Guest commentary from Ben Santer
Part 2 of a series discussing the recent Guardian articles
A recent story by Fred Pearce in the February 9th online edition of the Guardian (“Victory for openness as IPCC climate scientist opens up lab doors”) covers some of the more publicized aspects of the last 14 years of my scientific career. I am glad that Mr. Pearce’s account illuminates some of the non-scientific difficulties I have faced. However, his account also repeats unfounded allegations that I engaged in dubious professional conduct. In a number of instances, Mr Pearce provides links to these allegations, but does not provide a balanced account of the rebuttals to them. Nor does he give links to locations where these rebuttals can be found. I am taking this opportunity to correct Mr. Pearce’s omissions, to reply to the key allegations, and to supply links to more detailed responses.
Another concern relates to Mr. Pearce’s discussion of the “openness” issue mentioned in the title and sub-title of his story. A naïve reader of Mr. Pearce’s article might infer from the sub-title (“Ben Santer had a change of heart about data transparency…”) that my scientific research was not conducted in an open and transparent manner until I experienced “a change of heart”.
This inference would be completely incorrect. As I discuss below, my research into the nature and causes of climate change has always been performed in an open, transparent, and collegial manner. Virtually all of the scientific papers I have published over the course of my career involve multi-institutional teams of scientists with expertise in climate modeling, the development of observational datasets, and climate model evaluation. The model and observational data used in my research is not proprietary – it is freely available to researchers anywhere in the world.
The 1995 IPCC Report: The “scientific cleansing” allegation
Mr. Pearce begins by repeating some of the allegations of misconduct that arose after publication (in 1996) of the Second Assessment Report (SAR) of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). These allegations targeted Chapter 8 of the SAR, which dealt with the “Detection of Climate Change, and Attribution of Causes”. The IPCC SAR reached the historic finding that “The balance of evidence suggests a discernible human influence on global climate”. Information presented in Chapter 8 provided substantial support for this finding.
I served as the Convening Lead Author (CLA) of Chapter 8. There were three principal criticisms of my conduct as CLA. All three allegations are baseless. They have been refuted on many occasions, and in many different fora. All three allegations make an appearance in Mr. Pearce’s story, but there are no links to the detailed responses to these claims.
The first allegation was that I had engaged in “scientific cleansing”. This allegation originated with the Global Climate Coalition (GCC) – a group of businesses “opposing immediate action to reduce greenhouse gas emissions”.
In May 1996, a document entitled “The IPCC: Institutionalized ‘Scientific Cleansing’?” was widely circulated to the press and politicians. In this document, the Global Climate Coalition claimed that after a key Plenary Meeting of the IPCC in Madrid in November 1995, all scientific uncertainties had been purged from Chapter 8. The GCC’s “scientific cleansing” allegation was soon repeated in an article in Energy Daily (May 22, 1996) and in an editorial in the Washington Times (May 24, 1996). It was also prominently featured in the World Climate Report, a publication edited by Professor Patrick J. Michaels (June 10, 1996).
This “scientific cleansing” claim is categorically untrue. There was no “scientific cleansing”. Roughly 20% of the published version of Chapter 8 specifically addressed uncertainties in scientific studies of the causes of climate change. In discussing the “scientific cleansing” issue, Mr. Pearce claims that many of the caveats in Chapter 8 “did not make it to the summary for policy-makers”. This is incorrect.
The Summary for Policymakers (SPM) of the IPCC SAR is four-and-a-half pages long. Roughly one page of the SPM discusses results from Chapter 8. The final paragraph of that page deals specifically with uncertainties, and notes that:
“Our ability to quantify the human influence on global climate is currently limited because the expected signal is still emerging from the noise of natural variability, and because there are uncertainties in key factors. These include the magnitude and patterns of long term natural variability and the time-evolving pattern of forcing by, and response to, changes in concentrations of greenhouse gases and aerosols, and land surface changes”.
Contrary to Mr. Pearce’s assertion, important caveats did “make it to the summary for policy-makers”. And the “discernible human influence” conclusion of both Chapter 8 and the Summary for Policymakers has been substantiated by many subsequent national and international assessments of climate science.
There were several reasons why Chapter 8 was a target for unfounded “scientific cleansing” allegations. First, the Global Climate Coalitions’s “scientific cleansing” charges were released to the media in May 1996. At that time, Cambridge University Press had not yet published the IPCC Second Assessment Report in the United States. Because of this delay in the Report’s U.S. publication, many U.S. commentators on the “scientific cleansing” claims had not even read Chapter 8 – they only had access to the GCC’s skewed account of the changes made to Chapter 8. Had the Second Assessment Report been readily available in the U.S. in May 1996, it would have been easy for interested parties to verify that Chapter 8 incorporated a fair and balanced discussion of scientific uncertainties.
Second, the “pre-Madrid” version of Chapter 8 was the only chapter in the IPCC Working Group I Second Assessment Report to have both an “Executive Summary” and a “Concluding Summary”. As discussed in the next section, this anomaly was partly due to the fact that the Lead Author team for Chapter 8 was not finalized until April 1994 – months after all other chapters had started work. Because of this delay in getting out of the starting blocks, the Chapter 8 Lead Author team was more concerned with completing the initial drafts of our chapter than with the question of whether all chapters in the Working Group I Report had exactly the same structure.
The reply of the Chapter 8 Lead Authors to the Energy Daily story of May 22, 1996 pointed out this ‘two summary’ redundancy, and noted that:
“After receiving much criticism of this redundancy in October and November 1995, the Convening Lead Author of Chapter 8 decided to remove the concluding summary. About half of the information in the concluding summary was integrated with material in Section 8.6. It did not disappear completely, as the Global Climate Coalition has implied. The lengthy Executive Summary of Chapter 8 addresses the issue of uncertainties in great detail – as does the underlying Chapter itself.”
The removal of the concluding summary made it simple for the Global Climate Coalition to advance their unjustified “scientific cleansing” allegations. They could claim ‘This statement has been deleted’, without mentioning that the scientific issue addressed in the deleted statement was covered elsewhere in the chapter.
This was my first close encounter of the absurd kind.
The 1995 IPCC Report: The “political tampering/corruption of peer-review” allegation
The second allegation is that I was responsible for “political tampering”. I like to call this “the tail wags the dog” allegation. The “tail” here is the summary of the Chapter 8 results in the IPCC Summary for Policymakers, and the “dog” is the detailed underlying text of Chapter 8.
In November 1995, 177 government delegates from 96 countries spent three days in Madrid. Their job was to “approve” each word of the four-and-a-half page Summary for Policymakers of the IPCC’s Working Group I Report. This was the report that dealt with the physical science of climate change. The delegates also had the task of “accepting” the 11 underlying science chapters on which the Summary for Policymakers was based. “Acceptance” of the 11 chapters did not require government approval of each word in each chapter.
This was not a meeting of politicians only. A number of the government delegates were climate scientists. Twenty-eight of the Lead Authors of the IPCC Working Group I Report – myself included – were also prominent participants in Madrid. We were there to ensure that the politics did not get ahead of the science, and that the tail did not wag the dog.
Non-governmental organizations – such as the Global Climate Coalition – were also active participants in the Madrid meeting. NGOs had no say in the formal process of approving the Summary for Policymakers. They were, however, allowed to make comments on the SPM and the underlying 11 science chapters during the first day of the Plenary Meeting (November 27, 1996). The Global Climate Coalition dominated the initial plenary discussions.
