date: Fri Jan 2 12:52:58 2004 from: Phil Jones subject: A couple of other things to: Tom Wigley Tom, Going through my other emails (hope you have a better spam filter) I have to write a 2pg report to the USDoE. Have you any papers in the last year that I should be referencing? I need to get this together over the next couple of weeks. I talked to Ricky Petty about the new proposal and he said we should be hearing something soonish in the New Year. DoE hadn't got a budget when I saw him in early December. On CLIWOC, Dennis Wheeler is generally not that good, but here he hired an ex-UEA Naval Historian who knew his way around the archives in the UK, together with 4 postgrads (none of which it seems will finish their degrees). Digitizing was therefore cheap. Hasn't done either of them much good though as Clive Wilkinson is now looking for another job and Sunderland will close Dennis' dept in the summer. Lots of emails from Timo. His tail with the Maynard Keynes quote about changing one's opinion when new facts come along struck a chord. If I'd been reviewing the CLIWOC submission to the EU I wouldn't have recommended support, but I'm now nearly converted. Whether the money (about 1M Euros) was cost effective is another matter. How do you compare the project with one for more tree cores/ice cores/documentary data etc? Is it worth sending probes to Mars to look for life .... Had Emmanuel LeRoi Ladurie here in November. Still going strong and he's going to update his book from 1971. Did remind me of Hubert with his knowledge about all years over the last 700. He did send his latest vine harvest dates though from 1370 to 1977 ! Cheers Phil At 22:18 29/12/2003 -0700, you wrote: Phil, This BBC item (Wheeler, Sunderland) mentions U of E Anglia. Seems that the project reinvents the wheel -- a wheel we found, after 5 years work, to be more square than round. There are some reports around from the work we did 20+ years ago. I spent quite a bit of time doing hands on work on the logs available at various places in the UK and came to the conclusion that they were of little value pre 1850. This was based on historical insights from Martin Ingram and my own statistical and climatological expertise. Bottom line -- a waste of time and effort, but a great area for Lambian imagination. Tom. 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 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------