Open Letter to the U.S. Government from U.S. Scientists on climate change and the IPCC reports

Posted on Thursday, March 11, 2010

America, pay attention. On March 12, “An Open Letter from Scientists in the United States on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and Errors Contained in the Fourth Assessment Report: Climate Change 2007,” will be delivered to U.S. federal agencies. The letter thus far has upwards of 150 signers, the vast majority of whom are climate change scientists who work at leading U.S. universities and institutions, including both IPCC and non-IPCC authors. The letter affirms the great and compelling body of evidence developed by the science community over decades, which concludes that the problem of human-caused global climatic disruption is real and that there are multiple reasons for concern about the risks this problem poses. It affirms the great value, fundamental soundness, and significance of the IPCC climate science assessments, while acknowledging the need for careful review of procedures to strengthen and quality-assure future reports, to minimize errors and to correct errors in a timely fashion. The climate science community has been demonstrating its competence and integrity for many years, greatly advancing understanding and making a sustained effort to communicate with government officials and the public – for what precious little the government and the public have done to understand and act appropriately and effectively in response.  Instead of being distracted and manipulated by politically spun-up controversies that seek to impugn the integrity of the science community, let’s find out whether the U.S. government, the news media, and the American people themselves have the competence and wit to pay attention to, learn from, and act effectively on what the climate science community is telling them.  See Details for full text of the scientists’ letter.

From the Open Letter website:
[Note:  More than 150 scientists have already signed this open letter and signatures are still being collected. On Friday, March 12, 2010, when the letter has been delivered to federal agencies, a list of signers will be posted. The vast majority of the signers are climate change scientists who work at leading U.S. universities and institutions. They include both IPCC and non-IPCC authors. Additional signers include professionals from related disciplines, including physical, biological and social scientists.  If you have any questions, please contact the letter’s authors.]

Full text of the letter:

An Open Letter from Scientists in the United States on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and Errors Contained in the Fourth Assessment Report: Climate Change 2007

Many in the popular press and other media, as well as some in the halls of Congress, are seizing on a few errors that have been found in the Fourth Assessment Report (AR4) of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in an attempt to discredit the entire report.  None of the handful of mis-statements (out of hundreds and hundreds of unchallenged statements) remotely undermines the conclusion that “warming of the climate system is unequivocal” and that most of the observed increase in global average temperatures since the mid-twentieth century is very likely due to observed increase in anthropogenic greenhouse gas concentrations. Despite its excellent performance for accurately reporting the state-of-the-science, we certainly acknowledge that the IPCC should become more forthcoming in openly acknowledging errors in a timely fashion, and continuing to improve its assessment procedures to further lower the already very low rate of error.

It is our intention in offering this open letter to bring the focus back to credible science, rather than invented hyperbole, so that it can bear on the policy debate in the United States and throughout the world.  We first discuss some of the key messages from climate science and then elaborate on IPCC procedures, with particular attention to the quality-control mechanisms of the IPCC.  Finally we offer some suggestions about what might be done next to improve IPCC practices and restore full trust in climate science.

The Climate Challenge
     
Our understanding of human contributions to climate change and the associated urgency for humans to respond has improved dramatically over the past two decades.  Many of the major components of the climate system are now well understood, though there are still sources of significant uncertainty (like the processes that produce the observed rapid ice-sheet melting and/or collapse in the polar regions).  It is now well established, for example, that atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases from human sources have increased rapidly since the Industrial Revolution.  Increasing concentrations of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere reduce the heat going out of the climate system, i.e., the radiation balance of the Earth – and so first principles of physics tell us to expect, with a very high likelihood, that higher temperatures should have been observed.

Indeed, measurements of global average temperatures show an increase of about 0.6 degrees C over the twentieth century and about 0.8 degrees C warming since mid-19th century.  The pattern of increase has not been smooth or monotonic.  There have been several 10- to 15-year periods of stable or declining temperatures over the past 150 years, but 14 of the warmest 15 years on record have been experienced between 1995 and 2009.  Since 1970, observational evidence from all continents and most oceans shows that many natural systems are already being affected by these temperature increases. 

Because the long-term warming trends are highly significant relative to our estimates of the magnitude of natural variability, the current decadal period of stable global mean temperature does nothing to alter a fundamental conclusion from the AR4: warming has unequivocally been observed and documented.  Moreover, well-understood lags in the responsiveness of the climate system to disturbances like greenhouse gas increases mean that the current temperature plateau will very likely not persist much longer. Global climate model projections show that present-day greenhouse gas concentrations have already committed the planet to about 0.5 degree C in warming over this century.

Increasing emissions of carbon dioxide from the consumption of coal, oil and natural gas as well as deforestation have been the major drivers of this observed warming.  While we cannot predict the details of our climate future with a high degree of certainty, the majority of studies from a large number of research groups in the US and elsewhere project that unabated emissions could produce between 1 and 6 degrees C more warming through the year 2100.

Other research has identified multiple reasons to be concerned about climate change; these apply to the United States as well as globally.  They include (1) risks to unique and threatened systems (including human communities), (2) risks from extreme events (like coastal storms, floods, droughts, heat waves, and wildfires), (3) economic damages (driven by, for example, pest infestations or inequities in the capacity to adapt), (4) risks from large-scale abrupt climate change (e.g., ice-sheet collapse, ocean circulation slowing, sharply increased methane emissions from permafrost) or abrupt impacts of more predictable climate change (generated by thresholds in the coping capacities of natural and human systems to climate variability), and (5) risks to national security (driven largely by extreme events across the world interacting with already-stressed situations).

These sources of risk and the potential for triggering temperature-driven impacts at lower thresholds, as well as the explicit recognition in the AR4 that risk is the product of likelihood and consequence, led the nations of the world to take note of the Copenhagen Accord last December.  The Accord highlights 2 degrees C in warming as a target that might reduce the chance of “dangerous anthropogenic interference with the climate system” to more manageable levels.  Research has shown that increasing the likelihood of achieving this goal over the next century is economically and technically feasible with emission reduction measures and changes in consumption patterns; but it will not be easy without major national and international actions to deviate substantially from the status quo.

The IPCC and the Fourth Assessment Report
 
The World Meteorological Organization (WMO) and the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) established the IPCC in 1988 to provide policy makers regularly with balanced assessments of the state of knowledge on climate change.  In so doing, they created an open intergovernmental organization in which scientists, policy analysts, engineers, and resource managers from all over the world were asked to collaborate.  At present, more than 150 countries including the United States participate in the IPCC.  IPCC publishes an assessment report approximately every six years.  The most recent Fourth Assessment, approved by member countries and released in 2007, contained three volumes: The Physical Science Basis (Working Group I); Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability (Working Group II) and Mitigation of Climate Change (Working Group III) and a Synthesis Report.  More than 44 writing teams and 450 lead authors contributed to the Fourth Assessment – authors who have been selected on the basis of their expertise in consultation with all member countries and who were assisted by another 800 scientists and analysts who served as contributing authors on specific topics.  Authors donated their time gratis, and the entire process was supported by four Technical Support Units (TSUs) that employ 5 to 10 people each.

Errors in the Fourth Assessment Report

It was hard not to notice the extraordinary commotion that erupted around errors that were eventually found in the AR4.  The wrong year for the projected disappearance of the Himalayan glaciers and the wrong percentage of ‘land below sea level’ in the Netherlands are examples of errors that need to be acknowledged frankly and rectified promptly.  In a few other cases, like the discussion of the correlations between crop yields, climate change, and climate variability in North Africa, caveats that were carefully crafted within the chapters were not included when language was shortened for the Synthesis Report. While striving to simplify technical details and summarize major points, some important qualifications were left behind. These errors of omission in the summary process should also be recognized and corrected. Other claims, like the one reported at the end of February suggesting that the AR4 did not mention the millions of more people who will see increases in water availability that were reported in the cited literature along with the millions of more people who will be at risk of water shortage, are simply not true.  In any case, it is essential to emphasize that none of these interventions alter the key finding from the AR4 that human beings are very likely changing the climate, with far-reaching impacts in the long run.

The heated debates that have emerged around these instances have even led some to question the quality and integrity of the IPCC.  Recent events have made it clear that the quality control procedures of the IPCC are not watertight, but claims of widespread and deliberate manipulation of scientific data and fundamental conclusions in the AR4 are not supported by the facts.  We also strongly contest the impression that the main conclusions of the report are based on dubious sources. The reference list of the AR4 contains about 18,000 citations, the vast majority of which were published in peer-reviewed scientific journals. The IPCC also has transparent procedures for using published but not peer-reviewed sources in their reports.  These procedures were not properly followed in the isolated Himalaya case, but that statement was never elevated into the Summary for Policymakers of either Working Group II or the Synthesis Report – documents that were approved unanimously and word for word by all member nations.

Nonetheless, failsafe compliance with these procedures requires extra attention in the writing of the next round of assessments.  We propose implementing a topic-based cross-chapter review process by which experts in an impact area of climate change, such as changes in water resources, scrutinize the assessment of related vulnerability, risk analyses, and adaptation strategies that work downstream from such changes.  Here we mean, to continue the example, assessments of possible increases in flooding damage in river basins and the potential for wetlands to provide buffers in the sectoral and regional chapters. This would be most productively implemented just before the first-order draft, so that chapter authors can be alerted to potential problems before the major review step.

Quality Control within the IPCC and US Review
 
The impression that the IPCC does not have a proper quality-control procedure is deeply mistaken. The procedure for compiling reports and assuring its quality control is governed by well-documented principles that are reviewed regularly and amended as appropriate.  Even now, every step in the preparation of every chapter can be traced on a website: First Order Drafts (with comments by many scientists as well as author responses to those comments), Second Order Drafts in which those comments are incorporated (and comments by experts and country representatives on revised versions as well as another round of author responses), and so on, up through the final, plenary-approved versions. 

To be clear, 2,500 reviewers together provided about 90,000 comments on the 44 chapters for the AR4.  Each comment is documented on a website that also describes how and why the comment was or was not incorporated in the next revision.  Review editors for each chapter worked with the authors to guarantee that each comment was treated properly and honestly in the revision; in fact, no chapter can ever move forward for publication without the approval of its set of two or three review editors.

The US Government opened its reviews of the draft IPCC report to any US expert who wanted to review it. In order to protect against having this preliminary pre-reviewed draft leaked before its ultimate approval by the IPCC Plenary, the US Government asked all potential reviewers to agree not to disclose the contents of the draft.  For each report, the US Government assembled its own independent panel of government experts to vet the comments before submission to the IPCC. Anything with scientific merit was forwarded.  There were multiple rounds for each of the Working Group reports and the Synthesis Report, and opportunities for US experts to review the drafts were posted as Federal Register notices.

IPCC principles also govern how authors treat published but non-peer reviewed sources. These procedures acknowledge that peer-reviewed scientific journals contain little information about on-the-ground implementation of adaptation or mitigation – matters such as the emission reduction potential in a given industrial sector or country, for example, or catalogues of the specific vulnerabilities and adaptation strategies of sectors and regions with regard to climate change.  This information is frequently only available in reports from research institutes, reports of workshops and conferences, or in publications from industries or other non-governmental organizations.  This is the so-called gray literature. The IPCC procedure prescribes that authors are obliged to assess critically any gray source that they wish to include. The quality and validity of a finding from a non-peer reviewed source needs to be verified before its finding may be included in a chapter text.  Each source needs to be completely traceable; and in cases where gray sources are used, a copy must be deposited at the IPCC Secretariat to guarantee that it is available upon request for third parties.