Most of the plenary discussions at Madrid focused on the portrayal of Chapter 8’s findings in the Summary for Policymakers. Discussions were often difficult and contentious. We wrestled with the exact wording of the “balance of evidence” statement mentioned above. The delegations from Saudi Arabia and Kuwait argued for a very weak statement, or for no statement at all. Delegates from many other countries countered that there was strong scientific evidence of pronounced a human effect on climate, and that the bottom-line statement from Chapter 8 should reflect this.
Given the intense interest in Chapter 8, Sir John Houghton (one of the two Co-Chairs of IPCC Working Group I) established an ad hoc group on November 27, 1996. I was a member of this group. Our charge was to review those parts of the draft Summary for Policymakers that dealt with climate change detection and attribution issues. The group was placed under the Chairmanship of Dr. Martin Manning of New Zealand, and included delegates from the U.S., the U.K., Canada, Kenya, the Netherlands, and New Zealand. Sir John Houghton also invited delegates from Saudi Arabia and Kuwait to participate in this ad hoc group. Unfortunately, they did not accept this invitation.
The ad hoc group considered more than just the portions of the Summary for Policymakers that were relevant to Chapter 8. The Dutch delegation asked for a detailed discussion of Chapter 8 itself, and of the full scientific evidence contained in it. This discussion took place on November 28, 1996.
On November 29, 1996, I reported back to the Plenary on the deliberations of the ad hoc group. The Saudi Arabian and Kuwaiti delegations – who had not attended any of the discussions of the ad hoc group, and had no first-hand knowledge of what had been discussed by the group – continued to express serious reservations about the scientific basis for the detection and attribution statements in the Summary for Policymakers.
On the final evening of the Madrid Plenary Meeting, debate focused on finding the right word to describe the human effect on global climate. There was broad agreement among the government delegates that – based on the scientific evidence presented in Chapter 8 – some form of qualifying word was necessary. Was the human influence “measurable”? Could it be best described as “appreciable”, “detectable”, or “substantial”? Each of these suggested words had proponents and opponents. How would each word translate into different languages? Would the meaning be the same as in English?
After hours of often rancorous debate, Bert Bolin (who was then the Chairman of the IPCC) finally found the elusive solution. Professor Bolin suggested that the human effect on climate should be described as “discernible”.
Mr. Pearce – who was not present at the Madrid Plenary Meeting – argues that the discussion of human effects on climate in the IPCC Summary for Policymakers “went beyond what was said in the chapter from which the summary was supposedly drawn”. In other words, he suggests that the tail wagged the dog. This is not true. The “pre-Madrid” bottom-line statement from Chapter 8 was “Taken together, these results point towards a human influence on climate”. As I’ve noted above, the final statement agreed upon in Madrid was “The balance of evidence suggests a discernible human influence on global climate”.
Is “suggests” stronger than “points towards”? I doubt it. Is “The balance of evidence” a more confident phrase than “Taken together”? I don’t think so.
The primary difference between the pre- and post-Madrid statements is that the latter includes the word “discernible”. In my American Heritage College Dictionary, “discernible” is defined as “perceptible, as by vision or the intellect”. In Merriam-Webster’s Online Dictionary, one of the three meanings of the verb “discern” is “to recognize or identify as separate and distinct”. Was the use of “discernible” justified?
The answer is clearly “yes”. Chapter 8 of the IPCC’s Second Assessment Report relied heavily on the evidence from a number of different “fingerprint” studies. This type of research uses rigorous statistical methods to compare observed patterns of climate change with results from climate model simulations. The basic concept of fingerprinting is that each different influence on climate – such as purely natural changes in the Sun’s energy output, or human-caused changes in atmospheric levels of greenhouse gases – has a unique signature in climate records. This uniqueness becomes more apparent if one looks beyond changes averaged over the entire globe, and instead exploits the much greater information content available in complex, time-varying patterns of climate change.
Fingerprinting has proved to be an invaluable tool for untangling the complex cause-and-effect relationships in the climate system. The IPCC’s Second Assessment Report in 1995 was able to draw on fingerprint studies from a half-dozen different research groups. Each of these groups had independently shown that they could indeed perceive a fingerprint of human influence in observed temperature records. The signal was beginning to rise out of the noise, and was (using Merriam-Webster’s definition of “discern”) “separate and distinct” from purely natural variations in climate.
Based on these fingerprint results, and based on the other scientific evidence available to us in November 1995, use of the word “discernible” was entirely justified. Its use is certainly justified based on the scientific information available to us in 2010. The “discernible human influence” phrase was approved by all of the 177 delegates from 96 countries present at the Plenary Meeting – even by the Saudi and Kuwaiti delegations. None of the 28 IPCC Lead Authors in attendance at Madrid balked at this phrase, or questioned our finding that “the balance of evidence suggests a discernible human influence on global climate”. The latter statement was cautious and responsible, and entirely consistent with the state of the science. The much more difficult job of trying to quantify the size of human influences on climate would be left to subsequent IPCC assessments.
Mr. Pearce’s remarks suggest that there is some substance to the “political tampering” allegation – that I was somehow coerced to change Chapter 8 in order to “reflect the wording of the political summary”. This is untrue. There was no political distortion of the science. If Mr. Pearce had been present at the Madrid Plenary Meeting, he would have seen how vigorously (and successfully) scientists resisted efforts on the part of a small number of delegates to skew and spin some of the information in the Summary for Policymakers.
The key point here is that the SPM was not a “political summary” – it was an accurate reflection of the science. Had it been otherwise, I would not have agreed to put my name on the Report.
A reader of Mr. Pearce’s article might also gain the mistaken impression that the changes to Chapter 8 were only made in response to comments made by government delegates during the Madrid Plenary Meeting. That is not true. As I’ve mentioned above, changes were also made to address government comments made during the meeting of the ad hoc group formed to discuss Chapter 8.
Furthermore, when I first arrived in Madrid on November 26, 1995, I was handed a stack of government and NGO comments on Chapter 8 that I had not seen previously. I had the responsibility of responding to these comments.
One reason for the delay in receiving comments was that the IPCC had encountered difficulties in finding a Convening Lead Author (CLA) for Chapter 8. To my knowledge, the CLA job had been turned down by at least two other scientists before I received the job offer. The unfortunate consequence of this delay was that, at the time of the Madrid Plenary Meeting, Chapter 8 was less mature and polished than other chapters of the IPCC Working Group I Report. Hence the belated review comments.
The bottom line in this story is that the post-Madrid revisions to Chapter 8 were made for scientific, not political reasons. They were made by me, not by IPCC officials. The changes were in full accord with IPCC rules and procedures (pdf). Mr. Pearce repeats accusations by Fred Seitz that the changes to Chapter 8 were illegal and unauthorized, and that I was guilty of “corruption of the peer-review process”. These allegations are false, as the IPCC has clearly pointed out.
The 1995 IPCC Report: The “research irregularities” allegation
The third major front in the attack on Chapter 8 focused on my personal research. It was a two-pronged attack. First, Professor S. Fred Singer claimed that the IPCC’s “discernible human influence” conclusion was entirely based on two of my own (multi-authored) research papers. Next, Professor Patrick Michaels argued that one of these two papers was seriously flawed, and that irregularities had occurred in the paper’s publication process. Both charges were untrue.
