Email 1800, Mar 2005, precious question by Phil Jones: "Is the pre-20th century really that important when it comes to [detection and attribution]?"

Email 1800

From being at the review last week of the vertical temperature trends panel, the issue of reducing forcing uncertainties is important. A number of people think that agreement in the 20th century is all doing to model tuning due to uncertain forcing with sulphates. How to counter this is one area. One of my own pet areas is trying to reduce uncertainties in the paleo record for the last millennium, but again this is one of convincing people that we really know what has happened. So much is being made of the paleo records, but are they that important to detection when most of the work is going on with the 20th century records. Is the pre-20th century really that important when it comes to D&A? Cheers Phil