We conclude that the IPCC procedures are transparent and thorough, even though they are not infallible.  Nonetheless, we are confident that no single scholar or small group of scholars can manipulate the process to include or to exclude a specific line of research; authors of that research can (and are fully encouraged to) participate in the review process.  Moreover, the work of every scientist, regardless of whether it supports or rejects the premise of human-induced climate change, is subject to inclusion in the reports.  The work is included or rejected for consideration based on its scientific merit.

It is important to note that we are not addressing here the criteria and procedures by which the IPCC selects chairs and authors. These are handled exclusively by the IPCC and its members according to terms of reference that were initially defined in the authorizing language of 1988.  That is to say, governments or their appointees frame and implement these policies; and they create, approve and staff Technical Support Units for each working group. We do not make suggestions on these topics since they lie beyond our purview.

What comes next?
 
The National Academies of Sciences will shortly release a series of subsequent assessments under the America’s Climate Choices rubric.  We expect that the robust findings of the AR4 will be supported by new information gleaned from literature published since 2006, and that IPCC findings will be confirmed – i.e., that the climate change issue is serious and real.  Given these findings, we believe that the climate change issue deserves the urgent and non-partisan consideration of the country’s legislative and administrative leaders.  We feel strongly that exaggerated focus on a few errors from 2007 cannot be allowed to detract from open and honest deliberations about how to respond to climate risk by reducing emissions and promoting adaptation at home and abroad.

As the process of producing the IPCC Fifth Assessment Report (AR5) begins, the IPCC should become more responsive in acknowledging errors rapidly and openly as they become known. To this end, we urge the IPCC to put an erratum on its website that rectifies all errors that have been discovered in the text after publication.  In doing so, a clear distinction needs to be made between errors and progressing knowledge.  IPCC assessments are detailed snapshots of the state of scientific knowledge at a given time, while knowledge evolves continuously through ongoing research and experience; it is the errors in the assessments that need immediate attention.  In contrast, progressing knowledge is published in new scientific journal articles and reports; this information should be used as a basis for the AR5, but it cannot be listed as errata for the AR4 because it was not available when that assessment was conducted.  The website should, as well, respond rapidly and openly when reports of errors in past assessments are themselves in error.  We cannot let misperceptions fester anymore than errors go uncorrected.

Climate research and the IPCC reports on the state of knowledge provide a scientific foundation for climate policy making, whose agenda is defined by the governments of the IPCC and not the lead authors per se.  The quality of and the balance in the knowledge delivered by any assessment is certainly essential, as is clear and explicit communication of associated uncertainties.  Given the recent political and media commotion surrounding a few clear errors, it is now equally essential that we find ways to restore full trust in the integrity of the overwhelming majority of the climate change research and policy communities.  To that end, we are pleased that an independent critical evaluation of IPCC procedures will be conducted; we hope that the process will solicit participation by the National Academies of the member nations. 

The significance of IPCC errors has been greatly exaggerated by many sensationalist accounts, but that is no reason to avoid implementing procedures to make the assessment process even better. The public has a right to know the risks of climate change as scientists currently understand them. We are dedicated to working with our colleagues and government in furthering that task.

March 10, 2010

Signed:

Gary W. Yohe
Wesleyan University

Stephen H. Schneider
Stanford University

Cynthia Rosenzweig
NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies
and Columbia University

William E. Easterling
Pennsylvania State University

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Michael Mann interview: Denialists are waging “asymmetric warfare” against climate science

Posted on Wednesday, March 10, 2010

The climate science community is beginning to push back in the face of concerted attacks on the integrity of climate science. In a recent interview with science writer Chris Mooney, one of the most frequently attacked researchers—Penn State University climatologist Michael Mann—defended the fundamental scientific evidence on human-caused climate change and addressed issues of the ‘Climategate’ e-mail controversy. He pulled no punches in characterizing the problem of the global warming disinformation campaign and the dilemma with which it confronts the science community. See Details for partial transcript and links.

Dr. Michael E. Mann is a member of the Pennsylvania State University faculty and director of the Penn State Earth System Science Center.  He was a Lead Author of the chapter on “Observed Climate Variability and Change” in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Third Scientific Assessment Report published in 2001.  Among many other distinguished scientific activities, editorships, and awards, Mann is author of more than 120 peer-reviewed and edited publications. That includes, most famously, the 1998 study that introduced the so called ‘hockey stick,’ a graph showing that modern temperatures appear to be much higher than anything seen in at least the last thousand years.  With his colleague Lee Kump, Mann also recently authored the book Dire Predictions: Understanding Global Warming. Finally, he is one of the founders and contributors to the prominent global warming blog, RealClimate. More information about his research and publication record can be found here.

Mann has been at the center of the so-called ‘Climategate’ controversy over a set of e-mail messages that were hacked/stolen/leaked from a server at the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia, and has been further attacked in connection with a denialist campaign to delegitimize the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. See Climate Science Watch’s Archives by Date for a listing of, and links to, our numerous posts since October 2009 related to this set of controversies.

Chris Mooney, one of the best writers on the collision of climate change science and politics, among other subjects in the nexus of science and society, co-authors The Intersection blog. He is a 2009-2010 Knight Science Journalism Fellow at MIT, a host of the Point of Inquiry podcast, and the author of three books, The Republican War on Science, Storm World: Hurricanes, Politics, and the Battle Over Global Warming, and Unscientific America: How Scientific Illiteracy Threatens Our Future.

The audio of Chris Mooney’s interview with Michael Mann was posted February 26 at Point of Inquiry. Thanks to Chris for permission to post our partial transcription from the audio.

During the interview, Mann discussed a range of topics, including climate science issues and the ‘Climategate’ controversy. The following transcript is of a portion of the interview that starts at about 29:15 and deals with the global warming disinformation campaign:

Mooney: [A questioner asks] Do you have any ideas about what could have been done differently in responding to the stolen e-mails controversy?

Mann: Yes, I think there is now a growing awareness on the part of the scientific community—the climate science community in particular—that we have to be far better at defending ourselves and defending our science against disingenuous and dishonest attacks. The side that is issuing these attacks, our detractors, are extremely well-funded, they are extremely well-organized.  They have basically had an attack infrastructure of this sort for decades.  They developed it during the tobacco wars. They honed it further in efforts to attack science that industry or other special interests find inconvenient. So they have a very well-honed, well-funded, organized machine they are bringing to bear now in their attack on climate science.

It’s literally like a battle between a Marine and a Cub Scout when it comes to the scientists defending themselves.  We obviously don’t have the resources, we don’t have the experience, we haven’t been trained, we’re not public relations experts like they are, we’re not lawyers and lobbyists like they are – we’re scientists, we’re trained to do science.  So it’s like a classic example of asymmetric warfare, and that’s really the way we should think about this.

Mooney: I do agree there’s an existing infrastructure in place, in terms of conservative think tanks that have been fighting on the climate issue for a long time, and I think they need to be responded to. But I think there’s a different factor that isn’t pre-existing, and is new, and I think it’s the blogs have gotten a lot more powerful. And it depends, but they’re not necessarily part of that same old infrastructure. Something else is going on with this really energized anti-global-warming movement on the web. 

Mann: I think what’s happened is the anti-science industry has fully exploited the resources made available by the World Wide Web. It isn’t coincidental, it isn’t like that’s a new organic thing that’s emerged from grassroots anti-climate-change activists. It’s Astroturf, it’s just like Astroturf campaigns that are talked about in other contexts. That’s all we have here, I think what we have is an effort to exploit that resource, to exploit the World Wide Web. I would imagine that much of what might appear to an outsider to be organic, to be grassroots, is actually connected, funded, manned by those connected with the climate change denial movement. I think that a lot of the comments, the more informed and clever responses, attacks, criticisms that one sees on many of the newsgroups—Internet news sites and comment threads and blogs—I wouldn’t be surprised if some of those who are participating in those comment threads are professionals.

Mooney: But we don’t have any proof of that, do we? Certainly I’ve had my suspicions, when my blog gets overrun, as it very often does, by the climate change denial machine. But I don’t have any proof.

Mann: Well, we do have some proof. We’ve seen, for example, IP numbers coming in—we can check the IP addresses of those who make comments at RealClimate, and we’ve seen people coming in from fossil fuel industry corporations, or coming from lobby groups in DC who are connected with the climate change denial movement. So actually, you can confirm that sometimes.

Mooney: I would like to see more of that because I feel that this is part of that whole outrage against Obama, and the Tea Party-ism, and the stirring on the political right as well. But clearly it’s a hard-fought battle, and I agree that the warfare is asymmetric. One question is, can the scientific community fight harder or must it draw the line somewhere? I mean, you have someone out there like Mark Morano, who’s incredibly effective at doing what he does—his website is Climate Depot, it has very high traffic. The science community does not have its equivalent. The question is, should it, or is that crossing some kind of line?

Mann: Well, it’s the old line about getting into a fight with a pig—you’ll get dirty and the pig enjoys it. There is some truth to that and I think there’s a delicate line to be crossed between being a scientist and defending yourself in a way that is appropriate as a scientist, and wading into territory that you ought not to be wading into—you know, getting down in the mud with some professional climate change denier like Morano.

There does need to be—those who have reason to want to defend the science, to defend the scientists, in the policy community, in the nongovernmental organization community, there are many who care about science and who are deeply disturbed by the growth of anti-science, the attacks against climate change, the attacks against evolution, I could go on down the list. Those forces seem to be better organized and ready to go to war with the forces of anti-science. The scientists can’t do it—scientists aren’t trained to do it, they’re not equipped to do it, they don’t have the resources to do it—but others who have some stake in this debate, who do have those resources, and who are better organized, need to step up.

Mooney: [A questioner asks] Do you find that climate change denialism is responsive to data and factual arguments, or is it ultimately a faith position or one based on ideology—political, economic, religious—rather than on a genuine skepticism about the quality of the data?

Mann: It’s a good question. I don’t think it’s a one-size-fits-all. I think there are many different flavors of climate change contrarians, or deniers, or skeptics. Skepticism is a good thing—in science we should all be skeptics. And I think there are some who are genuinely skeptical, meaning that they don’t believe the evidence supports the conclusion that humans are influencing the climate. I would argue that they’re misinformed, and perhaps misguided, but they may believe that in good faith. So there are certainly individuals, scientists, policymakers, who fall into that category. 

On the other hand, I believe that there are many who are essentially serving as shills for the fossil fuel industry, who are doing the bidding of the fossil fuel industry, and are not engaging in good-faith debate, good-faith discourse, but are simply looking for a way to malign the science and the scientists and to advance a policy agenda. So, different people coming to this with different motives.  But the bottom line is that what should be in informing the discussion is legitimate science—peer-reviewed scientific research, not the opinions of bloggers or the attacks of politicians with extreme views. The climate change policy discussion should be informed by what legitimate science has to say.  Unfortunately, I think there are too many who are trying to insert politics into the process.

Mooney:  It’s been a pretty dark hour for climate science with ‘Climategate’ and all the attacks on the IPCC. The skeptics are clearly out for as many scalps as they can get, including yours, and probably mine after this show airs.  How do you think we’re going to come out of this? What do you look to when you want to feel hopeful?

Mann: I think that many of us didn’t believe it would ever come to this. In other words, the scientific case for the reality of human-caused climate change has been clear now for several years. Now that doesn’t mean that the science is done, or that there is no uncertainty, or that we have all the answers we need. There is much that we still need to learn and there are many significant outstanding uncertainties. But we do know enough to know that human-caused climate change is a reality.

There are many in the scientific community, perhaps in the policy community as well, who thought, somewhat naïvely, that in the end the science would carry the day, that the strength of the scientific consensus would be enough to lead those who might have doubted the reality to concede, yes, that the scientific evidence for the reality of human-caused climate change is solid.