On July 25, 1996, I addressed the first of these allegations in an email to the Lead Authors of the 1995 IPCC Report:
“Chapter 8 references more than 130 scientific papers – not just two. Its bottom-line conclusion that “the balance of evidence suggests a discernible human influence on global climate” is not solely based on the two Santer et al. papers that Singer alludes to. This conclusion derives from many other published studies on the comparison of modelled and observed patterns of temperature change – for example, papers by Karoly et al. (1994), Mitchell et al. (1995), Hegerl et al. (1995), Karl et al. (1995), Hasselmann et al. (1995), Hansen et al. (1995) and Ramaswamy et al. (1996). It is supported by many studies of global-mean temperature changes, by our physical understanding of the climate system, by our knowledge of human-induced changes in the chemical composition of the atmosphere, by information from paleoclimatic studies, and by a wide range of supporting information (sea-level rise, retreat of glaciers, etc.). To allege, as Singer does, that “Chapter 8 is mainly based on two research papers” is just plain wrong”.
In the second prong of the attack, Professor Michaels claimed that a paper my colleagues and I had published in Nature in 1996 had been selective in its use of observational data, and that our finding of a human fingerprint in atmospheric temperature data was not valid if a longer observational record was used. Further, he argued that Nature had been “toyed with” (presumably by me), and coerced into publishing the 1996 Santer et al. Nature paper one week prior to a key United Nations meeting in Geneva.
My colleagues and I immediately addressed the scientific criticism of our Nature paper by Michaels and his colleague Chip Knappenberger. We demonstrated that this criticism was simply wrong. Use of a longer record of atmospheric temperature change strengthened rather than weakened the evidence for a human fingerprint. We published this work in Nature in December 1996. Unfortunately, Mr. Pearce does not provide a link to this publication.
Since 1996, studies by a number of scientists around the world have substantiated the findings of our 1996 Nature paper. Such work has consistently shown clear evidence of a human fingerprint in atmospheric temperature records.
Disappointingly, Professor Michaels persists in repeating his criticism of our paper, without mentioning our published rebuttal or the large body of subsequently published evidence refuting his claims. Michaels’ charge that Nature had been “toyed with” was complete nonsense. As described below, however, this was not the last time I would be falsely accused of having the extraordinary power to force scientific journals to do my bidding.
A Climatology Conspiracy? More “peer-review abuse” accusations
Mr. Pearce also investigates a more recent issue. He implies that I abused the normal peer-review system, and exerted pressure on the editor of the International Journal of Climatology to delay publication of the print version of a paper by Professor David Douglass and colleagues. This is not true.
The Douglass et al. paper was published in December 2007 in the online edition of the International Journal of Climatology. The “et al.” included the same Professor S. Fred Singer who had previously accused me of “scientific cleansing”. It also included Professor John Christy, the primary developer of a satellite-based temperature record which suggests that there has been minimal warming of Earth’s lower atmosphere since 1979. Three alternate versions of the satellite temperature record, produced by different teams of researchers using the same raw satellite measurements, all indicate substantially more warming of the Earth’s atmosphere.
The focus of the Douglass et al. paper was on post-1979 temperature changes in the tropics. The authors devised what they called a “robust statistical test” to compare computer model results with observations. The test was seriously flawed (see Appendix A in Open Letter to the Climate Science Community: Response to A “Climatology Conspiracy?”). When it was applied to the model and observational temperature datasets, the test showed (quite incorrectly) that the model results were significantly different from observations.
As I have noted elsewhere, the Douglass et al. paper immediately attracted considerable media and political attention. One of the paper’s authors claimed that it represented an “inconvenient truth”, and proved that “Nature, not humans, rules the climate”. These statements were absurd. No single study can overturn the very large body of scientific evidence supporting “discernible human influence” findings. Nor does any individual study provide the sole underpinning for the conclusion that human activities are influencing global climate.
Given the extraordinary claims that were being made on the basis of this incorrect paper, my colleagues and I decided that a response was necessary. Although the errors in Douglass et al. were easy to identify, it required a substantial amount of new and original work to repeat the statistical analysis properly.
Our work went far beyond what Douglass et al. had done. We looked at the sensitivity of model-versus-data comparisons to the choice of statistical test, to the test assumptions, to the number of years of record used in the tests, and to errors in the computer model estimates of year-to-year temperature variability. We also examined how the statistical test devised by Douglass et al. performed under controlled conditions, using random data with known statistical properties. From their paper, there is no evidence that Douglass et al. considered any of these important issues before making their highly-publicized claims.
Our analysis clearly showed that tropical temperature changes in observations and climate model simulations were not fundamentally inconsistent – contrary to the claim of Douglass and colleagues. Our research was published on October 10, 2008, in the online edition of the International Journal of Climatology. On November 15, 2008, the Douglass et al. and Santer et al. papers appeared in the same print version of the International Journal of Climatology.
In December 2009, shortly after the public release of the stolen emails from the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit, Professors David Douglass and John Christy accused me of leading a conspiracy to delay publication of the print version of the Douglass et al. paper. This accusation was based on a selective analysis of the stolen emails. It is false.
In Mr. Pearce’s account of this issue, he states that “There is no doubt the (sic) Santer and his colleagues sought to use the power they held to the utmost…” So what are the facts of this matter? What is the “power” Fred Pearce is referring to?
- Fact 1: The only “power” that I had was the power to choose which scientific journal to submit our paper to. I chose the International Journal of Climatology. I did this because the International Journal of Climatology had published (in their online edition) the seriously flawed Douglass et al. paper. I wanted to give the journal the opportunity to set the scientific record straight.
- Fact 2: I had never previously submitted a paper to the International Journal of Climatology. I had never met the editor of the journal (Professor Glenn McGregor). I did not have any correspondence or professional interaction with the editor prior to 2008.
- Fact 3: Prior to submitting our paper, I wrote an email to Dr. Tim Osborn on January 10, 2008. Tim Osborn was on the editorial board of the International Journal of Climatology. I told Dr. Osborn that, before deciding whether we would submit our paper to the International Journal of Climatology, I wanted to have some assurance that our paper would “be regarded as an independent contribution, not as a comment on Douglass et al.” This request was entirely reasonable in view of the substantial amount of new work that we had done. I have described this new work above.
- Fact 4: I did not want to submit our paper to the International Journal of Climatology if there was a possibility that our submission would be regarded as a mere “comment” on Douglass et al. Under this scenario, Douglass et al. would have received the last word. Given the extraordinary claims they had made, I thought it unlikely that their “last word” would have acknowledged the serious statistical error in their original paper. As subsequent events showed, I was right to be concerned – they have not admitted any error in their work.
- Fact 5: As I clearly stated in my email of January 10 to Dr. Tim Osborn, if the International Journal of Climatology agreed to classify our paper as an independent contribution, “Douglass et al. should have the opportunity to respond to our contribution, and we should be given the chance to reply. Any response and reply should be published side-by-side…”
- Fact 6: The decision to hold back the print version of the Douglass et al. paper was not mine. It was the editor’s decision. I had no “power” over the publishing decisions of the International Journal of Climatology.
