975 Nature
paper on
Norsemen...etc used that figure when comparing what must have been their Camp
Century
record - have to check that too - where the main point of that paper was that
the timing of
Medieval warmth was different in Greenlandn and England!
25 years later my provocation for writing the CL paper came from a strong
statement on the
MWP by Claus Hammer that the canonical idea of the MWP being warming than the
present was
correct and that the 1999 Mann et al was wrong. he kept going on like that I
reminded him
that he was a co-author on the 1975 paper! that is also what motivated to do my
"bonehead"
sampling of whatever was out there just to see what happened when you added them
all
together - the amazing result was that it looked pretty much like Mann et al.
ther rest is
history -- much ignored and forgotten.
I might also pointn out that in a 1996 Consequences article I wrote - and that
Fred Singer
loves to cite -- Jack (who was the editor of the journal) basically shoehorned
me into
re-reproducing that figure even though I didn't like it - there was not an
alternative. in
the figure caption it has a similar one to Zielinski except that it states
"compiled by
R.S. Bradley and J.A. Eddy based on J.T. Houghton....so that puts a further
twist on this
because it point to Houghton not Bradley/Eddy as the source. Jack must have
written that
part of the figure caption because I don't think I knew those details.
but we still don't know where the details of the figure came from - the MWP is
clearly more
schematic than the LIA (actually the detailsl about timing of the samll wiggles
in the LIA
are pretty good) - maybe there was a meshing of the Greenland and the England
records to do
the MWP part - note that the English part gets cooler. they may also have
thrown in the
old LaMarche record - which I also have. maybe I can schlep something together
using only
those old three records.
tom
Michael E. Mann wrote:

Ray, happy holidays and thanks for the (quite fascinating) background on this.
It would be
good material for a Realclimate article. would be even better if someone could
get Chris on
record confirming that this is indeed the history of this graphic...
mike
raymond s. bradley wrote:

I believe this graph originated in a (literally) grey piece of literature that

Jack Eddy
used to publish called "Earth Quest". It was designed for, and distributed
to, high
school teachers. In one issue, he had a fold-out that showed different
timelines,
Cenozoic, Quaternary, last 100ka, Holocene, last millennium, last century etc.
The idea
was to give non-specialists a perspective on the earth's climate history. I
think this
idea evolved from the old NRC publication edited by L. Gates, then further
elaborated on
by Tom Webb in the book I edited for UCAR, Global Changes of the Past. (This
was an
outcome of the wonderful Snowmass meeting Jack master-minded around 1990).

I may have inadvertently had a hand in this millennium graph! I recall

getting a fax
 from Jack with a hand-drawn graph, that he asked me to review. Where he got
his version
from, I don't know. I think I scribbled out part of the line and amended it
in some
way, but have no recollection of exactly what I did to it. And whether he
edited it
further, I don't know. But as it was purely schematic (& appears to go
through ~1950)
perhaps it's not so bad. I note, however, that in the more colourful version
of the
much embellished graph that Stefan circulated ([3]

http://www.politicallyincorrect.de/2006/11/klimakatastrophe_was_ist_wirkl_1.html
the end-point has been changed to 2000, which puts quite a different spin on
things.
They also seem to have fabricated a scale for the purported temperature
changes. In any
case, the graph has no objective basis whatsoever; it is purely a "visual
guess" at what
happened, like something we might sketch on a napkin at a party for some
overly
persistent inquisitor..... (so make sure you don't leave such things on the
table...).
What made the last millennium graph famous (notorious!) was that Chris Folland
must have
seen it and reproduced it in the 1995 IPCC chapter he was editing. I don't
think he
gave a citation and it thus appeared to have the imprimatur of the IPCC.
Having
submitted a great deal of text for that chapter, I remember being really
pissed off that
Chris essentially ignored all the input, and wrote his own version of the
paleoclimate
record in that volume.

There are other examples of how Jack Eddy's grey literature publication was
misused. In
a paper in Science by Zielinski et al. (1994) [v.264, p.448-452]--attached--
they
reproduced [in Figure 1c] a similarly schematic version of Holocene
temperatures giving
the following citation, "Taken from J. A. Eddy and R. S. Bradley, Earth-quest
5 (insert)
(1991), as modified from J. T. Houghton, G. J. Jenkins, J. J. Ephraums,
Climate Change,
The IPCC Scientific Assessment (Cambridge Univ. Press, Cambridge, 1990)."
But I had nothing to do with that one!
So, that's how a crude fax from Jack Eddy became the definitive IPCC record on
the last
millennium!
Happy New Year to everyone
Ray

Raymond S. Bradley
Director, Climate System Research Center*
Department of Geosciences, University of Massachusetts
Morrill Science Center
611 North Pleasant Street
AMHERST, MA 01003-9297
 Tel: 413-545-2120
Fax: 413-545-1200
*Climate System Research Center: 413-545-0659
<[4] http://www.paleoclimate.org>
Paleoclimatology Book Web Site: [5]http://www.geo.umass.edu/climate/paleo/html
Publications (download .pdf files):
[6]http://www.geo.umass.edu/faculty/bradley/bradleypub.html

--
Michael E. Mann
Associate Professor
Director, Earth System Science Center (ESSC)

Department of Meteorology Phone: (814) 863-4075

503 Walker Building FAX: (814) 865-3663
The Pennsylvania State University email: [7]mann@psu.edu
University Park, PA 16802-5013

[8]http://www.met.psu.edu/dept/faculty/mann.htm

--
Michael E. Mann
Associate Professor
Director, Earth System Science Center (ESSC)

Department of Meteorology Phone: (814) 863-4075

503 Walker Building FAX: (814) 865-3663
The Pennsylvania State University email: [9]mann@psu.edu
University Park, PA 16802-5013

[10]http://www.met.psu.edu/dept/faculty/mann.htm

References

1. file://localhost/tmp/Goosseetal-CP06.pdf
2. http://www.meteo.psu.edu/~mann/shared/articles/Goosseetal-CP06.pdf
3.
http://www.politicallyincorrect.de/2006/11/klimakatastrophe_was_ist_wirkl_1.html
4. http://www.paleoclimate.org/
5. http://www.geo.umass.edu/climate/paleo/html
6. http://www.geo.umass.edu/faculty/bradley/bradleypub.html
7. mailto:mann@psu.edu
8. http://www.met.psu.edu/dept/faculty/mann.htm
9. mailto:mann@psu.edu
10. http://www.met.psu.edu/dept/faculty/mann.htm