From: Phil Jones <p.jones@uea.ac.uk>
To: William M Connolley <wmc@bas.ac.uk>,Caspar Ammann <ammann@ucar.edu>
Subject: Figure 7.1c from the 1990 IPCC Report
Date: Fri, 05 Jan 2007 13:38:40 +0000
Cc: Tom Crowley <tcrowley@duke.edu>,"Michael E. Mann" <mann@psu.edu>, "raymond s. bradley" <rbradley@geo.umass.edu>, Stefan Rahmstorf <rahmstorf@ozean-klima.de>, Eric Steig <steig@ess.washington.edu>,gschmidt@giss.nasa.gov, rasmus.benestad@physics.org,garidel@marine.rutgers.edu, David Archer <d-archer@uchicago.edu>, "Raymond P." <rtp1@geosci.uchicago.edu>,k.briffa@uea.ac.uk, t.osborn@uea.ac.uk, "Mitchell, John FB \(Chief Scientist\)" <john.f.mitchell@metoffice.gov.uk>, "Jenkins, Geoff" <geoff.jenkins@metoffice.gov.uk>, "Warrilow, David \(GA\)" <David.Warrilow@defra.gsi.gov.uk>, Tom Wigley <wigley@cgd.ucar.edu>,mafb5@sussex.ac.uk, "Folland, Chris" <chris.folland@metoffice.gov.uk>

       Dear All,

            I've added a few extra names in the cc of this email list to see if we can
    definitively determine where the figure in the subject title comes from. The
    background is that the skeptics keep referring back to it and I'd like
    to prove that it is a schematic and it isn't based on real data, but on
    presumed knowledge at some point around the late 1980s. If you think
    it is based on something real.
          What we'd like to do is show this either on 'Real Climate' or as background
    in a future paper, or both.
         I'm attaching a few diagrams as background (attaching in order of
    introducing them) and giving some earlier thoughts. I assume you all have
    a copy of the said diagram in the first IPCC report.
    1.  This is where the IPCC diagram came from - the top panel is also
    there, but the middle one from IPCC isn't. This is where Chris Folland
    knows it came from. He said it was shoehorned in at a very late date.
    This report comes from a UK Dept of the Environment document - where the
    first edition predates 1990. David Warrilow says that this was written by
    Geoff Jenkins and John Mitchell.
    John said the following
    I think it was based on a diagram A2 in the national Academy of Sciences
   boolet "Understanding climate change" cirica 1974 if rmeber correctly- I
   can find out in Reading tomorrow- which I can't find in the library- it
   was reproduced in one of John Gribbens books and I think a book claled
   the "1982 CO2 review". I think there 6 diagrams and I remember Tom
   Wigley commenting that only the first ( millions of years) and Last (
   instrumental record) had any credibility.
    and
    National Research Council, US Committee for the Global Atmospheric
   Research Program, Understanding Climatic Change: A Program for Action,
   National Academy of Sciences, Washington, DC, (1975), appendix A.
   2. This 1975 book has the 3rd attachment on p130 . This is very similar to one
    that David Warrilow said (also attached from Imbrie and Imbrie - second
    attachment).
    from David
    I can't be sure but I think the original diagram is from Imbrie and Imbrie :
   Imbrie, John and Katherine Palmer Imbrie. Ice ages: Solving the Mystery. Cambridge,
   Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1979, 1986 (reprint). ISBN 0-89490-020-X; ISBN
   0-89490-015-3; ISBN 0-674-44075-7. p. 25
    These look the same if you invert and rotate the one from 1975, and they both
    say 'winter conditions in Eastern Europe' - well Imbrie/Imbrie do. They
    also say adapted from Lamb (1969). This is the World Survey of Climatology
    series from Landsberg, vol2. I've been through this and I can't see much
    of a plot anything like those I've attached, so some adaptation. Also I've
    no idea what this Eastern European series is!
    The IPCC diagram and the UK report clearly don't originate here.
    3. Caspar Amman had John Gribbin's 1982 book and sent the 4th
    attachment. This has a warmer MWP, but is far too cool recently.
    So even if this was resmoothed, it wouldn't before the IPCC one.
    4. Ray Bradley sent this text:
    I believe this graph originated in a (literally) grey piece of literature that Jack Eddy
   used to publish called "Earth Quest".  It was designed for, and distributed to, high school
   teachers.  In one issue, he had a fold-out that showed different timelines, Cenozoic,
   Quaternary, last 100ka, Holocene, last millennium, last century etc.  The idea was to give
   non-specialists a perspective on the earth's climate history.  I think this idea evolved
   from the old NRC publication edited by L. Gates, then further elaborated on by Tom Webb in
   the book I edited for UCAR, Global Changes of the Past.  (This was an outcome of the
   wonderful Snowmass meeting Jack master-minded around 1990).
   I may have inadvertently had a hand in this millennium graph!  I recall getting a fax from
   Jack with a hand-drawn graph, that he asked me to review.  Where he got his version from, I
   don't know.  I think I scribbled out part of the line and amended it in some way, but have
   no recollection of exactly what I did to it.  And whether he edited it further, I don't
   know.  But as it was purely schematic (& appears to go through ~1950) perhaps it's not so
   bad.  I note, however, that in the more colourful version of the much embellished graph
   that Stefan circulated (
   [1]http://www.politicallyincorrect.de/2006/11/klimakatastrophe_was_ist_wirkl_1.html
   the end-point has been changed to 2000, which puts quite a different spin on things.  They
   also seem to have fabricated a scale for the purported temperature changes.  In any case,
   the graph has no objective basis whatsoever; it is purely a "visual guess" at what
   happened, like something we might sketch on a napkin at a party for some overly persistent
   inquisitor..... (so make sure you don't leave such things on the table...).
   What made the last millennium graph famous (notorious!) was that Chris Folland must have
   seen it and reproduced it in the 1995 IPCC chapter he was editing.  I don't think he gave a
   citation and it thus appeared to have the imprimatur of the IPCC. Having submitted a great
   deal of text for that chapter, I remember being really pissed off that Chris essentially
   ignored all the input, and wrote his own version of the paleoclimate record in that volume.

