Email 4331: Ben "Beat the Crap out of Pat Michaels" Santer to McIntyre: "I see no reason why I should do your work for you...Please do not communicate with me in the future"

Email 4331

[Steve McIntyre] ...Jones' misrepresentation of the inquiry creates a bad impression of me, in a situation where the fault lay with CRU.

Jones also complained that I want to "know why some individual series were excluded from the chronologies" and complained that "if they just did some paleo fieldwork with trees, corals, sediment cores they might understand why some samples are excluded." My inquiry pertained to inconsistencies between the list of sites provided in reponse to my FOI request and the procedures reported in the original articles and/or the website and was entirely reasonable. I have considerable personal experience with reporting requirements for mineral exploration fieldwork, which is strictly regulated by securities commissions, and am quite confident that, contrary to Jones' allegations, the above inconsistencies do not arise out of the exigencies of fieldwork, but out of avoidable inaccuracy on the part of CRU in describing the procedures actually used. Again, Jones' misrepresentation of the situation creates a bad impression of me, when the fault lay with CRU.
... Ben Santer wrote: Dear Mr. McIntyre,

I gather that your intent is to "audit" the findings of our recently-published paper in the International Journal of Climatology (IJoC). You are of course free to do so...

In summary, you have access to all the raw information that you require in order to determine whether the conclusions reached in our IJoC paper are sound or unsound. I see no reason why I should do your work for you, and provide you with derived quantities (zonal means, synthetic MSU temperatures, etc.) which you can easily compute yourself.

...I gather that you have appointed yourself as an independent arbiter of the appropriate use of statistical tools in climate research. Rather that "auditing" our paper, you should be directing your attention to the 2007 IJoC paper published by David Douglass et al., which contains an egregious statistical error.

Please do not communicate with me in the future.

Ben Santer