This whole episode should be filed under the category “No good deed goes unpunished”. My colleagues and I were simply trying to set the scientific record straight. There was no conspiracy to subvert the peer-review process. Unfortunately, conspiracy theories are easy to disseminate. Many are willing to accept these theories at face value. The distribution of facts on complex scientific issues is a slower, more difficult process.
Climate Auditing – Close Encounters with Mr. Steven McIntyre
Ten days after the online publication of our International Journal of Climatology paper, Mr. Steven McIntyre, who runs the “ClimateAudit” blog, requested all of the climate model data we had used in our research. I replied that Mr. McIntyre was welcome to “audit” our calculations, and that all of the primary model data we had employed were archived at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and freely available to any researcher. Over 3,400 scientists around the world currently analyze climate model output from this open database.
My response was insufficient for Mr. McIntyre. He submitted two Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests for climate model data – not for the freely available raw data, but for the results from intermediate calculations I had performed with the raw data. One FOIA request also asked for two years of my email correspondence related to these climate model data sets.
I had performed these intermediate calculations in order derive weighted-average temperature changes for different layers of the atmosphere. This is standard practice. It is necessary since model temperature data are available at specific heights in the atmosphere, whereas satellite temperature measurements represent an average over a deep layer of the atmosphere. The weighted averages calculated from the climate model data can be directly compared with actual satellite data. The method used for making such intermediate calculations is not a secret. It is published in several different scientific journals.
Unlike Mr. McIntyre, David Douglass and his colleagues (in their International Journal of Climatology paper) had used the freely available raw model data. With these raw datasets, Douglass et al. made intermediate calculations similar to the calculations we had performed. The results of their intermediate calculations were similar to our own intermediate results. The differences between what Douglass and colleagues had done and what my colleagues and I had done was not in the intermediate calculations – it was in the statistical tests each group had used to compare climate models with observations.
The punch-line of this story is that Mr. McIntyre’s Freedom of Information Act requests were completely unnecessary. In my opinion, they were frivolous. Mr. McIntyre already had access to all of the information necessary to check our calculations and our findings.
When I invited Mr. McIntyre to “audit” our entire study, including the intermediate calculations, and told him that all the data necessary to perform such an “audit” were freely available, he expressed moral outrage on his blog. I began to receive threatening emails. Complaints about my “stonewalling” behavior were sent to my superiors at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and at the U.S. Department of Energy.
A little over a month after receiving Mr. McIntyre’s Freedom of Information Act requests, I decided to release all of the intermediate calculations I had performed for our International Journal of Climatology paper. I made these datasets available to the entire scientific community. I did this because I wanted to continue with my scientific research. I did not want to spend all of my available time and energy responding to harassment incited by Mr. McIntyre’s blog.
Mr. Pearce does not mention that Mr. McIntyre had no need to file Freedom of Information Act requests, since Mr. McIntyre already had access to all of the raw climate model data we had used in our study (and to the methods we had used for performing intermediate calculations). Nor does Mr. Pearce mention the curious asymmetry in Mr. McIntyre’s “auditing”. To my knowledge, Mr. McIntyre – who purports to have considerable statistical expertise – has failed to “audit” the Douglass et al. paper, which contained serious statistical errors.
As the “Climategate” emails clearly show, there is a pattern of behavior here. My encounter with Mr. McIntyre’s use of FOIA requests for “audit” purposes is not an isolated event. In my opinion, Mr. McIntyre’s FOIA requests serve the purpose of initiating fishing expeditions, and are not being used for true scientific discovery.
Mr. McIntyre’s own words do not present a picture of a man engaged in purely dispassionate and objective scientific inquiry:
“But if Santer wants to try this kind of stunt, as I’ve said above, I’ve submitted FOI requests and we’ll see what they turn up. We’ll see what the journal policies require. I’ll also see what DOE and PCDMI administrators have to say. We’ll see if any of Santer’s buddies are obligated to produce the data. We’ll see if Santer ever sent any of the data to his buddies”
(Steven McIntyre; posting on his ClimateAudit blog; Nov. 21, 2008).
My research is subject to rigorous scrutiny. Mr. McIntyre’s blogging is not. He can issue FOIA requests at will. He is the master of his domain – the supreme, unchallenged ruler of the “ClimateAudit” universe. He is not a climate scientist, but he has the power to single-handedly destroy the reputations of exceptional men and women who have devoted their entire careers to the pursuit of climate science. Mr. McIntyre’s unchecked, extraordinary power is the real story of “Climategate”. I hope that someone has the courage to tell this story.
Benjamin D. Santer
John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Fellow
San Ramon, California
February 22, 2010*
*These remarks reflect the personal opinions of Benjamin D. Santer. They do not reflect the official views of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory or the U.S. Department of Energy. In preparing this document, I would like to acknowledge the assistance of Tom Wigley, Myles Allen, Kristin Aydt, Graham Cogley, Peter Gleckler, Leo Haimberger, Gabi Hegerl, John Lanzante, Mike MacCracken, Gavin Schmidt, Steve Sherwood, Susan Solomon, Karl Taylor, Simon Tett, and Peter Thorne.
Is there any possibility that an earthquake near a shoreline could be triggered by a rise in sea level?
@ Richard Lloyd #438
Greenfyre has posted something on this, with some help:
Greenfyre on poptart’s 450
I notice that pop tech says it’s managed to find 500 papers now. I wonder if McIntyre would have a go at showing up the falsity of this claim?
John Kerry’s weak response to the Swift Boat nonsense probably cost him the presidency. The attacks on climate scientists are no doubt made in the hope that the response of the scientific community will be equally weak. The lies and accusations must be refuted, promptly, clearly, and vigorously. The public may not have much of a head for science, but it respects a fighter and loathes a liar and a bully.
Gavin – thanks for the replies.
1. I’m well aware that various temperature data is available, but it’s incomplete and a mess. If there is going to be some kind of global climate regulation, how about a global climate data repository that is available to all, and not just available to Phil Jones?
[Response: Sure. But the reason is doesn’t exist has nothing to do with Phil Jones and everything to do with commercial imperatives that have been imposed on National Met Services around the world. Jones has for years tried to do the best that was possible within those constraints, as have the people at NOAA/NCDC with the GHCN datasets. – gavin]
2. It’s really disingenuous to say that the hockey stick type analysis and current environmental changes have not and are not being used to support the argument for fast action. For example, read Al Gore’s piece in the Times today.
[Response: The fact that it does seem likely that warming is unprecendented over the last thousand years. However, this is simply interesting – it is not a component of the attribution of current climate changes that informs our expectations of future change. Had the data shown a warmer medieval period than present, due perhaps to increased solar activity, it would not change the projections. Getting hung up on paleo-climate reconstructions as the ‘issue’ is just missing the forest for the tree rings. – gavin]
3. It seems like you are distancing yourself from all arguments except the following: CO2 forcing sensitivities implied by our current computer models and the temperature rises we have seen in the past 50 yrs imply a range of outcomes in the future, some of which may be unacceptable. If so, then we get to a technical set of questions about the models and their calibrations – fair enough. However, the other (unprecedented warming, scary things already happening) arguments have been, and continue to be presented to make the case – and they are weak. This is what I mean by the science devolving into advocacy. You shouldn’t let the weak arguments pollute the strong – it undermines credibility of the endeavor.
