date: Fri Jun 17 16:27:12 2005 from: Phil Jones subject: Re: Natural Climate Variability to: "Joel Smith" Dear Joel, Seems as though you ought to send me the RFP whatever that is ! I am away the week after next (June27-Jul1), but hear for most of the rest of the summer. I should say that I am very busy at the moment with the 4th Assessment Report of the IPCC - I'm a Convening Lead Author. Much of what you are planning will be reported in this Assessment, which has yet to go through an open and a Govt review process, so will not be out until early 2007. There will be two meetings yet of the IPCC chapter authors, and lots of writing and editing involved, so a lot of the key people who would need to be involved are very busy. There are a number of other initiatives taking place in the US as well in the Climate Change Science Program (CCSP), so, what I'm saying is that your initiative is running in parallel with a lot of other things. Many are looking at the same sort of issues as you want to. Once I've looked at the RFP perhaps we could talk. Cheers Phil At 15:56 17/06/2005, you wrote: Dr. Jones: The Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI) in the US is interested in sponsoring a workshop to review the state of knowledge on natural climate variability. EPRI is interested in this partly to help get a better handle on the attribution matter. They're not doubting the contribution of anthropogenic influences on climate. Nonetheless, as we look more at attribution, e.g., estimating the role of anthropogenic forcings at the regional scale and for specific extreme climate events, it is important to improve our understanding of natural variability. In addition, if there is movement to eventually set a global mean temperature target for climate change, then understanding the range of natural variability is even more critical. EPRI would like to put out an RFP to those who might be interested in organizing a workshop. The goal of the workshop would be to review the state of knowledge on natural climate variability, assess how well the climate models are capturing it, and define a research agenda. I am wondering if you or someone from your group might be interested in organizing such a workshop? The workshop does not need to be in the U.S. We'd be happy to send the RFP to you, when it is ready to go. I'd be happy to supply more information or call you (although I am out most of next week.) yours, Joel Smith Joel B. Smith Stratus Consulting Inc. P.O. Box 4059 Boulder, CO 80306-4059 USA Tel: 1-303-381-8218 Fax: 1-303-381-8200 jsmith@stratusconsulting.com [1]www.stratusconsulting.com 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 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------