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.
What is the IOP — a registered charity — up to?
Did you see the Institute of Physics “Memorandum submitted by the Institute of Physics (CRU 39)” here:
http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200910/cmselect/cmsctech/memo/climatedata/uc3902.htm ?
…and the IOP Energy Management Group’s July 2008 Newsletter here:
http://www.iop.org/activity/groups/subject/Energy/Newsletter/file_31726.pdf ?
I did and was shocked (I have asked if the article and memo represent IOP policy). I have specifically asked why the newsletter contains an article entitled “Reliability of CO2 Ice Core Studies” by one Zbigniew Jaworowski. He cites Idso S.B, (1988), “Carbon dioxide and climate in the Vostok ice core”, Atmospheric Environment, 22, pp. 2341-2342 — but I cannot find that article. However, it must be pre-1994, before the Vostock core was drilled!
http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/paleo/icecore/antarctica/vostok/vostok.html
Of course, the name rang a bell. Even an undergraduate reviewer could have found serious problems with the Jaworowski article citations. But what is the IOP — a registered charity — up to? If it is a charity, is it allowed also to be a front for industry, if that is the case?
Avatar wrote: “I think that the center will not hold in the climate science community after this process is completed.”
I think you are reciting scripted talking points that have been spoon-fed to you by ExxonMobil’s multimillion dollar propaganda machine, and that in fact you don’t know what you are talking about, and thus your pompous, fatuous opinions about what will or won’t happen to the “climate science community” are founded in arrogant, gullible ignorance, and have no value except as low comedy.
The Idso/Vostock article (thanks to Google Scholar) was published in 1988. That’s NINETEEN EIGHTY-EIGHT! Link: http://linkinghub.elsevier.com/retrieve/pii/0004698188901515 Yet 20 years later — in 2008 — the IOP Energy Management Group thinks it is OK to publish denialist newsletter articles that cite this and write nasty memos. Unbelievable. Perhaps I should have searched RC for IOP first?
ClimateCurious wrote: “This arrogant and demeaning phrase is a real turn off to laypersons reading this blog to educate themselves.”
As other commenters have noted, the “arrogant and demeaning” phrase “joe six-pack” was first used here by laypersons reading this blog, to refer to themselves, and to other unspecified members of the general public who they claimed share their opinions.
I would think it arrogant and demeaning to be called a “Ditto-Head” — suggesting a person incapable of independent thought, a person who slavishly believes, embraces and repeats whatever he is told by someone else.
And yet that is what devotees of Rush Limbaugh and the rest of the so-called “right wing” media proudly call themselves.
Go figure.
http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200910/cmselect/
cmsctech/memo/climatedata/uc3902.htm
IOP (deniers?)
Hank Roberts 386 and 391
You truly are showing you ignorance. I don’t know how the moderators of this site cope with the amount of junk that gets posted, from both sides of the fence, and that’s just the stuff that gets through. I commend your efforts, but I’ve had enough.
Gavin’s inline comment to #382 is mistaken. His expressions of legal opinion are generally careful, but this one misses the mark. Contrary to Gavin’s statement, “prima facie” does imply guilt. Indeed, prima facie means that guilt will be considered proven UNLESS further evidence is brought forward to rebut the prima facie case. One way to think about prima facie is that it means, “Based on what we know now, the defendant is guilty but we’ll wait to hear what evidence he has to offer.”
In this instance, the enforcement agency didn’t just say “prima facie,” it said that the prima facie case was “compelling.” So Gavin’s denial that there was an inference from the statement of a legal violation (but for the lapse of the statue of limitations, which is, of course, a complete defense) is wrong.
Gilles (378),
Try drought.
What say you on the Institute of Physics take on your…to put it nicely…methodologies?
Memorandum submitted by the Institute of Physics (CRU 39)
The disclosure of climate data from the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia
http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200910/cmselect/cmsctech/memo/climatedata/uc3902.htm
David (384),
Over the next year: No idea. That’s weather, not climate.
Next ten years: Still weather, but I’d say hotter and drier, with more violent weather along coastlines.
Next century: No good agricultural land left, leading to complete collapse of human civilization.
re: # response to 382.
