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
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