[Response: CO2 sensitivities are not constrained by models, but by data. This is another misconception. But the really persuasive points for concern have been clearly outlined many times. Again, please read the IPCC report. Nonetheless, there are signs of climate change now – glacier retreat, earlier onset of spring, ocean warmings, Arctic sea ice decline, increasing in rainfall intensity etc. that add to the body of evidence supporting the attributions of recent changes to anthropogenic causes. It is fine for these things to be reported. When people and media have gone too far (as in attributing every unusual weather event to global warming), we are on record dozens of times in reminding people that weather is not climate. I challenge you to find any statement of mine that could possibly be misconstrued in this way. Thus, when people ask us (or even when they don’t), we do stress the strong arguments and do not use ones that are unsupported (as I am doing here). Unfortunately, the media often has other ideas about what they want to stress, and correcting that is an immense job. – gavin]
4. I don’t see any way to make a case that warming is *accelerating* in a statistically significant way, and yes I’ve been through all the trend analysis stuff, and understand inherent variability masking the trend, etc, etc. Is there a good argument for this?
[Response: Easy. Global warming over the last century was about 0.07 deg C/dec. Over the last 30 years, double that. That is an acceleration and it is significant. – gavin]
Thanks.
378 Gilles; Citation of BPL : “And if we don’t do something to control our output of that greenhouse gas, we’re going to be in serious trouble.”
Can you equally justify this assertion by a correlation between any global indicator of “trouble” and CO2 concentration (or temperature)?
408 BPL Barton Paul Levenson says:
27 February 2010 at 12:32 PM
Gilles (378),Try drought.
Nope. Review of Sheffield et al.
410 Next century: No good agricultural land left, leading to complete collapse of human civilization.
You have never provided reasonable evidence of this claim, yet you continue to make variations of it over and over on this blog. Do you understand that this is counterproductive?
RE #415 Avatar & “The argument for immediate, dramatic action.”
There is no more an argument for immediate, dramatic action. I don’t hear it anymore. It was made over 20 years ago, but people in general decided to pass, keep the party going, live it up, squander it away, and to hell with the children.
Now it’s a matter of “hold on to your horses, here we go.” And “going, going, gone!”
No hope left to save people from themselves, considering how entrenched the denialists are now. I’m just praying for people’s immortal souls, so that they at least confess their wrong-doing before they die and avoid going to that much hotter place than a globally warmed world for eternity no less.
Alarmism is passé.
That link didn’t work. Here it is:
http://www.worldclimatereport.com/index.php/2010/02/24/update-on-global-drought-patterns-ipcc-take-note/
Response: Hardly. – gavin
Well. That’s your opinion. And that’s all it is.
There was an amusing seminar Eli saw at AGU about ten years ago given by Drew Shindell(??) with the ~title of which do your trust more, models or data for 1850-1900. It was a close call.
380 CM,
AB: what is of interest to Sonja is the political outcome, not what is true
CM: that’s where she entirely parts company with scholars and scientists?
No and yes. No, because the political outcome from the interaction of science and politics is her object of study. Yes, because she gives herself far to much liberty to do and say what she please and she trump science with ideology.
423 Mal Adapted,
True, it is not even possible to show that climate change is a fraud with such methods (you need physical science for that). The paper however shows that climate change as an environmental problem was good business for climate science, their funding increased significantly. And this is what Sonja assume, that climate science is favoured by the framing of climate change as an environmental problem. Actually, uncertainty should be what is favoured, and one should not hear “science is settled”, since that should result in solution research (i.e. not physical science). That many climate scientists advocate policy sugggest environmental and social concern rather than financial concern I would say?
Tell me what you are interested in and I might have a paper to suggest, but I don´t have the paper that verify that everything is a scam, lol
436 Philip Machanick,
It is the real deal :-)
447 E. Greisch;
Be careful citing Diamond’s “Collapse” as definitive authority for your world view. As is the case with most archeological evidence, the information presented in his book can be interpreted in different ways. God forbid, there might be some diversity of opinion!
What do each of the ‘civilizations’ (Pacific Islanders, Anasazi, Mayans, and Norse) described by Diamond have in common? They shared the common problems associated with the growth of successful subsistence cultures, including over-specialization and becoming too successful for their own good.
It must be a coincidence that each of these disparate and diverse cultures all collapsed at around the same time. It couldn’t be that they were unable to adapt and their cultures quickly cratered in when the climatic conditions to which their cultures had become specialized suddenly changed. That would mean that there was climate change prior to the late 20th century! But that couldn’t be true because it conflicts with our conclusions!
Don, link to actual papers; ‘World Climate Report’ has no credibility, they cherrypick and spin egregiously. If you find something you want to point to on their site, go to the original source and read it carefully; don’t assume what you read in WCR descriptions will match the actual source.
Ya know, the same advice you hear about the World Wildlife Fund?
Be skeptical, and always read the original source, whether you like the PR site or dislike it — don’t rely on sites making secondhand claims.
Read the original. Google Scholar can be very helpful finding these things (and finding updates and corrections, which the blogs often fail to add).
> Steckis …
> I work for a fisheries agency and have had my work audited by the
> government auditor-general’s office after complaints from industry
Citation needed. This is public information; where can we read it?
For those who are wondering why so many engineers (who should have the technical skills to know better) are global-warming denialists, this article may provide some insights: http://www.slate.com/id/2240157/
The article does not deal with global-warming in any way, but its insights into the attitudes/mindsets of some individuals with engineering backgrounds would seem to apply here.
Gavin (454)
Is “back-testing” not an important criteria for verifying a climate model? If not, why not?
442, dhogaza: Imagining that those working on GCMs have never thought about validation efforts of this type, and have never done validation of this type.
Have they modeled the 20th century?
Septic Matthew (#434) said:
Where do you get that information? See WG2 table 3.2 and surrounding text. The net change discussed is more people experiencing increased water stress, on the order of hundreds of millions to billions. The report does emphasize other drivers of water stress (population growth, income growth, efficiency) over climate. And it does make clear (including in the SPM) that increased precipitation will make more water available in some regions.
Gavin :” Jones has for years tried to do the best that was possible within those constraints, as have the people at NOAA/NCDC with the GHCN datasets. – gavin”
So it is hard to understand why there has been any issue at all when he has been asked to communicate his work. Scientific retribution is not money, it is the acknowledgement for a good and valuable work. What was the problem in showing the work was fine?
[Response: He has published dozens of papers and communicated his work very widely, what are you talking about? – gavin]
“The fact that it does seem likely that warming is unprecendented over the last thousand years. However, this is simply interesting – it is not a component of the attribution of current climate changes that informs our expectations of future change. Had the data shown a warmer medieval period than present, due perhaps to increased solar activity, it would not change the projections.”
Of course it would !! because you don’t have a precise measurement of the solar activity in the medieval period , but it is rather unlikely that it was much larger than at any other time for two millenia; so if the temperature during warm medieval period were shown to be higher, this would raise the likelihood of a higher influence of the sun, or may be of unforced variability and spontaneous cycles, so this would decrease the expected sensitivity to CO2, and decrease the future projections of warming. You seem to think as if the current paradigm has been firmly established – but the question is precisely whether it has really been !