I hate to suggest anything which might require even more work from people who have done an almost infinite amount, but considering the prestige of its source,I think that the submission from the IOP might deserve an article all to itelf. Even though the material is already out there, it needs to be assembled and focussed on the wording of the letter. This letter is already being amplified and producing a severe ‘howl- around’ i.e.a big unpleasant noise created by positive feedback.
The letter is not neutral as indicated by its willingness to go well beyond a plea for more data sharing and instead to support Nigel Lawson’s highly publicised demand for a wider inquiry. The reasons given given would also please Lawson in particular i.e veiled forecasts that the hockey sticks might all be broken and that this story will be written up under the heading of the martyrdom of Stephen McIntyre.
I think I may have guessed what’s causing the problem with my latitude-zone climate simulation. I’m basing H2O partial pressure on the zone temperature via the Clausius-Clapeyron relation and relative humidity, then normalizing so the total matches the observed. I get an absurdly hot equator and too-cool intermediate zones, though the average is correct (286 K in the latest version).
But heat isn’t the only thing transferred among latitude zones–water vapor must be as well. Wind carries water. Clouds carry water. Precipitation. And currents and heat-mixing in the ocean must affect large-scale rates of evaporation.
The problem is, I don’t know how to parameterize this. Does anyone at RC know how the general circulation affects water vapor by latitude? I could try guessing at a fit, but I need something to fit it too–is there empirical data on PH2O versus latitude anywhere?
Isn’t this kerfuffel all about the Santer Wigley Jones et al nature paper? (Vol.382, 4 July 1996, p.39-46) “A Search For Human Influences On The Thermal Structure Of The Atmosphere”.
Didn’t this paper inspire the IPCC 1995 report chap 8 to state the now infamous “a discernable Human influence on Global climate”?
Did you not use radio sonde data from 1963 to 1987 that showed close to a 1degC of warming?
However, when the full available time period of radio sonde data is used (Nature, vol.384, 12 Dec 96, p522) from 1958-1996, isn’t the warming shown in your paper just a product of the dates you had chosen?
[edit]
melty (#401) — psst — Vostok ice core data became available in the mid-1980s. They’ve continued drilling since.
OK well since this group has asked for specifics here we go:
1. The released emails clearly show a concerted effort to promote the research of one group of scientists at the expense of other groups who do not share the opinion about the unprecedented degree of recent warming. I’ve read them , and there is not doubt about that. The group at the center of this is important in the field, and in the middle of both the temperature reconstruction record and the iconic “hockey stick graph”.
[Response: Reading the emails of any group of researchers will tend to find an effort of those researchers to push their research. I find this completely unsurprising. However there is also a lot of disputes over methodologies and processing and interpretation. The clear and shared disdain for contrarians is not because the ‘do not share the opinion about the unprecedented degree of recent warming’, but because they use bad logic, bad science, and false analyses to disinform the public. That is very different to differences of opinion about recent attribution. You are confusing combatting anti-science with actual science. – gavin]
2. The paleoclimate research is shoddy, and although I don’t agree with everything that goes on at Climate Audit, they have done a good service in pointing out the weakness of much of that research. Whether it’s looking at the actual physical basis for believing the proxies work, the questionability of the statistical methods used or the failure to come to grips with the divergence problem, the general picture is quite unimpressive. I think a lot of the squealing about releasing data comes from the fact that those involved were well aware that the emperor was partially clad. Again this is pointed out in the emails quite well.
[Response: ‘Shoddy’ is too strong, but the fact that there are uncertainties is front and center of all the work being done – just read the papers (not the commentaries). – gavin]
3. The historical instrument temperature record is a mess, both for unavoidable reasons and because of lack of funding and staffing. However, it should not be controlled by a small university group which believes it is unaccountable to the public or FOI requests. My personal opinion is that it this record need to be redone by a group that understands this accountability much better. A group run by someone who discusses deleting emails to cover his tracks is not the group for the job.
[Response: The data was not and is not controlled by a small university group. The data are controlled by the National Met Services all across the world. This misconception is at the heart of the misinformation on this issue. Much of the data is public domain, and GISTEMP for instance uses that. But so can anyone else. Higher resolutoin SYNOP data is also public domain and any other group could create an ongoing record based on that. FOI requests to CRU for data that was not theirs to give were correctly rejected. – gavin]
4. Since the IPCC report, closer examination of it’s claims of current impacts all seem to point in the direction of reducing their actual magnitude. Whether it’s glacier melting rates, severity of hurricanes, severity of droughts, current flat temperature trend, the actual picture seems much less alarming. If fact, it’s not alarming at all. The earth is a prosperous, hospitable, slightly warmer place after a near doubling of CO2 in the last century.
