date: Fri, 13 Jul 2007 17:01:51 +0100 from: Sarah Dry subject: Re: Other proxy papers to: Phil Jones Dear Phil Thanks for sending this papers my way and sharing your thoughts, especially the intriguing last one you mentioned, about how skewed the proxy world is to Northern Hemisphere data without really acknowledging that it is so. I'll read up on this material and Mike and I will continue with the temperature story. Have a good two weeks away--I do hope it's a vacation! Many thanks and best wishes, Sarah On Jul 13, 2007, at 3:54 PM, Phil Jones wrote: Sarah, Here's another from 1998. This is the first paper to produce annual estimates back to AD 1000. The first article on the development of an NH series from multiproxy data was Bradley, R.S. and Jones, P.D., 1993: 'Little Ice Age' summer temperature variations: their nature and relevance to recent global warming trends. The Holocene 3, 367-376. The journal has not been back-scanned this far. There were earlier estimates of NH Temp series back in time, but none including Hubert Lamb's various endeavours are not reproducible today. They are very highly smoothed versions of the course of change. I mention this as a lot of people got their ideas of the last millennium - the Medieval Warm Period and the Little Ice Age etc - from his papers. They seem not to trust newer versions (which use orders of magnitude more data) if they don't have an MWP and an LIA. Odd that people accept a paper from the 1960s/1970s and ignore 90% of the subject which has been developed since 1980! The issues in the proxy world are the global nature of the MWP and the LIA - how global were they? They occurred in Europe and North America, but did they in the SH? My take on this is that any series should be representative of as many regions of the world as possible. We don't take the instrumental record back before 1850, as it is mostly then just representative of Europe. Odd then that people are happy to use just proxy series from Europe and say they are good for the NH. We would have quite different concepts of the last millennium if proxy science had developed in Australia/NZ and not in the North America/North Atlantic/Europe region. Cheers Phil 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 [1]p.jones@uea.ac.uk NR4 7TJ UK ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Please access the attached hyperlink for an important electronic communications disclaimer: http://www.lse.ac.uk/collections/secretariat/legal/disclaimer.htm