[Response: No, you are wrong. It’s precisely because the forcings and reconstructions for the medieval period are uncertain that using that time period to constrain sensitivity or the magnitude of internal variability is not very useful. Therefore whatever the temperatures showed (within the uncertainties as we can estimate them), nothing would change in the estimate of climate sensitivity and nothing would change in the model projections. LIA changes would potentially be of more use, but this has hardly ever been used to constrain projections either. In future, these periods might be useful (and have been included in CMIP5 for that reason), but as yet they have had no significant influence either on attribution of recent changes or on projections. – gavin]
“CO2 sensitivities are not constrained by models, but by data. This is another misconception. But the really persuasive points for concern have been clearly outlined many times. Again, please read the IPCC report. Nonetheless, there are signs of climate change now – glacier retreat, earlier onset of spring, ocean warmings, Arctic sea ice decline, increasing in rainfall intensity etc. that add to the body of evidence supporting the attributions of recent changes to anthropogenic causes. ”
I can’t understand the argument. Why does it support the ANTHROPOGENIC cause ? to my knowledge, none of these changes has been firmly established to occur only after 1970, where anthropogenic influence is supposed to be predominant. Before 1970, the data are either missing or of poor quality, or show that the changes started much before this date. And all the proxy curves I have seen start to climb much earlier than 1970 – when they don’t “decline” after this date, they show only little variation. That’s one of the main pieces of the climatic speech that put skeptics in furor – and I think they have some reason for that.
[Response: I’ll give two examples: Ocean warming implies a radiative imbalance – which was predicted ahead of time for a GHG-induced change (not so for an ‘internal change’), stratospheric cooling is a clear signature of CO2 related changes to radiative transfer (and the opposite effect to what you’d expect from solar or ocean induced warming). The fact is that there are fingerprints of changes that differ depending on the cause – and this fingerprinting is not just done using the global mean temperature changes. – gavin]
450, Robert: I hear that question frequently over on WUWT — Why don’t they try and verify the models somehow, by, say (sound of “skeptic” thinking harder than they ever have before in their life to date) STARTING THE MODELING IN THE PAST and SEEING IF IT REFLECTS THE REAL CLIMATE HISTORY.
&&&
The sad kind of kills the funny. It’s not a terrible sin to be ignorant — this is America, ignorance is a hallowed tradition here. It’s the arrogance that will not be taught, will not be shown, is determined that any effort to recognize that not everybody is equally skilled at science is “elitism.”
You seem to be mocking the very idea of testing models. A real test would be (and in fact will be) to test predictions of the future against the realized future. That will take decades to occur (during which time there will be increased computer power.) A model that adequately reproduces the already observed record will go a ways toward establishing the reliability of the model, and increase the credibility of its predictions. There is one of these simple predictions toward the end of the “Whatevergate” thread, by Benson. It “forecasts” (if you take the computed value as a forecast) a substantial increase in temperature over the next 2 decades. That differs from the forecast by Tsonis’ model (and some others.) We’ll have to wait 2 decades to know which is more accurate, but we’ll gain confidence in whichever one that is. It’s unfortunate that the models require so much time for thorough testing, but they do. One of the regular contributors here (I don’t remember which one) has a list of model predictions that have already been confirmed — that’s a good start. It should be complemented by surprising things that have happened, that are relevant, that have not been predicted (if there are any) and predictions that have been disconfirmed (if there are any.)
“Gilles asks: “Can you equally justify this assertion by a correlation between any global indicator of “trouble” and CO2 concentration (or temperature)?”
Well, there is this well known correlation:
http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=267352
http://econ-www.mit.edu/files/3689
Temperature correlates negatively with GDP.”
And much more negatively with the use of fossil fuels : the argument is biased because BPL has studied the global average of temperatures with global CO2, but then they are all correlated positively with GDP ! if you start to study the geographical correlation, then GDP is much more strongly positively correlated with the use of fossil fuels than with temperature ! so advocating the reduction of a strongly positively correlated quantity (use of carbon), to improve a little a slightly negatively correlated other quantity (temperature) , is just plainly stupid, and no wonder it raises some objections ! How can smart and scientific people arrive to so absurd conclusions?
E. Greisch :”YOU WILL NOT GET DATES. NOBODY IS FOOLISH ENOUGH TO MAKE A FORECAST LIKE THAT. TAKE A LABORATORY COURSE IN PROBABILITY AND STATISTICS.”
Sorry Edward, that’s not acceptable. You can’t ask people to strongly reduce there standard of living just with some “possibility” of trouble, unquantified neither in amplitude nor in time. And if you ask, you don’t have a single chance to get it. Be a little serious, please. How much did YOU reduce willingly your own wages these last years ?
560 ppm = 6°C. Aheemm … which slope do you expect in the next decades? and which level do you expect to reach reasonably with all measures we could take before 2050 ?
Don Shor #457, why not refer to the paper itself:
http://water.washington.edu/research/Articles/2008.global.continental.drought.pdf
And the lead author’s site for background:
http://hydrology.princeton.edu/~justin/
#458 Steckis, I suppose Gavin just got tired of pointing out the inanity (insanity?) of using ‘auditors’ that have no understanding either of the subject matter they are auditing, or of how to properly audit it, and compensate by ideological certainty.
You’re not telling us that the folks auditing your fisheries work were Greenpeacers, are you?
Avatar (415),
You’re a physicist? Really? Specializing in what? Where and when did you get your degree? And why aren’t you posting your real name? Mine is on my posts, and I got my physics degree at Pitt in 1983. I’ve worked mostly as a computer programmer, and I’ve been writing atmosphere models since 1998. Have you ever cracked a climatology book?
SM (418): For the GCMs, there is no solid foundation for believing that they correctly compute the results of the theoretical models that they embody. At minimum, they should correctly model some well-known record, such as the global temp annual means since 1900.
BPL: They have, over and over again. Here’s an example. Check the charts in chapter 5. Pretty good match, wouldn’t you say?
http://www.members.iinet.net.au/~johnroberthunter/www-swg/
Gilles (424): And everything that increased in the XXth century is obviously positively correlated with CO2.
BPL: You need to read up on statistics. The concept of “spurious correlation” has been a major topic in regression analysis at least since Durbin and Watson’s famous paper of 1958, and detecting such nonrelationships is at the heart of tecniques like the Dickey-Fuller and Adjusted Dickey-Fuller tests.
Gilles: So with cherry picking you can obviously find a lot of negative (and positive) things correlated with CO2.
BPL: See above.
Gilles: So it is important to define a “blind” indicator of welfare, (or of” trouble”), a priori independent of what you try to correlate. I doubt that drought is such a global indicator.
BPL: General Circulation Models predicted greater drought in continental interior decades before Dai et al. confirmed it.
BPL: Next century: No good agricultural land left, leading to complete collapse of human civilization.”
Gilles (428): I am still waiting for reasonable numbers behind your scenario , BPL.
BPL: Do you know how to multiply?
Fraction of Earth’s land surface “severely dry” by Palmer Drought Severity Index (PDSI < 3.0) in 1970: 12%.
In 2002: 30%.
30/12 = 2.5
Elapsed time: 32 years.
2002 + 32: 2034
2.5 x 30%: 75%
Now, of course, we don't know that it will continue to grow at the same rate. No doubt diminishing returns will set in at some point and the curve will become sigmoid rather than exponential. Want to bet the future of human civilization on when that will happen?
