Hi Philip

Yes, I agree with Paul Matthews that a PhD with Mike Berry gives you high credibility! In fact the reason I thought you'd got my Bristol physics background from Twitter was because it came up when Tamsin Edwards posted possibly the best abstract in the world on apparent superluminal neutrinos, by Berry et al.

(Incidentally, our friend Jonathan Jones replied that the abstract was probably right - he suspects a timing error)

Good to see another Bristol physics person here! (or maybe a couple, if Paul is too?)

My reconstruction is a simple fit to the sunspot curve without a background.
In http://www.leif.org/EOS/2011GL046658.pdf Schrijver et al discuss TSI without the background:
[19] The TSI appears to be mostly, if not entirely, set by the counteracting effects of dark pores and sunspots and the bright small concentrations of magnetic field (the faculae) on an otherwise constant background [Lean and Woods, 2010]. In view of the above, the observational records suggests that the network faculae associated with the ephemeral regions were the same in early 2009 as at any very quiet time in the past, and that this is consequently true also for the TSI during the Maunder Minimum.

Leif Svalgaard

Thanks very much for the clarification and the link to Schrijver et al. (2011) which I will read with interest. As I said upthread, I know far too little about this.

In case you look in again, let me also say how much I appreciated your dry commentary back in the days when I was a regular reader at WUWT.

Leif Svalgaard

Thanks for joining!

What are your thoughts on us using Wang et al (2005) as a forcing for our latest climate simulations - do you think this is this the best current reconstruction? (Your comment seems to imply that you don't necessarily think yours is better?)

I think that my own reconstruction is the best one because
1) it takes into account the most recent research on solar activity in the past 300 years
2) it is not model dependent
3) has the fewest parameters [most of the others have 5-9 free parameters]

The basic argument is about whether the 'quiet sun' is constant or varies with the envelope of solar activity [i.e. basically with the sunspot number]. Measurements by Livingston reported in the Schriver et al. paper and here:
http://lasp.colorado.edu/sorce/news/2011ScienceMeeting/docs/presentations/6e_Chapman_sedona8.pdf
provide support for the notion that the sun cannot get more quiet than it does at solar minimum, i.e. the 'quiet sun' is constant.

Thank you everyone - I'm very grateful for the clarification that has been offered. I hope very much that the Lief and Dora Preminger estimates will be used for at least some of the AR5 model runs.