Phil Jones, 2009: "European instrumental temperatures in summer are going to be revised downwards (by about 0.4 deg C for periods before 1850)"

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European instrumental temperatures in summer are going to be revised downwards (by about 0.4 deg C for periods before 1850), so the mid-lat of the NH reconstructions should reflect this new work which is either in press or submitted.... I can't see how better proxy reconstructions are going to help constrain the models with the carbon cycle feedbacks. This must be related to better forcing histories, but how do we know we have these right? Can we somehow say from proxy/model comparisons that if they don't agree that well that it is down to the forcing, the model physics or the proxy data? If we could reduce the dimensionality of the problem then this might help. Volcanoes are a high-frequency response, so should be doable with shorter time slices. Solar and carbon cycle feedbacks are more low-frequency, so harder to constrain. I seem to floundering a bit. I keep coming back to the long European instrumental records and the wealth or proxy data we have for the continent. We can better test the proxy methods here and we can look at some teleconnections in detail with long records, and follow these through with similar analyses with the models...[Phil Jones]