From	Phil Jones	Date	Thu May 22 09:28:52 2008
To	Michael E. Mann
CC	Gavin Schmidt
Subject	Re: Thompson et al paper
Mike, Gavin, OK - as long as you're not critical and remember the embargo. I'll expect Nature will be sending the paper around later today to the press embargoed till the middle of next week. Attached is the pdf. This is the final one bar page and volume numbers. Also attached is our latest draft press release. This is likely OK except for the last paragraph which we're still working on. There will also be a News and Views item from Dick Reynolds and a Nature news piece from Quirin Schiermeier. I don't have either of these. I did speak to Quirin on Tuesday and he's also spoke to Dave and John. It took me a while to explain the significance of the paper. I hope to get these later two items before I might have to do any interviews early next week. We have a bank holiday on Monday in the UK. The press release will go out jointly from the Met Office and UEA - not sure exactly when. Potentially the key issue is the final Nature sentence which alludes to the probable underestimation of SSTs in the last few years. Drifters now measuring SSTs dominate by over 2 to 1 cf ships. Drifters likely measure SSTs about 0.1 to 0.2 deg C cooler than ships, so we could be underestimating SSTs and hence global T. I hope Dick will discuss this more. It also means that the 1961-90 average SST that people use to force/couple with models is slightly too warm. Ship-based SSTs are in decline - lots of issues related to the shipping companies wanting the locations of the ships kept secret, also some minor issues of piracy as well. You might want to talk to Scott Woodruff more about this. A bit of background. Loads more UK WW2 logs have been digitized and these will be going or have gone into ICOADS. These logs cover the WW2 years as well as the late 1940s up to about 1950. It seems that all of these require bucket corrections. My guess will be that the period from 1945-49 will get raised by up to 0.3 deg C for the SSTs, so about 0.2 for the combined. In digitizing they have concentrated on the South Atlantic/Indian Ocean log books. [1]http://brohan.org/hadobs/digitised_obs/docs/ and click on SST to see some comparisons. The periods mentioned here don't seem quite right as more later 1940s logs have also been digitized. There are more log books to digitize for WW2 - they have done about half of those not already done. If anyone wonders where all the RN ships came from, many of those in the S. Atlantic/indian oceans were originally US ships. The UK got these through the Churchill/Roosevelt deal in 1939/40. Occasionally some ships needed repairs and the UK didn't have the major parts, so this will explain the voyages of a few south of OZ and NZ across the Pacific to Seattle and then back into the fray. ICOADS are looking into a project to adjust/correct all their log books. Also attaching a ppt from Scott Woodruff. Scott knows who signed this! If you want me to look through anything then email me. I have another paper just accepted in JGR coming out on Chinese temps and urbanization. This will also likely cause a stir. I'll send you a copy when I get the proofs from AGU. Some of the paper relates to the 1990 paper and the fraud allegation against Wei-Chyung Wang. Remind me on this in a few weeks if you hear nothing. Cheers Phil PS CRU/Tyndall won a silver medal for our garden at the Chelsea Flower Show - the theme of the show this year was the changing climate and how it affects gardening. Clare Goodess was at the garden on Tuesday. She said she never stopped for her 4 hour stint of talking to the public - only one skeptic. She met the environment minister. She was talking about the high and low emissions garden. The minister (Phil Woolas) seemed to think that the emissions related to the ability of the plants to extract CO2 from the atmosphere! He'd also not heard of the UHI! Still lots of education needed. PPS Our web server has found this piece of garbage - so wrong it is unbelievable that Tim Ball wrote a decent paper in Climate Since AD 1500. I sometimes wish I'd never said this about the land stations in an email. Referring to Alex von Storch just shows how up to date he is. [2]http://canadafreepress.com/index.php/article/3151 At 20:12 21/05/2008, Michael Mann wrote: Hi Phil, Gavin and I have been discussing, we think it will be important for us to do something on the Thompson et al paper as soon as it appears, since its likely that naysayers are going to do their best to put a contrarian slant on this in the blogosphere. Would you mind giving us an advance copy. We promise to fully respect Nature's embargo (i.e., we wouldn't post any article until the paper goes public) and we don't expect to in any way be critical of the paper. We simply want to do our best to help make sure that the right message is emphasized. thanks in advance for any help! mike -- Michael E. Mann Associate Professor Director, Earth System Science Center (ESSC) Department of Meteorology Phone: (814) 863-4075 503 Walker Building FAX: (814) 865-3663 The Pennsylvania State University email: [3]mann@psu.edu University Park, PA 16802-5013 [4]http://www.met.psu.edu/dept/faculty/mann.htm Prof. Phil Jones Climatic Research Unit Telephone +44 (0) 1603 592090 School of Environmental Sciences Fax +44 (0) 1603 507784 University of East Anglia Norwich Email p.jones@uea.ac.uk NR4 7TJ UK ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- References 1. http://brohan.org/hadobs/digitised_obs/docs/ 2. http://canadafreepress.com/index.php/article/3151 3. mailto:mann@psu.edu 4. http://www.met.psu.edu/dept/faculty/mann.htm