I was always a bit skeptical. I always felt that there were special interests who had way too much invested in protecting the fossil fuel industry, and despite all the talk a few years ago about quote-unquote ‘the debate being over,’ that they were just lying dormant. The forces of anti-scientific disinformation were lying dormant, but they would be back. So this didn’t surprise me at all. In fact, I fully expected, in advance of the Copenhagen Summit, that we would see an increase in the number of attacks. 

I guess what we all underestimated was the degree, the depths of dishonesty, and dirtiness, and cynicism to which the climate change denial movement would be willing to stoop to advance their agenda. That’s the only thing I think that surprised many of us. …

*    *    *

Mooney’s last question asked about how to come out of this on a hopeful note, but Mann’s response leaves that hanging. He is right in characterizing the current attack on climate science as a kind of ‘asymmetrical warfare’ – a concerted, predatory political attack of a kind that the science community is ill-equipped to counter, except by playing its appropriate role in defending and advancing science. There is more that can and must be done to combat the disinformation campaign than what the science community alone can do. Those who care – in the policy arena, the public interest community, the educational community, the media—who can see what is happening, and have skills and resources to act effectively, need, as Mann says, “to step up.” 

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“Cyber bullying” and Congressional inquisition aim to chill the work of climate scientists

Posted on Monday, March 08, 2010

An article in The Daily Climate (“Cyber bullying rises as climate data are questioned”) reports on how some of the leading climate scientists are being subjected to a barrage of vitriolic, abusive, and threatening communications. Kevin Trenberth, head of the Climate Analysis Section of the National Center for Atmospheric Research, has a 19-page document of “extremely foul, nasty, abusive” e-mails he’s received just since November. Worst of all, says Gavin Schmidt of NASA, are “intimidating letters” from congressional members threatening dire consequences to scientists working on climate change. “That is chilling the work of science in the agencies.” That’s all fine with notorious denialist propagandist Marc Morano: “I seriously believe we should kick them while they’re down,” he says of the scientists. “They deserve to be publicly flogged.”

The following was originally posted at The Daily Climate: 

Cyber bullying rises as climate data are questioned

‘That is chilling the work of science in the agencies.’

By Douglas Fischer
Daily Climate editor
March 1, 2010

The e-mails come thick and fast every time NASA scientist Gavin Schmidt appears in the press.

Rude and crass e-mails. E-mails calling him a fraud, a cheat, a scumbag and much worse.

To Schmidt and other researchers purging their inboxes daily of such correspondence, the barrage is simply part of the job of being a climate scientist. But others see the messages as threats and intimidation – cyber-bullying meant to shut down debate and cow scientists into limiting their participation in the public discourse.

“I get a lot of hate mail,” said Schmidt, a climate modeler at the Goddard Institute for Space Studies who also runs RealClimate.org, a website devoted to debunking myths and errors about climate change. “I get a lot of praise mail, but pretty much every time I have a quote in a mainstream publication I’ll get a string of emails from various people accusing me of various misdemeanors and fantasizing about my life in prison.”

Kevin Trenberth, head of the Climate Analysis Section of the National Center for Atmospheric Research, has a 19-page document of “extremely foul, nasty, abusive” e-mails he’s received just since November.

Australian author and academic Clive Hamilton noted that many of the country’s most distinguished climate scientists are increasingly the target of e-mail attacks aimed at driving them from the public debate.

They do not seem to be interested in dialogue. They are shrill, they are unfriendly, and they are bullying.
  —Rudy Baum, Chemical and Engineering News

“The purpose of this new form of cyber-bullying seems clear; it is to upset and intimidate the targets, making them reluctant to participate further in the climate change debate,” Hamilton wrote in a column published last week by Sydney’s ABC News. “While the internet is often held up as the instrument of free speech, it is often used for the opposite purpose, to drive people out of the public debate.”

The bullying has long been part of life for many climate scientists. Retired NCAR climate scientist Tom Wigley said he’s been fighting it for the last 20 years or more. Most of the e-mails appear to be the work of frustrated individuals, ranting into the ether, scientists say. But some appear to be the work of coordinated campaigns, and many, scientists say, appear to be taking their cue from influential anti-climate change advocates like Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck and ClimateDepot.com.

Scientists say the bullying, if anything, emboldens them. But it does have a cost.

Organized, “McCarthyite” tactics aimed at specific scientists by various groups can be stressful, Schmidt said. “Frivolous” Freedom of Information Act requests can tie up considerable quantities of researchers’ time.

Worst of all, he said, are “intimidating letters” from congressional members threatening dire consequences to scientists working on climate change.

“That is chilling the work of science in the agencies,” Schmidt said. “It’s certainly very off-putting for scientists who want to talk about their stuff in public but fear the political consequences.”

“Nobody wants to create an enemy on the Hill.”

Whenever you have someone ginning up a crisis and wanting to take power, you’re going to have anger.
  —Marc Morano, ClimateDepot.com

For the most part, the rants have remained just that – rants. Threats of physical harm remain rare and are usually discounted, scientists say. “These people don’t really know you,” Schmidt added. “They’re not really talking about you. You’re just a symbol that has an e-mail address.”

The pace picked up late last year, several scientists said, when several years’ worth of stolen correspondence among climate scientists were published on the Web. The onslaught intensified as errors in the Intergovernmental Panel of Climate Change’s most recent report surfaced in January and policy makers and reporters began to question what has become the gold standard of climate science.

What’s clear is the e-mails show anger and hostility. There’s no effort to ask questions or seek what Trenberth called “the truth.” Scientists aren’t the only target; journalists covering the issue also routinely find their inbox stuffed with epithets.

“They do not tend to be reasonable,” said Rudy Baum, editor-in-chief of Chemical and Engineering News, who has been covering science for the magazine for 30 years. “They do not seem to be interested in dialogue. They are shrill, they are unfriendly, and they are bullying.”

Why so much venom and vitriol?

None of this started from scratch. None of this started serendipitously or by happenstance.
  —Richard Littlemore, DeSmog Blog

The answer is simple, said Marc Morano, executive editor at ClimateDepot.com, who has spent years trying to expose global warming hype: The public is bitterly angry at the “con job” perpetrated by climate scientists.

“You have every aspect of our lives subject to regulatory control – down to the light bulbs we can put in – based on climate science,” Morano said. The researchers “never wanted to debate and they kept trying to demand the debate was over.”

“Whenever you have someone ginning up a crisis and wanting to take power, you’re going to have anger,” he added. “When you’ve been conned at a used car dealer, you don’t go back cheerily and politely to talk to them.”

That neither the stolen correspondence nor the minor IPCC errors undermine the underlying science of climate change hasn’t checked the onslaught.

Trenberth says that is the most dispiriting aspect of the e-mails: Facts don’t carry more weight in the public debate. The nature of public discourse – be it climate change or health care – has changed; information that does not fit one’s worldview is now discounted or rejected.

Increasingly,” wrote Pulitzer-prize winning columnist Leonard Pitts, Jr. in the Miami Herald recently, “we are a people estranged from critical thinking, divorced from logic, alienated from even objective truth.” [CSW note: Pitts says, “[R]emember a time when facts settled arguments. This is back before everything became a partisan shouting match, back before it was permissible to ignore or deride as “biased’’ anything that didn’t support your worldview. “If you and I had an argument and I produced facts from an authoritative source to back me up, you couldn’t just blow that off. You might try to undermine my facts, might counter with facts of your own, but you couldn’t just pretend my facts had no weight or meaning. “But that’s the intellectual state of the union these days, as evidenced by all the people who still don’t believe the president was born in Hawaii or that the planet is warming.”]

Added Trenberth: “In science there’s a whole lot of facts and basic information on the nature of climate change, but it’s not being treated that way. It’s being treated as opinion.”

The attacks are not limited to climate research, either. Researchers working on atrazine, a widely used herbicide, bisphenol A, a common plastic additive, and other environmental pollutants have received similarly intimidating e-mails and even threats.

Determining whether any given e-mail is part of an organized campaign is difficult, said Richard Littlemore, editor of DeSmog Blog and author of Climate Cover-up, an investigation of industry’s effort to undermine climate science.

But it’s not happenstance, he said. The bullying doesn’t start serendipitously or from scratch.

It starts with a paid campaigner – Morano; the International Climate Science Coalition’s Tom Harris; JunkScience.com publisher and Fox News commentator Steve Milloy – and filters out from there, Littlemore said.

“They’re the PR guys and they’re in the game and taking money for what they do,” he said. “They also wind up recruiting other folks (who) in many ways are just dupes and sincerely believe they’re standing up for democracy.”

“They’re people whose world view is being disrupted by climate scientists,” Littlemore added. “Sometimes they end up being the most effective and vitriolic.”
Morano, for his part, is unapologetic.

He doesn’t wish anyone harm. But he sees opportunity. “I seriously believe we should kick them while they’re down,” he said. “They deserve to be publicly flogged.”

Reach Daily Climate editor Douglas Fischer at dfischer [at] dailyclimate.org

Find more Daily Climate stories in the TDC Newsroom 

This work by The Daily Climate is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. 

Based on a work at http://www.dailyclimate.org

On Marc Morano see here and here.

Earlier CSW posts:
February 23::  Scientists ill-equipped to deal with all-out war on climate science community

Februry 24: Sen. Inhofe inquisition seeking ways to criminalize and prosecute 17 leading climate scientists

March 1: UK Guardian: “US Senate’s top climate sceptic accused of waging ‘McCarthyite witch-hunt’”

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Robert Watson: IPCC is fundamentally sound; don’t let “skeptics” distract or derail action

Posted on Sunday, March 07, 2010

“Does the IPCC process need to be significantly revised? I would argue that it does not,” says Robert Watson, former IPCC chairman and currently chief science adviser to the UK environment department. “The Principles and Procedures for the selection of authors and review editors, and the peer-review process and approval of reports are all sound. What is needed is to tighten up the implementation of these procedures.” The IPCC “is one of the most rigorous scientific review bodies in existence,” says Watson, and “in many cases is very conservative in its statements.” In his March 2 guest post on a World Bank site (“Is the scientific evidence of human-induced climate change unequivocal?”), Watson says: “To suggest that the hacked e-mails or the identified inaccuracies in the IPCC Working Group II report undermine the broad evidence that the Earth’s climate is changing due to human activities, or that any talk of carbon emissions cuts should be suspended, is simply untenable. …The challenges of the skeptics must be fully addressed, …[but] We must not allow them to use the incident at [the University of East Anglia] or the mistakes in the IPCC report to distract us or derail the political will to safeguard the planet.”

Re-posted with thanks to The World Bank “World Development Report 2010” blog.

Is the scientific evidence of human-induced climate change unequivocal?

By Robert Watson 
March 2, 2010

Last December, a very large majority of the scientific community and most politicians would have agreed that the scientific evidence of human-induced climate change was unequivocal and that the only question was whether the world’s political leaders could agree in Copenhagen to meaningful legally binding greenhouse gas emission reduction targets.

But, as we now know, the negotiations only produced an aspirational target—to limit the global mean surface temperature to no more than 2 degrees C above pre-industrial levels—and an accord that does not bind any country to reduce their emissions.

Since then, the IPCC’s Fourth Assessment report has been criticized for errors or imprecise wording.

•  For example, the statements that the Himalayan glaciers would melt by 2035 or earlier (IPCC admitted that this was an error and not evidence-based);
•  that agricultural production in some North African countries would decrease by up to 50% by 2020 (the synthesis report did not contain the nuances and more detailed discussion in the underlying chapter);
•  and that over half of the Netherlands was below sea level rather than a quarter (this was largely a definitional issue – the Netherlands Dutch Ministry of transport uses the figure 60% - below high water level during storms).