[Response: The ‘alarm’ is for where we are going, not where we have been. – gavin]
5. The argument for immediate, dramatic action is based on essentially 4 legs: the unprecedented nature of current warming int he past 1500 yrs, the “accelerating” current warming shown by the instrument record, claimed evidence of current extreme climate disturbances, and positive feedback computer models calibrated to the instrument temperature record that come nowhere near reflecting the actual complexity of the climate (see for example Solomon paper). As I see it, these are 4 weak legs that seem to get weaker upon scrutiny.
[Response: Read the reports again, these are not the basis of the problem. The temperatures of the last 1500 years doesn’t even come into it, neither does the acceleration (though it has accelerated), neither do the changes in the few extreme measures where the data is good enough to say anything. Your last point is vaguely related, but does not require models to show. The real issues are that CO2 is increasing rapidly, it is a greenhouse gas, it is very likely that the trends in recent decades are being driven by anthropogenic effects and the magnitude of those effects are going to increase rapidly if we stay on a BAU course. – gavin]
6. Climate science is hard. I’m a physicist by training, and it a much different discipline than running lab experiments 1000’s of times with reproducible results. I get that. But since climate science interacts with the political economy in such a tightly coupled way I think that the fundamental pillars of data need to be above reproach and accessible to all, and much more upfront about the possible uncertainties and errors lurking in the analyses. The interface between the science and entities like the IPCC has turned an investigative enterprise into something resembling advocacy politics. That’s both unacceptable and unfortunate.
[Response: If it were true, I would agree, but this is very far from the case. Once again, read the reports – you will find them very different from this cartoon. – gavin]
391, Hank Roberts: Here, it’s worth remembering that for climatologists, models are not just tools that can give a glimpse of what the future holds; they are also an experimental playground – a replica world on which they can test their knowledge of the climate system.
A better test of their knowledge (as embodied in their computer code, which includes not just particular methods for solving diffeqns but also particular code) would be to run the simulation from 1900 to 1999. Running the simulation from 2000 to 2099 only tests whether the program runs, not whether it gives accurate results. Model runs to date only show that the random variability in the data and parameter estimates is too great to pass or fail the model on the record since 1995.
FWIW, I disagree with wallruss of 406. I wouldn’t necessarily agree with your posts 386 or 391, but they are surely not junk.
#382 – “…………..
My reasons being that in considering the optimum in sustainable construction, I hold the view that
My question is a simple one, what shift in climate should we expect over the coming year, decade and century?
Thanks
Comment by David — 27 February 2010 @ 9:46 AM”
Just watch “An Inconvienient Truth” It’s all there…… and peer reviewed to boot.
391, Hank Roberts Here, it’s worth remembering that for climatologists, models are not just tools that can give a glimpse of what the future holds; they are also an experimental playground – a replica world on which they can test their knowledge of the climate system.
NOT incidentally, it is a difficult chore to show that a complex computer program actually calculates the correct results of the model that it embodies. This is not a hypothetical problem. The SIAM Applied Dynamical Systems Conferences regularly have presentations on this topic, with examples of seemingly trustworthy programs that got the wrong answers, even after having been seemingly coded correctly. Computer programs, like bridges (cf “Galloping Gerty”), are not dependable until they have been thoroughly tested against lots of objective criteria directly relevant to their goals. 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. They might still be wrong about the future, but at least there would be grounds for optimism that they might be correct.
386, Hank Roberts: News & Events – Starpoint Adaptive Optics becomes a Business Affiliate of the Institute of Physics. The IoP’s Business Affiliates Network brings together organisations of all sectors that engage …
#
… Membership of the Institute of Physics is open to all who have an interest in physics …
http://www.plasma.org/Conferences/Conference…/event_10726.html
http://www.starpointao.com/StarpointNews.html
&&&
Sounds like the Chamber of Commerce in the US. “Representative” not.
