In many cases, Kaufman’s decadal series are averages of annual data. Just because Kaufman coerced annual data into decadal versions (paying no heed obviously to Matt Briggs’ admonition not to smooth data) doesn’t mean that the annual data used for the decadal average wasn’t “part of the study”. It was.

http://www.anelegantchaos.org/cru/emails.php?eid=1012&filename=1252233095.txt :

Unless anyone has another suggestion, I will reply and send him the 10-year data (which is
already posted at NOAA-Paleoclimate) and explain that they were the basis for all of the
calculations. He might want the annual data that the mean values were based on. I suppose
we’ll cross that bridge when we get to it.

http://www.scribd.com/doc/18773744/How-to-Publish-a-Scientific-Comment-in-1-2-3-Easy-Steps

Hence why there’s no mention on http://www.realclimate.org/ about Kaufman even though the paper’s been out for a while. Just some more navel gazing posts.

The last note sent contained two messages. One was a continued request for data and the other was a description of the types of auditing that should be performed on the data. I’ve always found that it is better to keep to a single message in a note. The description of the types of auditing that need to be performed could have been misconstrued as a direct statement about the quality of the paper and the competence of the authors.

On the other hand, did they not expect critical and stringent examination of the results of an article, published in Science, that makes such strong claims. I have heard far more critical commentary and questions about papers expressed in the presence of the authors at panel sessions in engineering conferences. I have heard one major researcher in the field of machine learning being told that her work was unsound and that she lacked credibility during a Q&A session of a keynote address at an AI conference. Her main fault was that her simple systems worked while the complicated systems of the prior art didn’t. She had the embarrassed the machine learning establishment and was to be made to pay a price. I suppose that there is a direct analogy to the current situation in this..

Steve: the PI meeting notes stated that they should be prepared to be “SCRUTINIZED” and to be a “lightning rod” and that their data should be available. For the nth time, I could have said pretty please with sugar on it, Kaufman had no intent of giving me the data.

It is my belief that the data should be publicly available at the time of publication of the article – especially when the author says that the data is “publicly available”. Thus, any notice to Kaufman prior to notifying the journal was merely courtesy on my part.

In my experience, if an author intends to provide the data, he does so right away on the first pass without any song and dance in response to an email written in my usual business-like tone.

This has happened on a couple of occasions with non-Team oceanographers (William Curry springs to mind), who were surprised that they hadn’t archived the requested data and took immediate steps to rectify the situation. Konrad Hughen, one of whose series was used by Kaufman, was another who archived data in response to an inquiry from me.

I ask for things in a business-like way. I think that I’m polite, but if I were worried about being “nice”, I wouldn’t be doing what I’m doing. In business terms, I’m not hard-nosed but I’ve got enough experience to recognize when people are being evasive.

I didn’t post up my first two requests to Kaufman, which I provide below. In the old days, I got up to 30 emails or so to Crowley without getting data. I’m much quicker to pull the plug now. I give the author a couple of opportunities to rectify the situation and then publicize it here and then go to the journal.

I did not immediately publicize Kaufman’s obstruction. I asked him offline first. Here’s the first request on Sep 3 (which also notified him of upside-down Mann):

Dear Dr Kaufman,

Mann et al 2008 used the Tiljander series upside down from the orientation in the underlying articles (see McIntyre and McKitrick, PNAS 2009) – a point confirmed with Mia Tiljander (pers comm). I notice that you used this data in the upside-down Mann orientation, though you seem to be aware of the issues surrounding this series, as you truncated it at AD1800. You should report that you used this series upside-down to the orientation recommended by the authors.

You say that you selected series from those with “publicly available data (8) (table S1) (www.ncdc.noaa.gov/paleo/pubs/jopl2008arctic/jopl2008arctic.html “. The link only refers to 6 or so of the 23 data sets. I have been unable to locate “publicly available” versions of many of the data sets including: SIU Table 1 series 3, 6, 7, 12,13,19, 21 (in a few cases, as you note, you used annual versions that are not publicly available.) Could you please provide me with the above data that is not publicly available. You may wish to amend your text to be a bit more precise prior to the final print version.

Regards, Steve McIntyre

To which he promptly replied (attaching the decadal version now available at NOAA, but not when I sent my first letter):

Thank you for your comments.

I wasn’t aware that Mann et al. had flipped the Korttajarvi series, and I’m afraid that I didn’t see your correction in PNAS. I’ve plotted our original series along with the re-orientation of the Korttajarvi data to get a feel for the effect on the overall result (attached).

All of the data that we used in the the study are on-line at the NOAA paleoclimatology webiste:
http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/paleo/pubs/kaufman2009/kaufman2009.html

I’ve attached an excel file with the data as well. The column headings are keyed to the sites in Table S1.

Thank you for your interest in the study,

I responded that the version supplied was not what I asked for and re-requested the data as follows:

Thank you for your acknowledgement. I note that you have provided the decadally averaged and re-scaled versions as used – good -, but this is not exactly what I’d asked for, You had said that you had selectly “publicly available” daa. I’m pretty familiar with “publicly available” data sources and I haven’t been able to locate a public source for 6- Lake C2; 19- LAke Nautajarvi; 21- Lake Lehmilampi. Could you point me to the public location of these particular series that are supposedly “publicly available”? In the alternative, I’d appreciate copies of the data prior to the decadal averaging and re-scaling.

I am only aware of Mann’s version of 20- Lake Korttajarvi in public circulation though I obtained an original version of the series from Mia Tiljander, which corresponds. Is there another public version of this series?

As you note in your article, you used annual versions of 7,12,13 and 16 that are not publicly available. Again, I’d appreciate copies of these series as I am interested in examining this dataset on an annual as well as a decadal basis.

You observe that it doesn’t matter whether Korttajarvi is used upside down or not. You should probably check whether the other Finnish series are used upside down as well. My guess is that it probably won’t matter whether all of them are used upside down. It would be interesting to experiment with whether you can turn a majority of the series upside down without “mattering”. I suspect that you could as the Hockey Stick-ness of the result seems to depend heavily on series 1, 4, 9 and, of course, Briffa’s Yamal series, which has been a staple of these sorts of studies for many years. It would be highly desirable for someone to do a detailed reconciliation of why the updated version of Polar Urals yields such different results to Briffa’s Yamal series.

Regards, Steve McIntyre

This received no acknowledgement within a week or so. So I sent the follow-up in the correspondence already shown above.

I think that the correspondence is business-like. It’s how I write. I do not believe if that if the correspondence had been a bit “nicer” that Kaufman would have sent the data.

Perhaps I should try the process myself and get rejected 50 times, and then I’ll feel differently.

Yes, I think you’re starting to understand the source of frustration.