   There are other examples of how Jack Eddy's grey literature publication was misused.  In a
   paper in Science by Zielinski et al. (1994) [v.264, p.448-452]--attached-- they reproduced
   [in Figure 1c] a similarly schematic version of Holocene temperatures giving the following
   citation, "Taken from J. A. Eddy and R. S. Bradley, Earth-quest 5 (insert) (1991), as
   modified from J. T. Houghton, G. J. Jenkins, J. J. Ephraums, Climate Change, The IPCC
   Scientific Assessment (Cambridge Univ. Press, Cambridge, 1990)."
   But I had nothing to do with that one!
   So, that's how a crude fax from Jack Eddy became the definitive IPCC record on the last
   millennium!
    5. Finally, here's one from Stefan, to show how the IPCC diagram gets
    (first another one which appears to be the IPCC 1990 diagram).
    The one I want to attach seems to be within Stefan's email so that
    is the end of this email. You can also get to this by going to the link
    in Ray's piece above.
    It shows how you can embellish a diagram and even get Rembrandt in!
    I've also seen many other embellishments mentioning Greenland, the Vikings,
    Vineyards in York, frost fairs on the Thames etc. Also I've emailed over
    the years for the numbers in the 1990 IPCC Figure. I even got a digitized
    version once from Richard Tol and told him what he'd done was
    ludicrous.
    6. So who put to together? Do we blame Ray? Is it a whim of his
    excellent imagination?  I know we will all likely agree with Ray that
    it is based on absolutely nothing. Tom Crowley thinks it might be
    based on Lamb and sent the final figure. Now all of those who are
    or were in CRU know, you should be very careful with Lamb diagrams!
    This one does not stand any scrutiny and there are several more
    recent papers by Tom Wigley, Astrid Ogilvie and Graham Farmer
    that have shown that this final diagram is irreproducible and it was
    much cooler in the 11-13th centuries. It is also England and summer
    only. The galling thing is, it does look like the IPCC Figure!!!!!!
    When Tom sent the figure, he added this text (see below).
    The figure looks like Figure 30 (I've not scanned this one), but will,
    from his 1982 (reprinted in 1985 and 1995) called Climate History
    and the Modern World. This figure has series for the year, JJA and
    DJF.
    Someone tell me it isn't based on a Lamb diagram, please....
    Phil
    Tom Crowley said
   we still don't have an adequat explanation as to how Jack "cooked up" that figure - I do
   not believe it was purely out of thin air - look at the attached - which I used in the
   Crowley-Lowery composite just because it was "out there" - I made no claim that it was the
   record of record, but just that it had been used beforer.  the Lamb ref. is his book dated
   1966.  I will have to dig up the page ref later.  Dansgaard et al. 1975 Nature paper on
   Norsemen...etc used that figure when comparing what must have been their Camp Century
   record - have to check that too - where the main point of that paper was that the timing of
   Medieval warmth was different in Greenlandn and England!
   25 years later my provocation for writing the CL paper came from a strong statement on the
   MWP by Claus Hammer that the canonical idea of the MWP being warming than the present was
   correct and that the 1999 Mann et al was wrong.  he kept going on like that I reminded him
   that he was a co-author on the 1975 paper!  that is also what motivated to do my "bonehead"
   sampling of whatever was out there just to see what happened when you added them all
   together - the amazing result was that it looked pretty much like Mann et al.  ther rest is
   history -- much ignored and forgotten.
   I might also pointn out that in a 1996 Consequences article I wrote - and that Fred Singer
   loves to cite -- Jack (who was the editor of the journal) basically shoehorned me into
   re-reproducing that figure even though I didn't like it - there was not an alternative.  in
   the figure caption it has a similar one to Zielinski except that it states "compiled by
   R.S. Bradley and J.A. Eddy based on J.T. Houghton....so that puts a further twist on this
   because it point to Houghton not Bradley/Eddy as the source.  Jack must have written that
   part of the figure caption because I don't think I knew those details.
   but we still don't know where the details of the figure came from - the MWP is clearly more
   schematic than the LIA (actually the detailsl about timing of the samll wiggles in the LIA
   are pretty good) - maybe there was a meshing of the Greenland and the England records to do
   the MWP part - note that the English part gets cooler.  they may also have thrown in the
   old LaMarche record - which I also have.  maybe I can schlep something together using only
   those old three records.
   tom
   Stefan said
   the reason why I started to worry about this is the attached graph. Recognise something?
   - Used in school teaching in Germany, Austria and Switzerland, is on a website with
   officially recommended teacher materials
   - Used in university teaching in Germany
   - Used in politics in Germany by people within the FDP.
   Note the vertical axis label on that, by the way. The text that goes with it claims the
   medieval warm period was 2-4 ºC warmer than today.
   Climate sceptics material, of course.
   Cheers, Stefan
   13a7140.jpg
--




   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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References

   1. http://www.politicallyincorrect.de/2006/11/klimakatastrophe_was_ist_wirkl_1.html