You make them out to be just like every other professional association, like the American Statistical Association, Society of Industrial and Applied Mathematics, or the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
They’ve clarified that the “prima facie” evidence is in regard to Phil Jones e-mailing colleagues urging them to delete e-mail. I think everyone agrees it was wrong of Phil Jones to do that. I can’t imagine anyone thinking it has anything to do with the data request FOIs, the HadCRUT temperature product, etc.
So this statement by the IOP:
Is incorrect because it suggests that the ICO statement had to do with requests for data, and further incorrect because no “finding” has been made.
Leighton says:
27 February 2010 at 12:28 PM
“Gavin’s inline comment to #382 is mistaken. His expressions of legal opinion are generally careful, but this one misses the mark. Contrary to Gavin’s statement, “prima facie” does imply guilt. Indeed, prima facie means that guilt will be considered proven UNLESS further evidence is brought forward to rebut the prima facie case. One way to think about prima facie is that it means, “Based on what we know now, the defendant is guilty but we’ll wait to hear what evidence he has to offer.””
I can’t speak for Gavin, but I don’t think he is wrong. The burden of proof in a legal case does not shift, purely because someone says something. Everyone is innocent until proven guilty and that includes Jones and anyone else at CRU.
That Institute of Physics memo to Parliament is the new coffin nail for deniers. It looks like a faction of the organization got Lindzenized.
http://www.iop.org/activity/policy/Events/Seminars/file_25825.pdf
But they make quite the opposite view in a pre-Cop15 press release. Moreover, the aren’t exactly advertising their dissent on the CRU in public.
http://www.iop.org/Media/Press%20Releases/press_38339.html
Andreas @353
Hmm, that paper is kind of interesting. The idea that “elite” scientists can influence government policy with respect to funding for broad areas of scientific research, wasn’t new or controversial even in 1993, of course. The article doesn’t support claims that AGW theory is a fraud perpetrated by climate scientists to preserve or enhance their funding, either. But it was worth reading, so thanks. What else you got 8^)?
“Gilles (378),
Try drought.”
BPL , i have no doubt that SOME bad things have increased throughout the XXth century. Think of the great unlikelihood of the opposite : that NOTHING bad would have increased in the XXth century. And everything that increased in the XXth century is obviously positively correlated with CO2. So with cherry picking you can obviously find a lot of negative (and positive) things correlated with CO2.
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. Actually I also doubt that there is a global drought indicator well correlated with CO2 throughout the history, but I may be wrong.
#377 Barton Paul Levenson re. #351 ClimateCurious
Thank you for raising that point. It wreaks with irony that individuals of the denialist ilk use phrases such as ‘Joe Six-Pack’ and then, when one responds using the very language they introduced in the lexicon of the discussion, to have it thrown back at those who are merely responding.
ClimateCurious, like so many others, of such persuasion, hide behind their online names. So they never have to be identified, or take responsibility, for the silliness that is dredged up from their myopic opinions.
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David (384),
Over the next year: No idea. That’s weather, not climate.
Next ten years: Still weather, but I’d say hotter and drier, with more violent weather along coastlines.
Next century: No good agricultural land left, leading to complete collapse of human civilization.”
I am still waiting for reasonable numbers behind your scenario , BPL. Which date for the beginning of the decline, of GDP, of population, of agricultural land? which temperature would cause this following you? which amount of fossil fuels would we have burnt at this date? can’t find any sensible set of parameters matching your scenario, sorry… (of course no need to say that no scenario of IPCC looks like that..)
#382 per
En addendum to Gavin’s response one might also consider that even if prima facia evidence results in a guilty verdict, guilty in and of itself does not necessarily imply wrong doing, though it implies unlawfulness.
One can be guilty of something and still not have conducted unethical behavior.
An example might be: a homeless person has nowhere to sleep and so decided to sleep on a park bench. He is awakened by an officer of the law and is given a ticket for his conduct… but where is the unethical behavior? The person simply chose the safest location to sleep under stated circumstance.
I once slept under a pool table at the air base in Swindon because I arrived quite late at night on the rotator from Iceland, and I did not feel the situation warranted my waking the base commander as per regulation (at 1am). Technically I was guilty of breaking a regulation, but was it unethical. I would think the commander would be thankful had it become an issue.
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Please stop with the IOP bashing, you are just making yourselves ridiculous.
