Climategate Email No. 0235
This is a reply given to a freelance journalist asking Professor Jones if there was another period in history where the climate was worse than now. The bit that astounded me in his reply, was the closing remarks in his E Mail (I’ve emboldened it). I’ve also re-formatted the E mail to make it easier to read, but not altered the content in any way.
REDACTEDOriginal Message ----- date: Tue, 9 Oct 2007
From: [5]Phil Jones
To: [6]Jo Carlowe
Sent: Tuesday, OctoberREDACTED:06 PM
Subject: Re: BBC Focus Magazine
Jo,
I was away all last week, so apologies for being slow. Here are a
few thoughts.
REDACTEDYou and other may feel more insecure now, but this is coming from the knowledge you now have. This knowledge was quite different from earlier centuries, so this affects how earlier events were perceived then as opposed to now. So, any comparisons with the past are not that relevant to what is happening now or what will happen in the future.
REDACTEDThere have been good/bad times for humans in the past (and I'm thinking here purely of those related to the environment). The impacts of such events, that I know of, though are only related to the effects across Europe.
Agricultural crises DID NOT trigger the Little Ice Age - even if such an
event took place. Europe WAS not gripped by a chill that lasted 300 years. Your view here is completely wrong. There were more cold years, but there were also some very warm periods.
REDACTEDThe clearest impacts of climate in the historical past that I'm aware of took place when the climate of western Europe warmed from the early 1700s to about 1739. There were a number of good harvests in Britain and Ireland and our population increased dramatically as more children survived.
You should now see why your premise about the Little Ice Age is completely wrong. The 1730s temperatures in the UK are exceeded by two decades – the REDACTEDs and the 2000s.
In the late 1730s the population of Ireland was about twice what it is now!
In 1740 the coldest year in the Central England Temperature record occurred.
This led of famine across western Europe, especially Ireland. As many
people left Ireland then as did from the potato famine a century later. Probably as many died, but it is a forgotten famine because of the later on in 1845/6.
The latter was due to the potato blight (and a one crop agricultural system), but the one in 1740 was purely to the weather.
I'm attaching an article about this - the book to look at is by Dickson - in the references.
There is something in the paper about the effects of the very cold year
in different regions of Europe. The important thing in all this is
the exceptional cold of the year occurred after exceptional warmth of an entire decade, so the effects were likely much worse as the population had got used to a better climate. The conclusion of the paper is that the event was natural (with no known cause) so it could occur again!
The follow on influence of this is that people are not affected much by climate or climate change. What effects them is the Weather!
Cheers
Phil
So Professsor Jones now admits that it could happen again naturally. Mmmm.
I think you'll find that the 'good' Dr is applying wriggle room to the emails. Or outright denial (snigger).
ReplyDeleteLet's twist again
My favourite quotation comes from David Palmer who was the Freedom of Information Officer for the CRU-UEA at the time.
ReplyDeleteIn the newly released emails, he expresses his frustration with the whole procedure with candid honesty. It’s a shame he didn’t say the same thing publicly:-
From David Palmer to Phil Jones, regarding Willis Eschenbach's FOI request, email #1184, April 2007 (emphasis by Willis Eschenbach):
"Gents,
My head is beginning to spin here but I read this as meaning that he (W.E.) wants the raw station data; we don’t know which data belongs to which station, correct? Our letter stated:
“We can, however, send a list of all stations used, but without sources. This would include locations, names and lengths of record, although the latter are no guide as to the completeness of the series.”
Can we put this on the web? Perhaps I am being really thick here but I’m not sure if putting this on the web will actually satisfy Mr. Eschenbach - we’ve said we don’t have data sources, he says the external websites don’t have them, so who does? Are we back to the NMS’s? [National Meteorological Services -W.E.] I am happy to give this one more go, stating exactly what we are putting on the web and seeing if that suffices. Should Mr. Eschenbach still insist that we actually possess the information in the form he requests, I can then only give the file to Kitty Inglis for review and then we move on formally….
Cheers, Dave"
To paraphrase the IPCC (that's the UN mob, not the Police Complaints mob) :-
ReplyDelete"AGW is lost in the noise of natural variations."