These inaccuracies, coupled with the controversy surrounding illegally hacked e-mails and temperature data from the University of East Anglia (UEA), have provided climate skeptics and some media with ammunition to undermine public confidence in the conclusions of the IPCC and climate science in general.

It is easy to see that the language in the leaked e-mails could suggest that the scientists may have inappropriately manipulated the data to support the theory of human-induced climate change and attempted to suppress other data that contradicts this theory, which is why I applaud the University of East Anglia (UEA) for rapidly establishing an independent review.

But to suggest that the hacked e-mails or the identified inaccuracies in the IPCC Working Group II report undermine the broad evidence that the Earth’s climate is changing due to human activities, or that any talk of carbon emissions cuts should be suspended, is simply untenable.

Recently, the UK Royal Society, the National Environment Research Council and the UK Meteorological Office issued a joint statement not only supporting the findings of the 2007 IPCC report, but showing that recent scientific information further strengthens them. They concluded that the body of scientific evidence that underpins the call for immediate action could not be emphasized enough (http://www.nerc.ac.uk/press/releases/2009/29-climate.asp).  The Joint sciences academies’ statement (by eleven academies from developed and developing countries), also concluded that climate change is real, that we need to prepare for the consequences, and that all nations should take prompt action to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions (http://royalsociety.org/Joint-science-academies-statement-Climate-change-adaptation-and-the-transition-to-a-low-carbon-society/).

So let me return to the issue of the IPCC, which is one of the most rigorous scientific review bodies in existence.  Many thousands of scientists have dedicated their time to preparing and reviewing the most comprehensive and authoritative assessments of climate science available. In addition, governments from around the world have also reviewed the IPCC findings and by consensus approved the key findings in the Summaries for Policymakers and Synthesis Reports. 

The reports undergo two rounds of peer-review, and the policymakers summaries of the Working Groups are then subjected to a word by word approval of all governments in the presence of the chapter lead authors.

In many cases the IPCC is very conservative in its statements, e.g., the projections of sea level rise reported in WG I were based on contributions from thermal expansion of the oceans and the melting of mountain glaciers, but did not contain a contribution from the melting of the Greenland ice sheet due to an inadequate understanding of the current rate of melting.  Some would say: Only four mistakes or cases of imprecise wording have been found in the thousand page WG II report, and none in WGs I and III, so is there really a problem? 

I see no evidence that the authors purposely overstated the potential impacts from climate change in an effort to convince the public of the seriousness of the threat – the threat is serious enough without hyping it—and the expert and government peer-review process should have caught these inaccuracies and imprecise wordings.  The vast amount of attention in the print and TV media, at least in the UK, has probably left some of the public confused if not sceptical – the challenge now is to regain any lost trust through a continuing re-examination and restatement of the evidence, clearly identifying what we know and what is still uncertain. It is critical that the public understand the issue of climate change given the need to both mitigate and adapt in a cost-effective and socially responsible manner.

So does the IPCC process need to be significantly revised?  I would argue that it does not. The IPCC is more than capable of conducting rigorous and reliable assessments in an open, transparent and inclusive manner, but it also needs to takes steps to regain its full and deserved credibility. The Principles and Procedures for the selection of authors and review editors, and the peer-review process and approval of reports are all sound. What is needed is to tighten up the implementation of these procedures.

•  The selected authors need to represent the full range of credible views, including those of the sceptics.
•  The IPCC should consider shorter reports focussed on the key issues rather than the all-encompassing reports that have become the norm.
•  Authors, peer-reviewers and the Working Group secretariats need to be absolutely rigorous in ensuring that all conclusions are backed up by evidence, with an accurate assessment of how good the evidence is, and that all of the citations are valid. 
•  Grey literature, i.e., that which has not been peer-reviewed—can and should be used, as long as it is evidence-based and available to peer-reviewers for evaluation.

The co-sponsors of the IPCC, i.e., the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) and the World Meteorological Organization (WMO), in response to a request by Environment Ministers at the UNEP Governing Council meeting in Bali, announced that they would initiate an independent review of IPCC management and procedures by an eminent panel of scientists.

One criticism often aimed at the IPCC is that it is not flexible and unable to conduct rapid response assessments of new evidence due to the requirements of two rounds of peer-review involving experts and governments. One solution to this weakness is to complement, not replace, the IPCC by developing a “peer-reviewed” wiki that can continually update the evidence base and synthesize the findings, noting where the new evidence strengthens, modifies or undermines previous conclusions.

In my opinion, there is no doubt that the evidence for human-induced climate change is irrefutable. The world’s leading scientists, many of whom have participated in the IPCC, overwhelmingly agree on two things:

•  1. What we’re experiencing cannot be attributed to natural variation in the climate over time, but is due to human activities.
•  2. If we do not act, climate change will continue apace with increasing droughts, floods and rising seas, leading to major damaging impacts to the natural world (loss of species and critical ecosystem services) and society (displaced human populations).

There is no doubt that the atmospheric concentration of greenhouse gases has increased significantly over the past 150 years primarily due to human activities.  These gases are radiatively active and absorb and trap outgoing infra-red radiation from the Earth’s surface. Based on simple physics, the Earth’s atmosphere must respond by warming – the only issue is by how much and when.

The IPCC concluded that the global temperature data and analyses are robust, with increasing variable and extreme temperatures, coupled with increasing severe weather events, heat-waves, floods and droughts.  While a number of scientists argue that some of the land temperature data is contaminated and unreliable because of the urban heat island effect and movement of observational sites (the scientists who have reported these trends in the peer-review literature and IPCC argue that these effects are taken into account), ocean data, and balloon and satellite data also show an increasingly warmer world (these data sets are clearly free from any potential contamination from an urban heat island effect).

In addition, the evidence for a changing climate over the past 100 years also comes from observed changes in retreating mountain glaciers throughout most of the world, a decline in the extent and thickness of arctic sea ice, melting of the Greenland ice sheet, changes in precipitation patterns, and changes in vegetation and the behaviour of wildlife.  However, the challenges of the sceptics must be fully addressed.

The key question is the cause of the observed changes in temperature.  The IPCC concluded that it is very likely (>90% certain) that most of the observed changes over the past 50-60 years are due to human activities, and that the observed changes cannot be explained by known natural phenomena.

Future increases in greenhouse gas concentrations are projected to be accompanied by increased climate variability and more extreme climatic events, leading in general to adverse impacts on agriculture, water quantity and quality, coastal erosion, loss of biodiversity and degradation of ecosystem services.  Developing countries will be the most vulnerable and poor people within them.  Therefore, it is clear that climate change is not only an environmental issue, but a development and security issue.

All major emitters of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases need to rapidly and cost-effectively transition to a low-carbon economy in both the production and use of energy and the management of forests and agricultural lands.  In order to ensure food, water, and human security, and protect the world’s biodiversity, between now and the end of the century, the goal should be to limit the global average temperature rise to 2 degrees C above pre-industrial levels. This will require global emissions of all greenhouse gases to peak by around 2015 and reduce by at least 50% by 2050 (relative to 1990).  Without concerted action now, the world will be faced with temperature increases far in excess of 2 degrees C, with unthinkable impacts.

An equitable and substantive post-Kyoto agreement is essential if the aspirational target of 2 degrees C is to be realized.  Industrialized countries must demonstrate leadership, and provide developing countries with technical and financial assistance to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions, while they address the critical issues of poverty and hunger.

Given the limited success at Copenhagen, 2010 is a critical year for the world’s political leaders to unite in the fight against climate change.  Strong and visionary political leadership will be essential. We must not allow the sceptics to use the incident at UEA or the mistakes in the IPCC report to distract us or derail the political will to safeguard the planet.

Copyright © 2010 - The World Bank Group

Also see:
Met Office analysis reveals ‘clear fingerprints’ of man-made climate change (UK Guardian, March 5)

It is an “increasingly remote possibility” that human activity is not the main cause of climate change, according to a major Met Office review of more than 100 scientific studies that track the observed changes in the Earth’s climate system. …

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Naomi Oreskes: How a handful of scientists obscure the truth on global warming

Posted on Friday, March 05, 2010

Here’s a heads-up on a forthcoming book about the denial machine: In a videotaped lecture, University of California professor Naomi Oreskes discusses Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming, co-authored with Erik Conway. From the publisher’s pre-publication announcement: “Merchants of Doubt tells the story of how a loose-knit group of high-level scientists and scientific advisers, with deep connections in politics and industry, ran effective campaigns to mislead the public and deny well-established scientific knowledge over four decades. Remarkably, the same individuals surface repeatedly—some of the same figures who have claimed that the science of global warming is ‘not settled’ denied the truth of studies linking smoking to lung cancer, coal smoke to acid rain, and CFCs to the ozone hole. “Doubt is our product,” wrote one tobacco executive. These ‘experts’ supplied it.” See Details for the video of Prof. Oreskes’s talk.

[From the World Wildlife Fund climate blog. Re-posted with our thanks.]

From Tobacco to Climate Change: How Doubt-Mongers Systematically Undermine Public Policy

by Nick Sundt
March 5, 2010

In a videotaped lecture (see below), Naomi Oreskes discusses the upcoming book, Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming (Bloomsbury USA), which she has coauthored with Erik Conway. Oreskes is a professor of history and science studies at the University of California, San Diego.

According to the publisher’s spring catalog, the book tells “the troubling story of how a cadre of influential scientists have clouded public understanding of scientific facts to advance a political and economic agenda.”  It continues:

“The U.S. scientific community has long led the world in research on such areas as public health, environmental science, and issues affecting quality of life. Our scientists have produced landmark studies on the dangers of DDT, tobacco smoke, acid rain, and global warming. But at the same time, a small yet potent subset of this community leads the world in vehement denial of these dangers.

Merchants of Doubt tells the story of how a loose-knit group of high-level scientists and scientific advisers, with deep connections in politics and industry, ran effective campaigns to mislead the public and deny well-established scientific knowledge over four decades. Remarkably, the same individuals surface repeatedly—some of the same figures who have claimed that the science of global warming is “not settled” denied the truth of studies linking smoking to lung cancer, coal smoke to acid rain, and CFCs to the ozone hole. “Doubt is our product,” wrote one tobacco executive. These “experts” supplied it.

Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway, historians of science, roll back the rug on this dark corner of the American scientific community, showing how ideology and corporate interests, aided by a too-compliant media, have skewed public understanding of some of the most pressing issues of our era.”

From Merchants of Doubt: “For half a century, the tobacco industry, defenders of the Strategic Defense Initiative, and those skeptical of acid rain, the ozone hole, and global warming strove to ‘maintain the controversy’ and ‘keep the debate alive’ by fostering claims that were contrary to the mainstream of scientific evidence and expert judgment. We have seen how they promoted claims that had already been refuted in the scientific literature, and how the media became complicit as they reported the controversy as if it was a legitimate debate. Often the media did so without informing readers, viewers, and listeners that the ‘experts’ being quoted had links to the tobacco industry, were affiliated with partisan think tanks funded by industries, or were simply habitual contrarians who perhaps enjoyed the attention garnered by outlier views.” 

The presentation on 2 March 2010 was part of the University of Rhode Island’s Spring 2010 Vetlesen Lecture Series, People and Planet Global Environmental Change.

Embedded video also available at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XXyTpY0NCp0.