The IOP is the UK equivalent of the American Physical Society. Its history dates back to the 19th century, has more than 36000 members, and its publishing arm includes the top European journals in physics.
As others have mentionned before in the comments, I don’t think that the majority of the IOP membership will be happy with this.
Disclaimer: I was a member of the IOP for a few years (but not any longer). Otherwise, I have no ties to it.
Correction: I forgot the word “statement”
“I don’t think that the majority of the IOP membership will be happy with this statement.”
Publish everything. Data, methodology, notes, programs. Tell us exactly why you calculate x as x etc.
Provide everything, show the world. You are adamant you are right, so what are you afraid of, there should be nothing to not share.
Is there any one site dedicated to debunking all of the individual CRU e-mail myths? I have seen the truth here and there on one blog or the next (for instance, the reality behind Harry’s grumbling program code comments — something, as a programmer, I can appreciate on an emotional as well as intellectual level), and I’ve read a lot of the e-mail trails myself to get to the heart of what really was/wasn’t being said at all, but for the most part, I see people ranting and raving here and there and everywhere about how “Climategate” (I hate the name) proves this and that, when I know myself that this is not the case… but they take it as gospel.
Has anyone posted a step by step defense of the individual allegations in any one, easily referenced spot?
It would be nice if someone did, and one could just point the IOP there and say “exactly which allegations are you backing?”
[Response: We discussed many of them here and here. It might be worth collating this…. – gavin]
Scientific investigation crucially depends on collegiality – so does intelligent discussion, for that matter. By this I mean that knowledge is most effectively advanced when people confine their discussion to the subject matter in question, avoiding ad hominem issues such as the motivations of those involved in the dispute. Even if the opposing argument is made in bad faith, with deceptive intent, it’s generally more useful to proceed as if all arguments are good faith arguments. It can be a difficult standard of discourse for humans to put into practice, but good scientists have a lifetime of practicing this discipline in their collaborative work.
The recent eruption of transparently bad faith from the climate change denial industry therefore catches scientists off-balance. Dr. Mann, for instance, has commented on his surprise at the depths to which denialists will stoop.
James Hansen has touchingly explained his own motivations: he doesn’t want his grandchildren to say “Opa knew this could happen, but didn’t do enough to stop it.” The impulse Hansen describes is basic not only to humanity, but to life itself: reproduction (not individual survival) is the most primal biological imperative.
The apparent absence of this impulse in the denialist community as a whole is the main thing which scares the crap out of me. Do they think there’s going to be a bunker somewhere for their children to retreat into? In terms of our government of this world, we humans have lost touch with concern for our progeny. In terms of activist individuals in the denialist community, there must be something (money, status, belief system, who knows what) of higher priority than concern for the welfare of their own children.
Gavin dislikes this kind of talk, so I’d be surprised if this comment gets through. But the problem we face here is bigger than science: how did this moral mutation of Homo sapiens arise, after tens of thousands of years of successful evolution and development?
Kris Ayah (356)
Thank you for noticing.
You said:
This was written by John Peter …. and you’re thinking John Peter’s post is somehow reflective of the general opinions at RealClimate??? Really, that’s what you got out his your reading here so far? Oh dear!
Thank you again, although your last sentence could be better stated. At no time have I tried to reflect RC general opinion. Rather I have tried to play devil’s advocate and, to the best of my limited abilities, offer to RC zealots a stitching together of their own writings and statements. I have cherry-picked various AGW public positions to show what might be claimed in, say, a Congressional hearing on IPCC.
Scientists make poor public impressions until they have developed experience in simple straight-forward communication. A public speaker’s most serious difficulty is an unanticipated question. If you listened to Michael Mann’s interview on his paleoclimate findings and his model’s failure to be able to reproduce them you might believe, as I do, that he was caught off-guard by the interviewer’s, perhaps naive, but sensible assumption that the next IPCC report would be based on Mann’s new findings. Mann has some public experience, and his recovery was truthful and pretty good. He answered no and added words to the effect that maybe in some side subsection.
I have no problem with Mike’s answer, it was sensible, scientific and truthful. However, it raises the question, or allows opponents to raise the question, as to why are his findings will not be in the next IPCC report and opens the door further to claims that the IPCC process is too cumbersome or that our models are somehow too non-representative for “current” climate science”.