Re #382
Royal Societies of Chemistry and Statistics
http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200910/cmselect/cmsctech/memo/climatedata/uc4702.htm
http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200910/cmselect/cmsctech/memo/climatedata/uc4202.htm
I have only skimmed these. Quick conclusion. Unlike the submission from the IOP. these do not require a response (e.g. from RC) to the UK Parliament
Incidentally, weak responses , such as some of those in the comments above, excluding the responses in green, denigrating the IOP, would be counter-productive.
————————————————————
Re#422.
Useful comment, except it should have been McIntyre-ised or Wegmanised. I don’t see any logical connection between the argument presented by Lindzen in your first link and the IOP’s recent submission to Parliament.
My interpretation is based on direct observations i.e that there are numerous scientists at all levels who are badly informed about climate science and particularly badly informed about this x.gate stuff. Unfortunately, busy researchers have to pay a price, in units of time, for reading outside their subject.
me, I am just glad to see the issues around the IPCC second report are starting to be aired. That is where it all started to go pear shaped and Ben has one basic issue. There are just too many others that have the other side of the story to tell. He can bat them all back over the court all he likes but people will just wonder why there are so many people telling similar stories.
So, instead of that approach, let me, a humble denier (of the science being settled), try to offer you some suggestions in damagae control. Here is my basic guidance statement.
“The truth, and there is no use hiding from this, is that there are a number of crucial issues that need to be resolved in the current debate on climate change. Clearly it is difficult for the people of the world to make a clear judgement on this. What seems to have happened is that scientists have tried as best as possible to provide quality science and this has been the basis of a major and global political landscape. That interface is one that needs to be looked at closely. The issue is too important to leave to the vagueness of the political process. The interface between science and policy has clearly resulted in some level of underplaying of the clearly communicated uncertainties and some level of increase in the potential outcomes. What is now required is for the world government’s to take back the process, ensure a complete and transparant probe into the whole climate issue, including the IPCC process. Only then will the world be able to to look at the appropriate actions that may or may not need to be taken.”
So, yep, just a suggestion.
RE Jesse Fell
Bingo. There’s an excellent post by Prof. Juan Cole (via Michael Tobis) about this. Excerpts:
Unfortunately, all this outreach takes time away from the fun stuff, but we live in a time when doing nothing has its own consequences. Of course, posting on RC is preaching to the choir a bit, but maybe others will get the message. As an example, Mike’s interview was very good, bit I would have loved to learn more about the evolution of his paleoclimate research – what are the important take-home messages of his recent paper in Science and how have the recent papers answered questions raised by critics. A discussion of the MCA at a time when critics are still harpiog on MBH98/99 might get some attention.
Dr. Santer:
Thank you for presenting your thoughts on this issue.
I do have concerns regarding your reaction to FOI requests. The purpose of these laws is to ensure a transparent government.
If you find complying with them unduly burdensome, you should not work for a government agency. Private foundations do not have to respond to FOI requests.
455 Don Shor “410 Next century: No good agricultural land left, leading to complete collapse of human civilization.
You have never provided reasonable evidence of this claim”
Hold on there, Don. I’ve challenged Barton’s assertion that AGW will have catastrophic effects on a global scale in the next 30-50 years. (Desertification WILL have a catastrophic impact in the is time frame, but NOT on a global scale and AGW is NOT a primary cause of this desertification. Desertification will still be a major threat even if there is no warming.)
OTOH, there is plenty of support for the contention that unchecked carbon emissions and associated warming will have a catastrophic impact on a global scale in the 22nd C. I’m not sure about the probability of a “complete collapse of human civilization”, but even that is possible.
Sometimes well-intentioned and generally well-informed people get things wrong. This does not necessarily invalidate their central argument.
For example, in the most recent Sierra magazine, Carl Pope, Executive Director of the Sierra Club, erroneously states that the Red River drains in the Mississippi. It doesn’t: It flows north into Hudson Bay.
Nevertheless, his central argument that Mississippi River flooding is the result of decades of (well-intentioned) mismanagement by the Army Corps of Engineers and that the solution is the restoration of the natural floodplain and protective wetlands is fully correct.
Hank Roberts says:
27 February 2010 at 8:33 PM
Thanks for the response, but it didn’t add to my knowledge. The paper I referred to was dated 1996. The Daly site is dated 1997 so historically it was “current”. Did you read my first post at #413?
I came to this blog because I believe it is the “source” of the Daly article I sited. So I wish to learn if the Daly article is accurate or not. i.e. Did the Santer et al paper of 96 choose radio sonde data from 1963-87 when 1958-96 was available?
Regards historical/antique information/knowledge, call it what you like, they can be valuable sources in all walks of life. I happen to be an old bloke, an antique if you will. Am I redundant because of a pimply faced 20 something with a degree in his hands?
Some of the readers here simply don’t get it. McIntyre was well within his rights to ask for the data he requested. The proof of this is in the fact he eventually got the data. The embarrassing part for Santer is that he refused a reasonable request in the very beginning.
The recent submission to the UK Parliamentary Committee by the Institute of Physics should help clear up muddled thinking by the readers of this blog. Although written specifically regarding the CRU emails, points 6 through 9 look almost as if the authors had Ben Santer in mind. Here they are:
6. There is also reason for concern at the intolerance to challenge displayed in the e-mails. This impedes the process of scientific ‘self correction’, which is vital to the integrity of the scientific process as a whole, and not just to the research itself. In that context, those CRU e-mails relating to the peer-review process suggest a need for a review of its adequacy and objectivity as practised in this field and its potential vulnerability to bias or manipulation.
7. Fundamentally, we consider it should be inappropriate for the verification of the integrity of the scientific process to depend on appeals to Freedom of Information legislation. Nevertheless, the right to such appeals has been shown to be necessary. The e-mails illustrate the possibility of networks of like-minded researchers effectively excluding newcomers. Requiring data to be electronically accessible to all, at the time of publication, would remove this possibility.
8. As a step towards restoring confidence in the scientific process and to provide greater transparency in future, the editorial boards of scientific journals should work towards setting down requirements for open electronic data archiving by authors, to coincide with publication. Expert input (from journal boards) would be needed to determine the category of data that would be archived. Much ‘raw’ data requires calibration and processing through interpretive codes at various levels.
9. Where the nature of the study precludes direct replication by experiment, as in the case of time-dependent field measurements, it is important that the requirements include access to all the original raw data and its provenance, together with the criteria used for, and effects of, any subsequent selections, omissions or adjustments. The details of any statistical procedures, necessary for the independent testing and replication, should also be included. In parallel, consideration should be given to the requirements for minimum disclosure in relation to computer modelling.
http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200910/cmselect/cmsctech/memo/climatedata/uc3902.htm
The Institute of Physics make several very good points. Real scientists, as opposed to pseudoscientists, should be making data, methods and code available on the first request. FOIA requests should never be needed, but if they are needed should be honored without question. Any spurious claim by Santer to being “harrassed” by FOIA requests just brings more dishonor down on his own head. If he had just acted like a scientist and provided the data when requested, there would be no problem. Regarding archiving, many journals already have policies on archiving but for some reason would not enforce them on climate researchers. It is clear that day is over. Any journal which refuses to enforce its own archiving policies now will lose all credibility.
