As Mosher and Fuller noted in The CRUTape Letters, in the first years of the twenty-first century relations between Phil Jones and Steve McIntyre were relatively collegial. However, something changed during 2003 and thereafter Jones adopted an approach of blocking all McIntyre's requests for data.
It's hard to tell exactly what prompted this change of heart - the two major events of 2003 were the Soon and Baliunas affair and publication of MM03. Since both of these were critiques directed at Mann, it's not obvious why they would affect Jones. Clearly Jones had to be persuaded that there was a group interest in resisting McIntyre's efforts and in email #1566 we get a taste of how this was achieved. In it, Mann tells other members of the Hockey team about an email he has just sent to McIntyre, telling him that he will not respond to further requests for information (see The Hockey Stick Illusion p.91).
FYI--thought you guys should have this (below). This guy "McIntyre" appears to be yet another shill for industry--he appears to be the one who forwarded the the scurrilous "climateskeptic" criticisms of the recent Bradley et al Science paper. Here is an email I sent him a few weeks ago in response to an inquiry. It appears, by the way, that he has been trying to break into our machine ("multiproxy"). Obviously, this character is looking for any little thing he can get ahold of...
The best that can be done is to ignore their desperate emails and, if they manage to slip something into the peer-reviewed literature, as in the case of Soon & Baliunas, deal w/ it as we did in that case--i.e., the Eos response to Soon et al---they were stung badly by that, and the bad press that followed.For those of you who haven't seen it, I'm forwarding an interesting email exchange from John Holdren of Harvard that I got the other day. He summarized the whole thing very nicely, form an independent perspective...
Cheers,
mike
p.s. I'm setting up my email server so that it automatically rejects emails from the "usual suspects". You might want to do the same. As they increasingly get automatic reject messages from the scientists, they'll start to get the picture...