Oreskes read a passage from her book, including the following (starting at 38:10 in the video):

“Imagine a gigantic, colossal banquet. Hundreds of millions of people come to eat. They eat and drink to their hearts’ content, eating food that is better and more abundant than at the finest tables in ancient Athens, or Rome or even in the palaces of medieval Europe. Then one day a man arrives wearing a white dinner jacket.”

It is, Oreskes explains, the waiter—and he is holding the bill. She continues:

“Not surprisingly the diners are in shock. Some begin to deny that this is their bill. Others deny that there even is a bill. Still others deny that they partook of the meal. One diner suggests the man is not really a waiter, but is only trying to get attention for himself or to raise money for his own projects. Finally the group concludes that if they simply ignore the waiter, he will go away.

“This is where we stand today on the question of global warming. For the past 150 years, industrial civilization has been dining on the energy stored in fossil fuels and the bill has now come due. Yet we have sat around the dinner table denying that it is our bill, and doubting the credibility of the man who delivered it.

“The great economist John Maynard Keynes famously summarized all of economic theory in a single phrase: “there is no such thing as a free lunch.” And he was right. We have experienced prosperity unmatched in human history. We have feasted to our hearts’ content. But the lunch was not free.

“So it is not surprising that many of us are in denial. After all we didn’t know that it was a banquet—and we didn’t know that there would be a bill. But now we do know. The bill includes acid rain, and the ozone hole and the damage produced by DDT. These are the environmental costs of living the way citizens of wealthy developed nations have lived since the industrial revolution. Now we either have to pay the price, change the way we do business, or both.

“No wonder the merchants of doubt have been successful. They’ve permitted us to think we could ignore the waiter, while we haggled about the bill. The failure of the United States to act on global warming as well as the long delays between when the science was settled and when we acted on tobacco, acid rain and the ozone hole are prima facie empirical evidence that doubt-mongering works.”

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E-mails show climate scientists struggling with push-back on anti-science political assault

Greenwire and the New York Times on-line reported today on leaked e-mails among leading U.S. scientists who are exchanging views on the question of how the climate science community can best counter the global warming denial machine, which is currently engaged in an all-out attack on multiple fronts seeking to delegitimize leading scientists, scientific organizations, and the scientific evidence on climate change.

We appreciate both the conscientious dialogue and the growing sense of urgency among members of the science community, who are faced with an unprecedented and malign assault by non-scientist political operatives that threatens to damage the country’s ability to engage in rational discourse and respond effectively to the threat of global climatic disruption. Some high-ranking politicians and corporate executives who surely know better appear to be, if not directly fanning the flames, at least using the current controversies as an additional excuse to delay or derail effective climate change policymaking.

From the New York Times on-line, March 5 (excerpt):

E-Mails Show Scientists Planning Push-Back Against ‘McCarthyite’ Attacks on Climate Science

By ALEX KAPLUN of Greenwire (Greenwire is by subscription)

U.S. scientists are planning to counter criticisms directed at them during the “Climategate” scandal and congressional debates, saying conservatives and industry groups have waged a “McCarthyite” campaign, according to e-mails exchanged by the researchers.

The e-mails obtained by E&E show the scientists are considering launching advertising campaigns, widening their public presence, pushing the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) to take a more active role in explaining climate science and creating a nonprofit to serve as a voice for the scientific community.

“We need to develop a relentless rain of science and scientific dialog on the incredible, destructive demagoguery that has invaded the airwaves, the news media and the public forum and has prevented a rational discussion about political solutions to human perturbations on the environment,” wrote Paul Falkowski, a professor at Rutgers University’s Institute of Marine and Coastal Sciences.

Stephen Schneider, a climatologist at Stanford University, wrote that the scientific community has been subjected to “neo-McCarthyism” fueled by Sen. James Inhofe (R-Okla.) and his staff. “I am hopeful that all the forces working for honest debate and quality assessments will decry this McCarthyite regression, and by name point out what this Senator is doing by a continuing smear campaign,” Schneider wrote.

Schneider was among 17 scientists whom Inhofe said may have violated federal law in connection to last year’s hacked e-mail controversy, which has been called “Climategate.”

Though the scientists’ strategy e-mails show a desire by the scientific community to push back against attacks from climate change critics, it is not clear that they have produced a consensus on what steps to take.

The messages, which were distributed mostly in late February through a listserv maintained by the National Academy of Sciences for members in its environmental sciences and ecology division, involved a dozen or so scientists who are academy members. Their e-mails to the list appear to have been forwarded outside the group by an unknown person.

An NAS spokesman said that the discussion was a private conversation between individuals and does not represent the views of the organization as a whole. …

We were asked to comment:

Rick Piltz, director of the watchdog organization Climate Science Watch, expressed concern over the continued public exposure of private discussions among scientists but also said he was proud of the effort the scientists were looking to undertake.

“I think they’re doing exactly what needs to be done; the communications exude intellectual integrity and public concern,” Piltz said. “Clearly, nobody in the political and corporate elites of this country believe that the global warming denial machine is right and the National Academy of Sciences are wrong about climate change.”

The article concludes with:

Some have suggested that scientists need to become more active in politics by running for office or engaging more directly with politicians and voters.

It remains to be seen whether any such prolonged efforts will occur in the wake of Climategate, but the e-mail exchange at NAS and recent comments from a number of scientists do indicate that the community is increasingly starting to believe that its scientific goals are irrevocably linked to the political debate.

“Most of our colleagues don’t seem to grasp that we’re not in a gentlepersons’ debate, we’re in a street fight against well-funded, merciless enemies who play by entirely different rules,” wrote Paul Ehrlich, a biologist at Stanford University.

“Science is getting creamed with no effective response, and our colleagues involved with the IPCC [Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change] are getting threatened with prosecution by the likes of Inhofe. It is not clear whether the NAS can ever be an effective voice, but if we don’t start some action it surely never will be.”

Earlier CSW posts:
March 1: UK Guardian: “US Senate’s top climate sceptic accused of waging ‘McCarthyite witch-hunt’”

February 24: Sen. Inhofe inquisition seeking ways to criminalize and prosecute 17 leading climate scientists

February 23: Scientists ill-equipped to deal with all-out war on climate science community

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UK Guardian: “US Senate’s top climate sceptic accused of waging ‘McCarthyite witch-hunt’”

Posted on Monday, March 01, 2010

The Guardian covered the story of Senator Inhofe’s new prosecutorial approach to climate science. “A spokesman for Inhofe rejected the charges of a witch-hunt,” the British national daily newspaper reported. “But he said a criminal investigation was warranted and that it should not necessarily be limited to the 17 ‘key players’.”

Earlier CSW posts:
February 24: Sen. Inhofe inquisition seeking ways to criminalize and prosecute 17 leading climate scientists

February 23: Scientists ill-equipped to deal with all-out war on climate science community

From the Guardian:

US Senate’s top climate sceptic accused of waging ‘McCarthyite witch-hunt’

James Inhofe calls for criminal investigation of climate scientists as senators prepare proposal that would ditch cap and trade

Suzanne Goldenberg, US environment correspondent

guardian.co.uk, Monday 1 March 2010 17.14 GMT

The US Congress’s most ardent global warming sceptic is being accused of turning the row over climate science into a McCarthyite witch-hunt by calling for a criminal investigation of scientists.

Climate scientists say Senator James Inhofe’s call for a criminal investigation into American as well as British scientists who worked on the UN climate body’s report or had communications with East Anglia’s climate research unit represents an attempt to silence debate on the eve of new proposals for a climate change law. ...

The article quotes several of the scientists being targeted by Inhofe:

“I think this is like a drag net, just to try and catch everyone whose name happens to be on this list. It’s guilt by association and I thought those days were over 50 years ago,” said Michael Oppenheimer, of Princeton University ... “It looks like a McCarthyite tactic: pull in anyone who had anything to do with anyone because they happened to converse with some by email, and threaten them with criminal activity.”

Inhofe is also accused of further fuelling a spike in hate mail and politically motivated freedom of information requests in the three months since the emails of climate scientists were stolen from the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit.

Michael Mann, a scientist at Penn State University who is on Inhofe’s list of 17, said that he had seen a sharp rise in hostile email since November.

“Some of the emails make thinly veiled threats of violence against me and even my family, and law enforcement authorities have been made aware of the matter,” he told the Guardian.

He said the attacks appeared to be a co-ordinated effort. “Some of them look cut-and-paste.”

A university investigation largely cleared Mann of misconduct for his connection to the East Anglia controversy. However, a rightwing group in Pennsylvania are demanding further action.

Gavin Schmidt, a climate scientist at Nasa’s Goddard Institute who is also on the list of 17, said he had seen an increase in freedom of information act requests. “In my previous six years I dealt with one FoIA request. In the last three months, we have had to deal with I think eight,” he said. “These FoIAs are fishing expeditions for potentially embarrassing content but they are not FoIA requests for scientific information.”

He said Inhofe’s call for a criminal investigation created an atmosphere of intimidation. “The idea very clearly is to let it be known that should you be a scientist who speaks out in public then you will be intimidated, you will be harassed, and you will be threatened,” he said. “The idea very clearly is to put a chilling effect on scientists speaking out in public and to tell others to keep their heads down. That kind of intimidation is very reminiscent of other periods in US history where people abused their position.”

Other scientists on Inhofe’s list of 17 admitted they were disturbed by the threat of criminal prosecution.

“I am worried about it, I have to say,” said Raymond Bradley, director of the climate science research centre at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, who is also on the list of 17. “You can understand that this powerful person is using the power of his office to intimidate people and to harass people and you wonder whether you should have legal counsel. It is a very intimidating thing and that is the point.”

The Guardian asked Inhofe’s staff about the list of 17 scientists:

The document, produced by members of Inhofe’s staff, recycles now familiar sceptic arguments about the stolen emails from East Anglia and the mistakes in the IPCC report.

But climate scientists say the report takes the campaign to a new level by threatening criminal prosecution. The report calls for the inspector generals of all US government agencies touching on the environment to investigate the scientists as a first step to possible prosecution.

“The minority staff of the Senate committee on environment and public works believe the scientists involved violated fundamental ethical principles governing taxpayer-funded research and, in some cases, may have violated federal laws,” the report says.

A spokesman for Inhofe rejected the charges of a witch-hunt. But he said a criminal investigation was warranted and that it should not necessarily be limited to the 17 “key players”.

“We are not saying that there are 17 scientists we should be calling criminals,” said Matt Dempsey, a spokesman for Inhofe. “I’m not putting a number on 17.”

He added: “The bottom line though is that there was manipulation of data and it appears that they violated a law.” “In terms of what these email demonstrate, there are possible criminal violations here with FoIA and other laws.”

Rick Piltz, a former official in the US government climate science programme who now runs the Climate Science Watch website, said Inhofe and others were getting in the way of scientific work. “Scientists who are working in federal labs are being subjected to inquisitions coming from Congress,” he said. “There is no question that this is an orchestrated campaign to intimidate scientists.”

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Al Gore New York Times op-ed a lesson for Obama in how to talk about climate change with candor

Posted on Saturday, February 27, 2010

In the Sunday February 28 New York Times former Vice-President Al Gore weighs in with a strong, 1,900-word op-ed column that includes a spirited defense of climate science and the besieged climate science community (something it would be nice to see Obama start doing). Gore also takes aim at the political paralysis that has been allowed to develop in Washington, notwithstanding the large Democratic majority. He argues for not abandoning cap-and-trade legislation—even as it now appears that it may be on the verge of being jettisoned by Senate climate bill negotiators. Will Senate leaders try to sell us a watered-down compromise that is inadequate to the problem supposedly being addressed? And he delivers a richly-deserved thrashing of the hubristic triumphalism of free-market fundamentalists, who have served the interests of corporate power and wealth, promoted fake-populist demagogues, and undermined the country’s ability to govern itself intelligently.  “From the standpoint of governance,” Gore says, what is at stake is our ability to use the rule of law as an instrument of human redemption. After all has been said and so little done, the truth about the climate crisis — inconvenient as ever — must still be faced.”

