date: Fri, 07 Dec 2007 10:08:40 +0000 (GMT) from: Thomas.C.Peterson@noaa.gov subject: McK & Michaels to: p.jones@uea.ac.uk Hi, Phil, Yesterday Chris F. asked me to talk to David P. about a response to McK & Michaels that Chris thought you and David and perhaps me should be writing. I'd love to be involved, but I doubt if I would have enough free time during the next 6 months to contribute significantly. David didn't seem certain that he'd be involved. So I thought I should pass on a few ideas I had for your consideration (I won't feel hurt if you toss out all of them). The bottom of page 14 says that de Laat and Maurellis (2004, 2006) have presented evidence that even MSU data exhibit some contamination by socioeconomic activity, so this first suggestion might not be helpful even though in the conclusions they write that "economic activity have significant explanatory power on the pattern of trends published climatic data measured at the Earth's surface, but not in trends measured in the lower part of the atmosphere". My first suggestion is to compare MSU TLT trends with sfc trends spatially to show how similar the patterns are. The second was to run a climate model driven solely by observed SSTs. Obviously, observed SSTs aren't influenced by the spatial distribution of world economies. So if the model reproduces most of the spatial features of observed land surface warming it would show local economies aren't driving the obs. The third would be to do a simple economy - MSU stratospheric temp spatial correlation. The farther we go away from the sfc, the harder it is for even unreasonable people to think the relationship is causal. Lastly, one might try normalizing all the trends based on the grid box variability. As I recall, you did this many years ago and on a normalized basis warming in the tropics shows up more while northern warming decreases. This makes sense to me as I recently normalized summer and winter changes in extremes for North America and they both show about the same amount of warming. The point I'm making by that in my paper is that it is not surprising that the most warming is occurring where the variability is greatest (as Fred Singer once implied that to me). The problem would then be explaining the meaning of normalized results and relevance to economic analyses. Anyway, those are my specific thoughts. It does seem like someone needs to write a paper on the topic in general to give clear scientific support for positions IPCC, etc., have to take ignoring such nonsense. I'd enjoy helping as time permits. But I'd also be happy to just sit back and wait for your to publish a paper on it. Warm regards from soggy Exeter (I'm leaving the Met Office at 1PM today), Tom