date: Fri, 16 Feb 2007 23:09:50 +0100 from: Valérie Masson-Delmotte subject: (pas de sujet) to: p.jones@uea.ac.uk Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed X-MIME-Autoconverted: from 8bit to quoted-printable by cirse.extra.cea.fr id l1GMAVNm004545 Dear Phil, It was nice to see you shortly at the IPCC meeting in Paris. I know that you are invited to a lecture in the Academy of Sciences on March 5th. The meeting is organised by Academicians such as Vincent Courtillot, who is popularizing alternative views on climate change in the earth science communities in France, and a good friend of Claude Allegre, another geochemist who took positions arguing that there is no demonstration on the role of human activities on climate, that climate models have no demonstrated capabilities and that a global warming of 2°C has no meaning. I am just writing this email to you after some arguments with these two scientists (who are leading scientists of their own research fields). I would just like to suggest that it would be nice to come prepared for such a meeting, and give you a few arguments developed by these two scientists : 1) C. Allegre : global temperature estimates are not possible, there were only 10 thermometers in the world 100 years ago (published 3 times in 2006 in French newspapers such as l'Express or Le Monde) (it would be interesting to show a map with the location and number of thermometers used for your estimates) 2) V. Courtillot : has published a few papers on solar activity, magnetic field and climate. The latest one is attached. He claims to have used a global temperature dataset of yours but I have some doubts, since the initial citation is from a paper by Solanki (it is somehow indirectly, probably through a collaboration with Russian scientists). He is working on temperature records from the Arctic (I guess local data) and suggests that the 1940s period is warmer than the last decades. We have interacted by email last week and apparently he wants to show that your temperature series is not correct. (it would be interesting to show the comparison between the global temperature record and the estimates for various latitude bands). Attachment Converted: "c:\eudora\attach\Courtillot EPSL Climat.pdf"