Post by Rick Piltz

President Obama, here is the way you should be talking about climate change and its context, if you were addressing it with the candor and the sense of urgency you once claimed it called for. And here is the way you would be talking if you wanted to step up and show the climate science community that you have their back.

We Can’t Wish Away Climate Change

New York Times
February 28, 2010

By AL GORE
Op-ed Contributor

Gore begins with:

It would be an enormous relief if the recent attacks on the science of global warming actually indicated that we do not face an unimaginable calamity requiring large-scale, preventive measures to protect human civilization as we know it.

Of course, we would still need to deal with the national security risks of our growing dependence on a global oil market dominated by dwindling reserves in the most unstable region of the world, and the economic risks of sending hundreds of billions of dollars a year overseas in return for that oil. And we would still trail China in the race to develop smart grids, fast trains, solar power, wind, geothermal and other renewable sources of energy — the most important sources of new jobs in the 21st century.

But what a burden would be lifted! We would no longer have to worry that our grandchildren would one day look back on us as a criminal generation that had selfishly and blithely ignored clear warnings that their fate was in our hands. We could instead celebrate the naysayers who had doggedly persisted in proving that every major National Academy of Sciences report on climate change had simply made a huge mistake.

I, for one, genuinely wish that the climate crisis were an illusion. But unfortunately, the reality of the danger we are courting has not been changed by the discovery of at least two mistakes in the thousands of pages of careful scientific work over the last 22 years by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. In fact, the crisis is still growing because we are continuing to dump 90 million tons of global-warming pollution every 24 hours into the atmosphere — as if it were an open sewer. …

After some discussion of the scientific evidence on climate change and the sorry state of Washington policymaking, Gore sets the problem in this larger political context:

The decisive victory of democratic capitalism over communism in the 1990s led to a period of philosophical dominance for market economics worldwide and the illusion of a unipolar world. It also led, in the United States, to a hubristic “bubble” of market fundamentalism that encouraged opponents of regulatory constraints to mount an aggressive effort to shift the internal boundary between the democracy sphere and the market sphere. Over time, markets would most efficiently solve most problems, they argued. Laws and regulations interfering with the operations of the market carried a faint odor of the discredited statist adversary we had just defeated.

This period of market triumphalism coincided with confirmation by scientists that earlier fears about global warming had been grossly understated. But by then, the political context in which this debate took form was tilted heavily toward the views of market fundamentalists, who fought to weaken existing constraints and scoffed at the possibility that global constraints would be needed to halt the dangerous dumping of global-warming pollution into the atmosphere.

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.

Simultaneously, changes in America’s political system — including the replacement of newspapers and magazines by television as the dominant medium of communication — conferred powerful advantages on wealthy advocates of unrestrained markets and weakened advocates of legal and regulatory reforms. 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 “socialist” any proposal to reform exploitive behavior in the marketplace.

From the standpoint of governance, what is at stake is our ability to use the rule of law as an instrument of human redemption. After all has been said and so little done, the truth about the climate crisis — inconvenient as ever — must still be faced. …

These are just excerpts. Read the whole piece.

See Joe Romm’s post at Climate Progress on the Gore column, annotated with useful links to documentation on global climatic disruption.

Earlier CSW posts:
February 24: Sen. Inhofe inquisition seeking ways to criminalize and prosecute 17 leading climate scientists

February 23: Scientists ill-equipped to deal with all-out war on climate science community

January 28 Obama State of the Union evasive and inadequate on climate change and climate science

December 31, 2009: A New Year’s resolution for Obama: Figure out how to talk to the public about climate change

November 22, 2009: Obama 2008: “Time for delay is over. This is a matter of urgency.” US 2009: No climate policy

 

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Sen. Inhofe inquisition seeking ways to criminalize and prosecute 17 leading climate scientists

Posted on Wednesday, February 24, 2010

Senator James Inhofe, ranking Republican on the Environment and Public Works Committee, has gone a step beyond promoting his long-notorious global warming denialist propaganda. He is now using the resources of the Senate committee to seek opportunities to criminalize the actions of 17 leading scientists who have been associated with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change assessment reports. A report released by Inhofe’s staff on February 23 outlines this classic Joe McCarthyite witch-hunt: page after page of incorrect and misleading statements, a list of federal laws that allegedly may make scientists subject to prosecution by the U.S. Justice Department, and a list of names and affiliations of 17 “key players” in the “CRU Controversy” over stolen e-mails and their connections with IPCC reports.

Post by Rick Piltz

See our February 23 post: Scientists ill-equipped to deal with all-out war on climate science community

Inhofe’s committee minority report: ‘Consensus’ Exposed: The CRU Controversy (United States Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works, Minority Staff, February 2010)

Inhofe press release: “Senate EPW Minority Releases Report On CRU Controversy—Shows Scientists Violated Ethics, Reveals Major Disagreements On Climate Science”

From the Executive Summary of Inhofe’s report:

In this report, Minority Staff of the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works examine key documents and emails from the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit (CRU). We have concluded:

•  The emails were written by the world’s top climate scientists, who work at the most prestigious and influential climate research institutions in the world.

•  Many of them were lead authors and coordinating lead authors of UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) reports, meaning that they had been intimately involved in writing and editing the IPCC’s science assessments. They also helped write reports by the United States Global Change Research Program (USGCRP).

•  The CRU controversy and recent revelations about errors in the IPCC’s most recent science assessment cast serious doubt on the validity of EPA’s endangerment finding for greenhouse gases under the Clean Air Act. The IPCC serves as the primary basis for EPA’s endangerment finding for greenhouse gases.

•  Instead of moving forward on greenhouse gas regulation, the Agency should fully address the CRU controversy and the IPCC’s flawed science.

The scientists involved in the CRU controversy violated fundamental ethical principles governing taxpayer-funded research and, in some cases, may have violated federal laws.

In our view, the CRU documents and emails reveal, among other things, unethical and potentially illegal behavior by some of the world’s preeminent climate scientists.  [boldface added]

In a section titled “The CRU-IPCC Connection” (pages 25-26; also see pages 35-37), Inhofe names the targets of his witch-hunt to be investigated for possible referral to the U.S. Justice Department for prosecution. Inhofe’s targets include, in alphabetical order:

Raymond Bradley
Keith Briffa
Timothy Carter
Edward Cook
Malcolm Hughes
Phil Jones
Thomas Karl
Michael Mann
Michael Oppenheimer
Jonathan Overpeck
Benjamin Santer
Gavin Schmidt
Stephen Schneider
Susan Solomon
Peter Stott
Kevin Trenberth
Thomas Wigley

Those of you who know the climate science community will note that the list includes some of the very best—individuals whose contribution to scientific understanding and science communication would be lionized in a society that was seeing things clearly.

In a section titled “Legal and Policy Issues in the CRU Controversy” (pages 29-31), Inhofe’s report says:

These and other issues raise questions about the lawful use of federal funds and potential ethical misconduct. Discussed below are brief descriptions of the statutes and regulations that the Minority Staff believe are implicated in this scandal. In our investigation, we are examining the emails and documents and determining whether any violations of these federal laws and policies occurred.

The rest of the section discusses each of the following:

Freedom of Information Act …

Shelby Amendment …

OSTP Policy Directive …

President Obama’s Transparency and Open Government Policy …

Federal False Statements Act …

The False Claims Act (Criminal)

Obstruction of Justice: Interference with Congressional Proceedings …

Inhofe’s allegations were raised at a February 23 hearing of the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works, on the President’s Proposed EPA Budget for FY 2011. (The link to the hearing page includes opening statements by committee chair Sen. Barbara Boxer and Inhofe, written testimony by EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson, and an archived webcast.)

RealClimate, an invaluable website for clarifying current climate science issues in more-or-less plain English, has a February 14 post (“IPCC errors: facts and spin”) that looks at the various allegations about errors in the IPCC 2007 report, sorts the wheat from the chaff, and asks “what does it all mean, for the IPCC in particular, and for climate science more broadly?”  Of course, Inhofe and whoever writes his material are not into setting the record straight, they are waging political war, and thus can be presumed to be essentially uneducable on science issues.

Inhofe’s witch-hunt against a named list of climate scientists echoes Rep. James Sensenbrenner’s demand that scientists whose names appear in the stolen Climatic Research Unit e-mail file be blacklisted from the IPCC, on which we posted earlier:

CSW post December 9, 2009: Sensenbrenner IPCC witch-hunt: Attempt to blacklist climate scientists must be rejected

Rep. James Sensenbrenner (R-Wisconsin), ranking Republican on the House global warming committee, has sent a letter to Dr. Rajendra Pachauri, Chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, calling for scientists whose names appear in the e-mails stolen from the U.K. Climatic Research Unit to be blacklisted from participating as contributors or reviewers of the forthcoming IPCC Fifth Assessment Report. ... Denialists are throwing up a smokescreen of propaganda in an attempt to legitimize their refusal to come to grips with scientific evidence on global climatic disruption and its implications. This is a power play. ...

We call on the Obama Administration and in particular the President’s science adviser John Holdren to fully support the U.S. climate science community in this matter. ... Seeking an IPCC purge is just the next step. This attack, using guilt-by-association and demagogy, will go as far as it can to delegitimize the entire climate science and assessment enterprise if it is not exposed and thwarted. ...

Additional earlier CSW posts:

January 22: Richard Somerville: A Response to Climate Change Denialism

December 15, 2009:: Setting the record straight on stolen e-mail: Associated Press, FactCheck.org, and other sources

December 15, 2009:: Setting the record straight on stolen e-mail:  Nature, AAAS, AMS, Union of Concerned Scientists

December 8, 2009:: Rep. Sensenbrenner projects “fascism” and “fraud” onto scientists, is rebutted at hearing

December 7, 2009:: Open Letter to Congress from U.S. Scientists on Climate Change and Recently Stolen Emails

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Scientists ill-equipped to deal with all-out war on climate science community

Posted on Tuesday, February 23, 2010

At the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, a panel of eminent scientists agreed they and their colleagues should have responded more quickly and effectively to news about a few errors in the 2007 IPCC climate change assessment report and to allegations about hacked researcher e-mails—but they characterized the public impact of these controversies as far out of proportion to the overwhelming evidence that human activity is changing the Earth’s climate, with profound implications. “The situation is completely out of hand,” ScienceNOW reported Texas A&M climate scientist Gerald North saying at the event. “One guy e-mailed me to say I’m a ‘whore for the global warming crowd.’ Scientists cannot use the same tone and rhetorical style as commentators and bloggers,” he said. For example, how can scientists be expected to respond to this kind of incitement from the bizarre extremist talk show host Glenn Beck on Fox News: “If the IPCC had been done by Japanese scientists, there’s not enough knives on planet Earth for hara-kiri that should have occurred.” This is not a science education problem—it’s much worse than that.

From a February 19 AAAS news report: 

“There has been no change in the scientific community, no change whatsoever,” in the consensus that global average temperatures have been steadily climbing since the mid-20th century, “said Jerry North, a professor of atmospheric sciences at Texas A&M University [and chair of a National Research Council study on the paleoclimate temperature record].

In addition to North, the panel included, among others, Ralph Cicerone, president of the National Academies of Science and chair of the National Research Council. ... Cicerone said the appearance—if not the reality—of a rift within the research community has “corroded ” the climate debate in a way that “may spread over to other kinds of science.”

