Chris Horner has just had another batch of emails released to him, this time from the University of Arizona, where Hockey Team members Overpeck and Hughes are based. It's early days on the analysis of the content, but one message was sufficiently amusing for him to forward it to me.
Remember this picture?
This is Sir John Houghton launching the Report of WG1 for the IPCC Third Assessment, with the Hockey Stick the centrepiece of the event. Mann has previously been rather critical of the IPCC's use of his work in this way.
I always thought it was somewhat misplaced to make it a central icon of the climate change debate," he said.
However, the new email disclosures show that it wasn't always this way. When the BBC report in which the image appeared was published, Mann wrote to his coauthors to tell them about it:
I thought you might be interested in this, from today's BBC:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/sci/tech/newsid 1130000/1130501.stm
Not to slight Sir John(!), but its actually the chart in the background I'm referring to :)
cheers,
mike
Malcolm Hughes sent a joking reply:
Highly cool! - pity about the ugly old guy in front! Cheers, Malcolm
To which Mann responded:
Hey, that's Sir John you're talking about! And a fellow brit, no less! I thought it was pretty cool too. I'd like to know what he was saying about the chart!
I guess what initially appears "cool" might turn out, with the benefit of hindsight, to be, well, uncool.