Maybe Mike’s answer was the best that could be done, then so be it. If considering more fully the implications of the question in advance developed a better answer, I think it would be worth it and save the expensive, sometimes futile attempts to correct it after the fact. Climate-gate is just one example of the costs of loose talk.
I will repeat again what I have tried to make clear over and over, my comments are offered in exchange for my use of this excellent site. Any comment of mine may be rejected, that’s fine by me. If I believe I have been misunderstood, I may try to explain myself further. I hope if any of my straw-man arguments are brought up in future discussions outside of this site, that I have given the RC sponsors the opportunity to come up with the best answer/defense they can. I will be satisfied that I have contributed.
If Joe-6pack is offensive, try a synonym like John Q. Public, a 20th century term. I was attempting to use 21st century terminology.
410, Barton Paul Levenson: Next century: No good agricultural land left, leading to complete collapse of human civilization.
The IPCC report (AR4) says that more people will probably experience reduced water stress than will probably experience increased water stress. This was omitted from the summary for policy leaders.
“The balance of evidence suggests a discernible human influence on global climate”
Who could argue with “suggest”, or the oft-repeated word “might”?
Andreas Bjurström #149: Sonja claims to edit a scientific journal. That she is willing to expose her prejudice in such a public way is so astonishing that I have to wonder if this is the real deal. Anyone can post on a site like this with any name.
Well since I’m a nobody in both the world of physics and climate science I feel free to say this.
Many brilliant scientists lack a fully mature set of societal skills.
The authors of the Institute of Physics letter and Dr. Judith Curry are both responding to attacks on the credibility of science with an embarrasing “he did it”, finger pointing defense. Without checking on whether or not anybody did anything.
I strongly recommend reading “Under a Green Sky”, a book about the search for the causation of past extinction events. It has a number of examples of how scientists sometimes fail to work together in a constructive manner which ring true to me.
Some very good advice was passed onto me by a senior research professor when I was confronted with a situation similar to today’s attack by the press on science. Here it is: “Don’t Panic”. Just do your best and try to let the rest go.
Hi
I wonder if anyone can help. I’m not a scientist just trying to read as much as I can. I’m currently in the middle of an argument with a couple of fairly determined deniers. One of them has come up with the old ‘450 peer reviewed papers that back deniers cause’ argument but can anyone give me an approximate figure of the papers that support AGW? I know its thousands but i can’t find a definitive figure.
Thanks for your time
[Response: Start here, and here. – gavin]
The last portion of my comment at 413 was edited AND RIGHTLY SO.
On reflection, my comment was uncalled for and I apologise for it.
My comment also included a link to more info which was edited along with the unsavoury remark. I would appreciate it if this link could be posted now so that others reading may inform themselves fully.
Once again please accept my apologies.
The link was http://www.john-daly.com/sonde.htm
#415 Avatar
You say you area physicist? Do you have any published works you can share with the group?
You also say we have doubled Co2 in the last century? Where did you get this erroneous information?
Don’t you think it is important to at least try to be accurate? Or do you feel that opinion and guessing based on what you read on the internet is good enough?
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#430 john
https://www.realclimate.org/index.php/data-sources
http://www.ossfoundation.us/projects/environment/global-warming/myths/hidden-code-data
You might want to visit a web site called:
https://www.realclimate.org
There they discuss how x gets calculated as x etc. You will actually have to read the material though to understand it. It can not be assimilated by osmosis simply because your computer is attached to the internet.
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Septic Matthew opines:
Imagining that those working on GCMs have never thought about validation efforts of this type, and have never done validation of this type.
Septic Matthew has quite the imagination.
> Baa H.
> john-daly.com/sonde.htm
Note the date of the web page you’re referring people to.
Take the citations of the papers there.
Paste them into Google Scholar
Read the subsequent work on the subject up to the present.
It’s always interesting to read antique papers, but old science papers aren’t “foundations” on which everything else relies — they’re valuable to the extent other people mention them as sources where they found something interesting to work from. The newer papers are the ones to rely on.
Daly’s site is of historical interest, but not a place to go for information
except to find keywords and cites to paste into Scholar.
I said:
I am mistaken, and I believe the ICO is overreaching, because apparently Section 77 makes it illegal to destroy records, but NOT to simply talk about it.
