CORRESPONDENCE WITH
NSF 
December 18, 2003 NO REPLY RECEIVED
Dear
Dr. Verardo,
In your reply dated December 15, 2003, you state the following:
"In return,
we expect them [grantees] to make their data available so that other scientists
may examine and replicate their findings."
Again, I note that Professor Mann has directly refused to provide and Professor Bradley has failed to respond to a request for disclosure of the following information:
-
The identification of the 159 series used to carry out the reconstruction in MBH98;
-
complete description of the methodology used to read in the 159 series and effect the temperature re-construction in MBH98, through disclosure of the computer programs to effect this re-construction;
The
recent request for information on residuals can be added.
Professor Mann's response to you, listing various disclosures over the past few
years, is not responsive to the above very specific requests. I am familiar with
the listed disclosures and none of them deal with the above data request. The
fact that Professor Mann may have made adequate disclosure of other information
is not relevant here. In the present state of disclosure of MBH98, we assert
that it is not possible to "examine and replicate their findings.
As to the current standard of MBH98 disclosure, it is my understanding that the
U.S. government has established standards for disclosure, applicable to
recipients of government grants. Surely the applicable standard here is, at a
minimum, that of being "capable of being substantially reproduced" as
set out in Guidelines implementing Public Law 106-554. In the case of a
publication as influential as MBH98 and with as profound a potential impact,
copious and comprehensive disclosure is the only reasonable policy. In his
email of Dec. 5, 2003 to you, Professor Mann stated:
"We gave as detailed a description of our methods as was possible in the confines of a short paper, and in all these respects must have satisfied the stringent standards set by the editor and reviewers of the journal in which we published."
This
very statement acknowledges that the "confines of a short paper"
necessarily prevented complete and comprehensive disclosure of the methodology.
Thus, while the disclosure may have met the standards of the journal, the above
statement is not evidence that the disclosure met the pertinent standard of
being "capable of being substantially reproduced." The situation can
be readily remedied through trivial disclosure as requested above. The very
difficulty of obtaining such disclosure should itself be of concern to you and
others. We request that you re-consider your position on this matter forthwith.
I also strongly disagree with several comments in Mann's email in respect to his
FTP site. Professor Mann stated:
All of the proxy data used in MBH98 were made available on our public ftp site
once the various researchers that contributed data to our network were able to
publish their own data (July 2002). The data (all individual proxy indicators
used as well as the various PC representations of proxy sub networks for
different time intervals) were provided in the various clearly labeled
directories here: <ftp://holocene.evsc.virginia.edu/pub/MBH98/>
The
above statement implies that Professor Mann entered into embargo agreements with
other scientists. If the embargoes are with scientists who are themselves
recipients of U.S. grants, then such scientists would not be entitled to claim
an embargo under the 1991 Policy Statement, since the use
in the MBH multiproxy study represented significant use of the data.
Additionally, if one examines the listing of proxy sources at http://www.ngdc.noaa.gov/paleo/ei/data_supp.html,
one sees only two references which are later than 1996 and many, if not most,
references are 1992 or earlier. This is at least prima facie evidence that there
were no applicable embargo agreements. Since you have relied in part on the
truth of the above claim regarding implied embargoes in reaching your decision,
I request that you verify the existence of the specific embargoes, which
prevented the timely disclosure of the proxy database.
Thank you for your attention to the re-consideration requests referred to above.
Yours truly,
Stephen McIntyre
No reply received.