Scientists need to redouble their efforts to share the implications of climate change with the public, he said, by breaking down the numbers and showing how the often-cited global average temperature rise of 3 degrees Centigrade could actually send temperatures over the land soaring nearly to nearly 9 degrees in the next few decades.

“A lot of what we need to do,” said Cicerone, “is translate basic information into terms the public can understand.

Eli Kintisch reported on the event in the AAAS publication ScienceNOW on February 19 (excerpt):

Scientists Grapple With ‘Completely Out of Hand’ Attacks on Climate Science

… At a time when the biggest headlines on science have been over the flaws or legitimacy of climate science, said Cicerone, recent skirmishes over climate research “have really shaken the confidence of the public in the conduct of science [overall].” …

Climate researchers have taken the biggest hit. They are feeling the brunt of what IPCC author Chris Field has described as a “feeding frenzy” since the November e-mail release. [Dr. Field is currently co-chair of the forthcoming IPCC Working Group 2 Fifth Assessment Report on Impacts, Vulnerability, and Adaptation.] …

Scientists repeatedly admitted how ill-equipped they were for the political fight into which they’ve found themselves flung. “We are very immature in our public communications,” North said. “We need some coaching.” Harvard University policy expert Sheila Jasanoff, whose presentation focused largely on philosophical issues related to science and society, allowed that scientists had made a “tactical error” in not responding explicitly in public to attacks.

The press is responsible for much of the dire straits in which climate scientists now find themselves, the researchers said. For example, commentators have made “careless” assertions that large snowfall on the U.S. Eastern seaboard undermined global warming patterns, says Cicerone. That’s particularly frustrating for scientists who generally believe that a warmer atmosphere would mean a wetter and therefore snowier one. “The reporting on this has been truly abominable,” said ocean scientist James McCarthy [chairman of the AAAS Board and Alexander Agassiz Professor of Biological Oceanography at Harvard University].

But McCarthy said that scientists had made plenty of mistakes on their own. Critics, for example, have uncovered a handful of errors in the 2007 IPCC report, including a false assertion that Himalayan glaciers would melt away by 2035. “The scientific community has been powerless” McCarthy said, to respond to attacks on the fundamental authority of IPCC, seemingly undermined by “two sentences on glaciers.” Small errors in the 2007 report were “careless” and minor he said, but IPCC should have done a full and public examination to describe how they had come about. “The names of the authors, who was on the review, what happened—it all should have been up there, and it wasn’t done. And I think that the institution was hurt as a result,” he said.

We fully agree with Dr. McCarthy on this point and have raised concerns about the IPCC leadership’s deplorable handling of the controversy.

Earlier posts:
February 5: Questions to an IPCC co-chair on ensuring the credibility of IPCC leadership and communications

February 8: Climate Progress interviews Christopher Field and Michael MacCracken on climate change reality

January 21: Worldwide glacier melt a real concern; Himalaya controversy leaves questions about IPCC leadership

January 19: IPCC slips on the ice with statement about Himalayan glaciers

December 7, 2009: Open Letter to Congress from U.S. Scientists on Climate Change and Recently Stolen Emails

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Anyone Can Whistle: The Essential Role of the Whistleblower in American Society

Posted on Saturday, February 20, 2010

On February 17 the Government Accountability Project teamed up with Participant Media and the Paley Center for Media in New York City for a televised, long-format special featuring legendary whistleblowers. The program detailed and analyzed what whistleblowers are, the six stages of whistleblowing they typically experience, and their lack of legal protections. Noted guests for the event included Daniel Ellsberg, former FDA commissioner David Kessler, former NYPD whistleblower Frank Serpico, FBI whistleblower Coleen Rowley, and others. See Details for more information and link to video of the event.

The essential messages of the program were:

•  Whistleblowers are tremendously important to society
•  Legal protections for federal and corporate whistleblowers are grossly inadequate, and must be strengthened
•  The public can change this harsh reality by taking action (see here)

The program was streamed live over the Internet, and broadcast to over 120 college campuses around the country via satellite. See here for video.

Noted guests for the event included:

•  Daniel Ellsberg – The patriarch of modern whistleblowing, his disclosures (the Pentagon Papers) as a Rand Corporation/DoD analyst exposed deceit and concealment involving the government’s handling of the Vietnam War.

•  Kit Foshee – A meat safety whistleblower who exposed serious problems with ammoniated beef product from a major supplier.

•  Mike German – A former undercover FBI agent who infiltrated terrorist groups before blowing the whistle on his field office’s illegal wiretaps on suspects. Now with the ACLU, German discussed current legislative fixes for whistleblower protections.

•  Cathy Harris – A U.S. Customs official who blew the whistle on African-Americans being unfairly targeted as potential drug smugglers.

•  Dr. David Kessler – The former FDA Commissioner who worked with “The Insider” Dr. Jeff Wigand to challenge Big Tobacco.

•  Babak Pasdar – A computer security expert who exposed that a major telecommunication company provided the federal government unfettered access to its customers’ private communications.

•  Coleen Rowley – Noted FBI whistleblower who detailed intelligence breakdowns in relation to the 9/11 attacks, and Time Magazine’s “Person of the Year” in 2002.

•  Frank Serpico – NYPD whistleblower whose story is memorialized by the film that shares his name.

NPR and FOX News’ Juan Williams was the moderator.

The event also served as a kickoff for the Government Accountability Project’s campaign to strengthen corporate whistleblower rights. (see here)

The following is from a post by Louis Clark, president of GAP:

Anyone Can Whistle

by Louis Clark on February 19, 2010

Transparency and accountability are essential for an effective government. Without such, the public finds routine unfettered corruption, threats to public health, and an eventual disenfranchised citizenry. Whistleblowers are catalysts for restoring integrity. With community support they expose wrongdoing, raise awareness of dangerous conditions, pave the way for reform, and restore openness.

There are few aspects of government, commerce, or public well-being that whistleblowers have not impacted positively. They are our eyes and ears preserving public safety, exposing corruption, protecting the environment, saving tax dollars, and challenging abuses of power.
They work for governments, corporations, and other essential institutions.

Many are threatened with firing and the sabotage of their careers; others even have reason to fear violence. Essentially, whistleblowers risk everything. Often they don’t understand how risky it is to blow the whistle and challenge wrongdoing. They are simply doing their job in the most ethical way, which means when they see a problem, they report it. Clearly these are exactly the sort of employees that a well-run organization would cherish.

Whistleblowers provide the spark. They make the initial waves. But without critical allies, they sink beneath the waves they created.
On February 17, a number of national good-government groups are kicking off a campaign to enhance whistleblower protections for federal employees and the employees of federal contractors. Once successful, their next targets will be bills pending in Congress to extend effective legal protections for corporate employees as well.

Each of us has a role to play. People should join the campaign to enact new rules to protect those brave employees whose vital information enlighten, inform and enfranchise all of us.

For starters, we must fix the broken laws that no longer protect federal government employees. Since 2000, only two government whistleblowers have won their legal cases—in contrast to sixteen each month that lose their initial legal hearings. Government contractor employees, who now greatly outnumber federal employees, have essentially no rights at all to raise serious concerns.

The Whistleblower Protection Enhancement Act could change everything. It has passed the House of Representatives twice with majority support from both major parties. This legislation is bottled up in the Senate. It unanimously passed critical Senate committees—only to languish now.

This situation is untenable. People need to write their Senators demanding that they take appropriate action to free the whistleblower protection reform from stalemate and legislative inaction. Senators need to hear from concerned citizens on behalf of courageous civil servants and civic-minded federal employees.

Members of the House of Representatives should be congratulated for the House’s action in passing previous meaningful bills. However they might have voted the first two times the Whistleblower Protection Enhancement Act was before them, they should be urged to support the bill the next time they have a chance to vote on it.

In the meantime, every other day or so, another federal whistleblower loses his/her case for want of adequate legal protection. As a nation we cannot allow this injustice to continue. Our tax dollars, health, safety, environment, and welfare are dependent on employees who work for us. It is not conscionable to expect them to continue to serve us without giving them the legal tools necessary to protect themselves.

This is the time to act.

Climate Science Watch is a sponsored project of the Government Accountability Project.

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Deep Climate investigation of denialist and “skeptic” attack on Hockey Stick temperature record

Posted on Friday, February 12, 2010

The investigative blogger Deep Climate has been working to set the record straight on how an orchestrated campaign by members of Congress, industry-funded global warming denialist groups and PR operatives, and professional “skeptics” has spread misleading information about the paleoclimate temperature record while launching attacks on the integrity of leading members of the science community. Two recent posts at Deep Climate – “Steve McIntyre and Ross McKitrick, part 1: In the beginning,” and “Steve McIntyre and Ross McKitrick, part 2: The story behind the Barton-Whitfield investigation and the Wegman Panel,” should be read in their entirety, along with Richard Littlemore’s post at DeSmogBlog – “Wegman’s Report Highly Politicized – and Fatally Flawed: ‘Independent’ Hockey Stick analysis revealed as Republican set-up,” and Joe Romm’s post of additional supporting material, links, and references at Climate Progress.

Here we take the liberty of re-posting at length some of the relevant text. See the original posts for full sets of embedded links:

Steve McIntyre and Ross McKitrick, part 1: In the beginning
Deep Climate, February 4

The well-timed release of the stolen CRU emails (a.k.a. Climategate) did much to enhance public awareness of self-appointed climate science auditor Steve McIntyre and his long-time co-author and promoter, economist Ross McKitrick. Indeed, the pair has finally received widespread coverage in their native Canada with a spate of mainstream profiles full of fawning admiration from the CanWest newspaper chain, McLean’s magazine and the Toronto Star. That’s on top of new interest from the likes of Associated Press and CNN, along with coverage from the usual biased sources like Fox News and the Wall Street Journal.

Those stories tell the tale of a humble retired mining executive (McIntyre), whose analysis of the “hockey stick” temperature reconstruction got the attention of economist Ross McKitrick, and eventually shook all of climate science to its core.  Of course, the reporters seem blissfully unaware that McIntyre and McKitrick have published exactly one – that’s right, uno – peer-reviewed article in a scientific journal. …

McIntyre’s thin publication record suggests that his prominence has less to do with any compelling scientific analysis, and much more to do with astute promotion. And, indeed, the McIntyre-McKitrick saga turns out to have the usual supporting cast of anti-science propaganda: two notorious right-wing think tanks (the Competitive Enterprise Institute and the George Marshall Institute) and a deft fossil-fuel company funded PR veteran operating behind the scenes (none other than Tom Harris of APCO Worldwide). …

M&M go to Washington

Late in 2003, McIntyre and McKitrick published their first joint paper in the contrarians’ favourite journal, Energy and Environment. “Corrections to the Mann et al (1998) Proxy Data Base and Northern Hemispheric Average Temperature Series” caused a minor sensation in climate skeptic circles. Hard on the heels of the paper came an invitation from the CEI-led Cooler Head Coalition and the George Marshall Institute to participate in the Washington Roundtable on Science and Public Policy series. McIntyre and McKitrick titled their presentation “The IPCC, the ‘Hockey Stick’ Curve, and the Illusion of Experience.”

At the time, both CEI and the Marshall Institute enjoyed funding from ExxonMobil. And CEI head Myron Ebell and Marshall president (and American Petroleum Institute ex-COO) William O’Keefe were both implicated in Bush administration efforts to water down official reports on climate science, as outlined in this one page excerpt from the Government Accountability Project report Redacting the Science of ClimateChange [See full 1.5 MB PDF]. …

In the fall of 2004, McIntyre and McKitrick finally explored alternatives for publication, targetting the AGU publication Geophysical Research Letters.  “Hockey sticks, principal components, and spurious significance” was received by GRL in October 2004, accepted on January 17, 2005, and published February 12, 2005.