AFAIK there’s no prima facie evidence that e-mails were deleted, just evidence that one pissed-off Phil Jones sent an ill-advised e-mail suggesting it.
Re: 438
It’s also important to note that not all of the papers on the list “back the deniers’ cause.” The paper that I’m lead author on that’s on the list doesn’t say anything about anthropogenic climate change, one way or the other. The people who put the list together are aware of many of the misrepresentations, but haven’t taken anything off.
John Peter re: 433
You are correct. That last sentence I wrote was not checked before I pushed the send button. “His” should have been “of”. Oops. Just as I imagine you missed the correct spelling of my name. No big deal.
I did listen to Dr. Mann’s interview this morning as I was getting ready. I enjoyed it.
Best,
426 Gilles: Uncertainty is a 2 edged sword. It cuts both ways. We can’t prove that we won’t be extinct in 5 years or that we will be extinct in 100 years. It is way too risky to take that chance. There is no reason to expect it to take more than one century. “Climate Code Red” by David Spratt and Philip Sutton says the following:
Long term warming, counting feedbacks, is a least twice the short term warming. 560 ppm CO2 gets us 6 degrees C or 10.8 degrees F. We will hit 560 ppm before mid century.
YOU WILL NOT GET DATES. NOBODY IS FOOLISH ENOUGH TO MAKE A FORECAST LIKE THAT. TAKE A LABORATORY COURSE IN PROBABILITY AND STATISTICS.
THERE WILL NOT BE ENOUGH EVIDENCE TO PROVE IT TO YOU UNTIL IT IS TOO LATE. Just like you never see the face of the Grim Reaper until you die. You will know that the famine has started when you get to the grocery store and there is no food. Don’t bother to go squirrel hunting at that time because there will be no squirrels either. A friend of mine was involved in the Hungarian Uprising of 1956. He had exactly that experience: No food in the grocery store and no squirrels out in the country. This time, there will be no food anywhere on Earth.
See “The Long Summer” by Brian Fagan and “Collapse” by Jared Diamond.
O/T
A rising meme in the denialosphere is concerned with the 1860 – 1880 trend given by Phil Jones in the BBC written interview, which is a fraction higher than that he gave for 1975 – 2009, both of which are statistically significant.
The argument runs as you might expect – if there was greater global warming in the early part of the record greater than that recently, then dynamics other than CO2 can provide a greater forcing. I made use of the woodfortrees site to find that the solar trend was positive for the period. Could you direct me to a helpful link, and/or give a brief reply?
[Response: This is a complete red herring. Does the prior conviction of someone a hundred years ago of arson mean that you cannot convict someone of the crime today? No. Each case must be taken on its merits. Attribution for climate works in exactly the same way. Even accepting the quality of the data that far back (which in reality is dubious – both for the temperature and the forcings), it certainly could be that there was a big shift in solar and a decrease in volcanoes that explains it. But these are not what happened in the last 50 years – there we have a flat solar trend and a slight increase in volcanism, combined with a huge increase in GHGs. Therefore you would get a different attribution. – gavin]
Baa Humbug sez …
Please show my link to John Daly’s site!
I’m glad they passed it through. You have *no* idea how much harm your citing John Daly has done for your credibility here.
“Matthew has quite the imagination”
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.”
In other news, Al Gore pwns deniers in the NYT today: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/28/opinion/28gore.html?ref=opinion
Other people fighting for the truth on this issue should take a lesson from him; he doesn’t back down, he doesn’t qualify, he doesn’t dignify the attacks on him by deniers. He just hits back with the plain-language summary of denialism:
“Over the years, as the science has become clearer and clearer, some industries and companies whose business plans are dependent on unrestrained pollution of the atmospheric commons have become ever more entrenched. They are ferociously fighting against the mildest regulation — just as tobacco companies blocked constraints on the marketing of cigarettes for four decades after science confirmed the link of cigarettes to diseases of the lung and the heart.”
“. Some news media organizations now present showmen masquerading as political thinkers who package hatred and divisiveness as entertainment. And as in times past, that has proved to be a potent drug in the veins of the body politic. Their most consistent theme is to label as “soc!alist” any proposal to reform exploitive behavior in the marketplace.”
Ouch. That’s going to leave a mark.