@Don Shor — 27 February 2010 @ 10:57 PM
If you look at the abstract, http://ams.allenpress.com/perlserv/?request=get-abstract&doi=10.1175%2F2008JCLI2722.1, Sheffield et al actually say
“Three metrics of large-scale drought (global average soil moisture, contiguous area in drought, and number of drought events shorter than 2 years) are shown to covary with ENSO SST anomalies. At longer time scales, the number of 12-month and longer duration droughts follows the smoothed variation in northern Pacific and Atlantic SSTs.” Although the paper is primarily about variability, not trends, it’s obvious that as SSTs continue to increase, drought severity will increase. In another paper from the same author, http://ams.allenpress.com/perlserv/?request=get-abstract&doi=10.1175%2F2007JCLI1822.1, the abstract states “Although drought is driven primarily by variability in precipitation, projected continuation of temperature increases during the twenty-first century indicate the potential for enhanced drought occurrence.”
This is consistent with the findings of Dai et al, http://www.cgd.ucar.edu/cas/adai/papers/Dai_pdsi_paper.pdf,
“The global very dry areas, defined as PDSI ,-3.0, have more than doubled since the 1970s, with a large jump in the early 1980s due to an ENSO-induced precipitation decrease and a subsequent expansion primarily due to surface warming, while global very wet areas (PDSI >3.0) declined slightly during the 1980s. ”
Given the misrepresentation of what Sheffield said, I suspect the minds, like the comments, at worldclimatereport.com, are always closed.
> Don Shor
> 457
That paper does not say anything like what World Climate Report kind-of-vaguely-suggests — they spin it based on the word “natural” in the Abstract!
Duh. Who told you you could rely on WCR for analysis? Please look into this:
http://water.washington.edu/research/Articles/2008.global.continental.drought.pdf
Remember all those high school level claims over the past year or so that the Sun was going into something like a new Maunder Minimum? Ain’t happened.
http://sohowww.nascom.nasa.gov/data/LATEST/current_eit_304.gif
#345 John Peter
I don’t know if you were saying I couldn’t find anyone that was convicted of looking at someone e-mail. Anyway, this isn’t a case of simply looking at someone’s e-mail, but copying it, and then posting it. Here are a few more links.
http://www.hacking-news.com/2007/06/29/former-police-officers-found-guilty-of-hacking/
http://news.softpedia.com/news/Former-TV-Presenter-Admits-to-Hacking-His-Coworker-s-Email-92353.shtml
https://www.hackinthebox.org/modules.php?op=modload&name=News&file=article&sid=3903
Yes, I’m tiring of this as well.
So, if the forcing/historical data/model based case as Gavin presents it is the strongest case to be made, and the others are weak, how do we end up with for example the mush that Al Gore published in the Times. Don’t you guys talk to him? Any casual observer can spot problems with his line of reasoning:
1. It’s not credible that the modest degree of warming we have seen has produced **only ** negative effects. It’s just not. And many of the things he mentions are not really problems at all in the list of actual problems the world faces today.
2. He takes the bait and makes unsupportable comments about snowfall. Really silly.
3, He confuses level with slope and comes out with this bit of nonsense:
“Similarly, even though climate deniers have speciously argued for several years that there has been no warming in the last decade, scientists confirmed last month that the last 10 years were the hottest decade since modern records have been kept.”
Educated people won’t buy this. Temperature rise could stop forever and this statement would be perpetually true.
If the one really supportable argument is as Gavin outlines, then I suggest someone take a crack at selling it, even though it is not as simple as what the Rev. Gore is preaching.
Maybe instead of focusing on the mysterious idea of an average global temperature (which doesn’t really exist anyway, and averages mask the dispersion which is the real problem), maybe try focusing on retained heat. So you can say:
“Well, more CO2 causes more heat to be retained by the earth in various ways, in the air, on the ground, and in the oceans. We really don’t know exactly where that heat will end up since the climate and weather are pretty unpredictable, but this heat is energy and like all forms of energy it can do both good things and bad. Since the Earth’s climate is pretty hospitable right now, the risk of this extra heat doing bad things in some areas of the world outweighs the possibility it might do some good things in other ares, so we should be careful about trapping too much more heat.”
I think people might buy that.
“I do have concerns regarding your reaction to FOI requests. The purpose of these laws is to ensure a transparent government.”
They are not there for harrassment.
Just like the law courts are there fore justice not for harrassment (SLAPP: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strategic_lawsuit_against_public_participation ).
Also aren’t corporations supposed to be transparent so that shareholders can see what’s going on?
So why isn’t there a FOIA for corporate emails and minutes?
“463
Hank Roberts says:
28 February 2010 at 12:33 AM
> Steckis …
> I work for a fisheries agency and have had my work audited by the
> government auditor-general’s office after complaints from industry
Citation needed. This is public information; where can we read it?”
Just a bump up: notice that RS still hasn’t answered.
Probably hiding something…
@kbausch #480:
Exactly what FOIA requests are you talking about?
Your apparently mixing up things.
I read the Sheffield article.
From Sheffield: “Globally, the mid-1950s showed the highest drought activity.”
There is no evidence that global warming has increased drought activity. As you speculate, it might. But it hasn’t so far.
Re: “… projected continuation of temperature increases during the twenty-first century indicate the potential for enhanced drought occurrence.”
Wow, talk about cherry-picking! Same abstract: “Trends in drought duration, intensity, and severity are predominantly decreasing.”
#488: You seem very determined to dismiss the science involved. Your first point is a dead giveaway to your denialism. Once you move past blowing smoke about how the climate hasn’t changed…you then shift to “well, it’s good for us! Surely there must be some good?”
Your second point is an argument from incredulity – e.g. you don’t buy something, so it’s obviously false.
His rejoinder to your third point, of course, is that the long term temperature rise is obvious if you step back from noisy annual data. If there was some cooling trend then you wouldn’t have gotten such a high average, would you?
But the real tell that you’re not approaching this as a scientific question is when you go on with sheer nonsense about how you can’t compute a global mean temperature. Of course there is an average, and it’s just standard denialist nonsense to claim that this obvious statistical measurement doesn’t exist or mean anything. Anyone with scientific training would know that (temperature measures energy.)
How are you on the theory of evolution; the age of the Earth; and whether Obama is an American citizen?
Avatar,
Hmm, I don’t remember seeing Al Gore’s name on the list of contributors to this site. Let’s see. Nope. Not there. Maybe you should take you “Al Gore is fat” arguments against physical reality somewhere they might hold water.
Jimi Bostock @478, do you ever tire of making unsubstantiated allegations?
Guess not, huh?
Gilles says: “Sorry Edward, that’s not acceptable. You can’t ask people to strongly reduce there standard of living just with some “possibility” of trouble, unquantified neither in amplitude nor in time.”
Hmm! Sounds very much like an argument that a corporate officer from AIG might make back in, say, 2007. Sorry, Gilles, but there are situations that can develop where you have the certainty of a disaster but cannot predict when it will occur.
An avalanche is an excellent example. But then you can’t ask people to curtail a fun day of skiing just with some “possibility” of trouble, can you?
Gilles, Are you actually contending that it is impossible to achieve prosperity without fossil fuels? Did you ever consider that the correlation might run the other way–increased prosperity leads to greater fossil fuel use? Did you ever think what your contention might imply given the fact that fossil fuels are running out. You want that one back, maybe?
SM says, “You seem to be mocking the very idea of testing models.”
Nope, Matthew, he’s mocking your contention that the models haven’t been tested. Really dude, you can look this stuff up.