Self-Consistent Analysis of OH-Zeeman Observations: Too Much Noise about
  Noise
  We had recently re-analyzed in a self-consistent way OH-Zeeman observations
in four molecular-cloud envelopes and we had shown that, contrary to claims by
Crutcher et al., there is no evidence that the mass-to-flux ratio decreases
from the envelopes to the cores of these clouds. The key difference between our
data analysis and the earlier one by Crutcher et al. is the relaxation of the
overly restrictive assumption made by Crutcher et al, that the magnetic field
strength is independent of position in each of the four envelopes. In a more
recent paper, Crutcher et al. (1) claim that our analysis is not
self-consistent, in that it misses a cosine factor, and (2) present new
arguments to support their contention that the magnetic-field strength is
indeed independent of position in each of the four envelopes. We show that the
claim of the missing cosine factor is false, that the new arguments contain
even more serious problems than the Crutcher et al. original data analysis, and
we present new observational evidence, independent of the OH-Zeeman data, that
suggests significant variations in the magnetic-field strength in the four
cloud envelopes.
