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From: Ross McKitrick

Sent: 28 October 2004 14:53

To: Cotter, Rosalind

Cc: webmaster at uoguelph.ca'; Stephen McIntyre

Subject: Re: Posting of confidential material without permission

Dear Dr Cotter

Contrary to your email to the university webmaster I removed the links to these documents on my web site upon receipt of the request. While they remained on my unix account they were not accessible from my web site. However I have deleted the files in question in order to avoid any further misunderstanding on this matter.

May I remind you that Nature permitted Professor Mann to insert a reference to material covered by the same embargo in a document hosted at nature.com, and used this confidential material to support an assertion published in Nature in his July 1 Corrigendum that his errors did not affect his conclusions. Despite our requests no action has ever been taken to withdraw this reference either in print or on your web site. The confidential document is now publicly archived at Stephen Schneider's web page at Stanford. I trust you are making comparable efforts to have it withdrawn from there, and when you have succeeded in doing so will you please explain on what basis readers are expected to evaluate the claims you permitted to be published, now that you have forced the supporting information to be removed from public access.

Yours truly,

Ross McKitrick