date: Tue Apr 5 07:56:57 2005 from: Phil Jones subject: Re: Douglass and Knox, GRL, March 2005 to: Tom Wigley Tom, That's what Myles says as well - you can't reduce the uncertainty range, especially the upper limit. Myles gets the lower limit of at least 1-1.5C. I'm off after today until April 15. See you later in the month. Cheers Phil At 15:41 04/04/2005, you wrote: Thanx Phil. I will see Myles at the end of the month before coming up to Norwich. By the way, my paper says one CAN get sensitivity from volcanoes, but cannot narrow the uncertainty range. Tom. =========== Phil Jones wrote: Tom, I gave Myles the crap paper last week when we met at Duke for an IDAG meeting. He has a paper coming out soon in GRL saying much the same as you - volcanoes can't be used to estimate the climate sensitivity. He was unaware of Douglass and Knox. I think Myles paper has someone else as the first author. Myles is aware of your paper. He refers to it and made a comment to getting the same sort of answer in his presentation. I am saying all this as Myles went onto Sydney, Australia and is there for much of this week. I think we've all signed off on the NRC review. You should get something in the next 2-3 weeks so I'm told. I couldn't seem to stop Lindzen referring to the crap paper nor his own in response to some comments in Chapter 5. With your paper coming up and the one Myles is involved with you'll have enough to not bother answering. Cheers Phil At 14:52 04/04/2005, you wrote: I am writing a comment on this, with Ben and Caspar Ammann. It is total crap. It is a pain to do, but important to have a response on the record. A number of us suspect that one of the editors of GRL is deliberately choosing 'sympathetic' referees for papers like this (another e.g. is the recent M&M paper criticizing the hockey stick). Myles -- did I send you my volcano paper (soon in JGR)? Tom. =================== Myles Allen wrote: Dear Phil and Tom, Thanks for the copy of Douglass and Knox, Phil. Am I right that answer to the "exercise to the reader spotting the obvious mistake" is: 1) Failure to take into account uncertainty in the baseline climate (or, indeed, the removed ENSO and solar signals) in fitting the simple model. If everything is shifted down by 0.2K in figure 3, you could get a much higher peak and relaxation time. I'm reasonably confident about this one, because (as Dick points out) fitting things is what I do... I'm less confident about 2) Confusion between TOA longwave anomalies, which would presumably be affected by the cold stratospheric aerosol cloud, and tropopause longwave anomalies, which are relevant to the calculation of lambda. This is most evident in paragraph [26], where they suggest Delta(T)/Delta(LW)~lambda, with Delta(LW) being the perturbation TOA longwave anomaly observed by ERBE. Can one really ignore the impact of volcanic aerosols on longwave fluxes? 3) Odder still, equation (9) seems to suggest that the forcing due to Pinatubo is simply the longwave anomaly, with no mention of shortwave at all: although, perhaps by chance, they seem to get a forcing-to-AOD relationship that is consistent with Hansen's. Are you doing anything about this, Tom? Does it matter? Will anyone care? Myles Send instant messages to your online friends [1]http://uk.messenger.yahoo.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 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- 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 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------