As usual for such rare contrarian peer-reviewed scientific publications, the public relations campaign was ready to go. Indeed, the PR campaign preceded actual
publication by a full two weeks! …

Then, in a major coup, the Wall Street Journal featured McIntyre on its front page. Reporter Antonio Regalado portrayed the scientific debate as more or less a standoff and emphasized the doubts concerning the “hockey stick” of (mostly unnamed) scientists.

In a devastating critique for Environmental Science and Technology [“How the Wall Street Journal and Rep. Barton celebrated a global-warming skeptic: The untold story of how a front-page article and powerful U.S. politicians morphed former mining executive Stephen McIntyre into a scientific superstar”], Paul D. Thacker noted:

Decades of research have created a massive body of scientific literature on climate change, and thousands of new studies on the subject appear every year in different science journals. Yet, within weeks of publishing his first peer-reviewed study, McIntyre was profiled on the front page of the Wall Street Journal.

Four days later, the Wall Street Journal editorial page praised Regalado’s reporting and launched an attack on the hockey stick, the IPCC, and the science of global warming.

Like the National Post before it, the Journal touted a narrow critique of dubious significance as a massive reversal of all paleoclimatology, and indeed all of climate science. And, like the National Post, the Journal has yet to reveal the story’s provenance, or the PR operatives behind it. …

As 2005 wore on, McIntyre and McKitrick were clearly rising stars in the contrarian firmament, thanks in no small part to the diverse efforts of their think tank and PR supporters, not to mention complaisant media outlets like the National Post and the Wall Street Journal. McIntyre and McKitrick’s inexcusable and enthusiastic co-operation with APCO’s sordid propaganda efforts, not to mention those of CEI and the Marshall Institute, continued to be ignored.

The time was approaching for ratcheting up the politically motivated attacks on climate science, in the form of an abusive investigation instigated by Republican congressmen Joe Barton and Ed Whitfield. That will be the subject of part 2 …

Steve McIntyre and Ross McKitrick, part 2: The story behind the Barton-Whitfield investigation and the Wegman Panel
Deep Climate, February 8

Perhaps the most disturbing episode in the “hockey stick” controversy was the investigation of climate scientists by the U.S. House Energy and Commerce Committee under Republican representatives Joe Barton and Ed Whitfield, and a subsequent report for that same committee by an “independent” panel led by George Mason University statistics professor Edward Wegman. In light of various renewed “skeptic” allegations of scientific misconduct against Michael Mann and Phil Jones, and my recent revelation of possible plagiarism and other questionable scholarship in the Wegman report, a complete review of the events of 2005-2006 would seem to be in order.

In short, the Energy and Commerce Committee refused the offer of a proper scientific review from the National Academy of Sciences in favour of an investigative process that was ad hoc, biased and unscientific. And the report resulting from that process is tainted with highly questionable scholarship.

I can now fill in important gaps in the timelines of the initial investigation and the Wegman panel. But more importantly my review has led to some startling conclusions:

•  Not only was the original Barton-Whitfield investigation (in the form of intimidating letters) inspired by the allegations of “climate science auditor”  Steve McIntyre, but the defining impetus seems to have been a little known Cooler Heads Coalition-Marshall Institute sponsored presentation by McIntyre and sidekick economist Ross McKitrick in Washington barely a month beforehand.
•  Energy and Commerce Committee Republican staffer Peter Spencer played a key but hitherto undisclosed role in the investigation and the subsequent Wegman panel report, and apparently acted as the main source and gatekeeper of climate science information for the panel.
•  Steve McIntyre was in communication with the Wegman panel, at least concerning technical questions around replication of his work. The full extent of McIntyre’s communications or meetings with Spencer or other staffers, as well as Wegman panelists, is still unknown. However, the record shows there were at least two intriguing opportunities for face-to-face meetings in Washington during the Wegman panel’s mandate.

All this, along with new information about the circumstances of the Wegman panel’s formation and mandate, raises serious doubts about the supposed independence of the Wegman panel. …

Wegman’s Report Highly Politicized—and fatally Flawed
Richard Littlemore at DeSmogBlog, February 8

“Independent” Hockey Stick analysis revealed as Republican set-up

The purportedly independent report that Dr. Edward Wegman prepared in 2006 for the Congressional Committee on Energy and Commerce was actually a partisan set-up, according to information revealed today.

Wegman, who had presented himself as an impartial “referee” between two “teams” debating the quality of the so-called Hockey Stick graph was, in fact, coached throughout his review by Republican staffer Peter Spencer. Wegman and his colleagues also worked closely with one of the teams (and especially with retired mining stock promoter Stephen McIntyre) to try to replicate criticism of the Hockey Stick graph, while at the same time foregoing contact with the actual authors of the seminal climate reconstruction.

The Hockey Stick refers to a graph (by Michael Mann, Raymond Bradley and Malcolm Hughes) that became a defining image of the Third Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). It also became a target for Steve McIntyre and the Guelph University economist Ross McKitrick, who since 2002, at least, has been a paid spokesperson for ExxonMobil-backed think tanks such as the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI) and the Fraser Institute.

According to a detailed analysis by the blogger Deep Climate, McIntyre and McKitrick’s criticism of the Hockey Stick graph was aggressively promoted and disseminated by an echo chamber of think tanks and blogs, all of which had financial or ideological associations with fossil fuel industry funders.

Then, in 2005, (and perhaps through the machinations of CEI climate specialist Myron Ebell), Republican Rep. and Energy and Commerce Committee Chair Joe Barton began calling for an investigation into the graph. But Barton rejected an offer from National Academy of Sciences President Ralph Ciccerone to conduct a formal and independent review in the highly professional manner typical of the nation’s foremost scientific body. Barton chose, instead, to engage a statistician (Wegman) from one of the most conservative institutions in the country (George Mason University) and to task him with setting up a team to dissect Mann’s Hockey Stick.

The result was predictable. Collaborating with McIntyre, Wegman’s team recreated and then endorsed the critical view of Michael Mann’s work. According to earlier revelations from Deep Climate, Wegman also cribbed—arguably plagiarized—work from Raymond Bradley, lifting whole sections of his 1999 textbook, but periodically changing material or inserting information calculated to cast doubt on the reliability of tree-ring data (the source of the MBH climate reconstruction). In the most outrageous example, suspiciously unattributed, Wegman’s report actually suggested that tree rings might be affected positively by automobile pollution. (”... oxides of nitrogen are formed in internal combustion engines that can be deposited as nitrates also contributing to fertilization of plant materials.”)

All this could be dismissed as typical politicking except for two things. First, because this was presented as an independent and impartial review, it is reasonable to ask whether Barton, Wegman, et al, are guilty of misleading Congress, a felony offense.

Second, the same echo chamber that promoted Steve McIntyre’s criticism of the Hockey Stick is now fully engaged accusing scientists of manipulating data to increase global concern about climate change. The manipulation of both data and public opinion are certainly evident in this story. Science has most certainly been politicized. But (thanks to Deep Climate’s careful research) the record shows that the manipulation and politicization has been bought and paid for by the energy industry and executed by a sprawling network of think tanks and blogs - and by leading Republicans and their staffers.

This is, at the very least, fodder for a Congressional investigation as to whether the Energy and Commerce Committee was, indeed, intentionally and perhaps disastrously misled.

“Independent” critique of Hockey Stick revealed as fatally flawed right-wing anti-science set up
Joe Romm at Climate Progress, February 8

Few scientists have been more victimized than Michael Mann, Director of Pennsylvania State University’s Earth System Science Center.  Than again, few scientists have been more vindicated than Michael Mann (see “Penn State inquiry finds no evidence for allegations against Michael Mann” and below).

That’s why I feel compelled to keep doing my small part in helping to set the record straight as often as possible — and to publicize the tremendous work of others doing the same, such as the blogger Deep Climate, who has uncovered previously unknown details of just how some of the most fraudulent charges against Mann and the Hockey Stick graph were trumped up by the anti-science crowd in the first place. …

Yes, a Congressional investigation would be valuable to help set the record straight (see also this DeSmogBlog post [“Plagiarism? Conspiracies? Felonies? Breaking out the Wegman File”]).

Of course, the Hockey Stick graph was itself vindicated years ago in a thorough examination by a panel of the prestigious (and uber-mainstream) National Academy of Sciences (see NAS Report and here).  Indeed, the news story in the journal Nature (subs. req’d) on the NAS panel was headlined:

Academy affirms hockey-stick graph

Even more important than the fact that the original analysis was defensibly correct, is that the conclusions were correct [which could be true even if the analysis had flaws in it].  Is the planet now as hot (or hotter) than it has been in a millenium?  Try two millennia (see “Sorry deniers, hockey stick gets longer, stronger: Earth hotter now than in past 2,000 years,“ which discusses the PNAS study that is the source of the figure above ).  See also “Human-caused Arctic warming overtakes 2,000 years of natural cooling, ’seminal’ study finds,” the source of the figure below).

That’s why climatologist and one-time darling of the contrarians Ken Caldeira said last year, “To talk about global cooling at the end of the hottest decade the planet has experienced in many thousands of years is ridiculous.”

Sadly, the ridiculous is what passes for serious analysis by the anti-science crowd and the media echo chamber — and that means long nights for those in the science blogosphere trying to set the record straight.

Previous CSW posts:
December 23, 2009: Reps. Joe Barton and James Sensenbrenner carried global warming denier message to Copenhagen

October 22, 2009: Climate Cover-Up: New book by the DeSmogBlog team is a take-down of the denial machine

October 14, 2009: Scientists return fire at CEI and Pat Michaels for bogus charges on global temperature data record

 

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World Wildlife Fund statement on the IPCC and WWF’s scientific work

The World Wildlife Fund has issued a statement on the results of the organization’s inquiry into statements about Himalayan glaciers and the climate change threat in the Amazon attributed to WWF in the 2007 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change impacts assessment report. The statement indicates steps WWF will take to ensure that the scientific community and the public can more easily distinguish between WWF’s voluminous peer-reviewed scientific reports and their general communications products, and to ensure their scientific publications continue to meet the highest standards for accuracy, and notes the broader context of the strong scientific basis for understanding climate change.

Read the full Statement from WWF Regarding the IPCC and the Strength of our Science on the WWF Climate Blog.

From the statement, on the recent controversy about citations to WWF publications in the 2007 IPCC assesssment report:

The 2007 IPCC climate change study cited WWF reports as the source for the following claims regarding climate change:

•  The Himalayan glaciers could melt completely by the year 2035
•  Up to 40% of the Amazonian forests could react drastically to even a slight reduction in precipitation

Upon further review, we have determined that the information about the Himalayas was inaccurate and that we erred by including it in one of our reports.  In regards to the Amazon, we have determined that our statements were accurate and fully supported by several published studies.  In both instances, however, WWF fell short in including sufficient citations for the source of the information.

 
Specific details about the role played by WWF as a source for the IPCC report are provided in the full statement.

The statement includes the following, which is a corrective to the rampant snarkiness we’ve been seeing on various “skeptic” blogs, where ignorant denialists have been touting the misguided idea that WWF should be characterized as a non-scientific political organization:

For nearly five decades, WWF has been a leader in conducting robust, peer-reviewed conservation research and analysis.  Today, WWF scientists are working in more than 100 countries around the world, conducting leading edge research that continues to expand our knowledge and understanding of our planet and the species which inhabit it. …

As the world’s leading science-based conservation organization, WWF is widely recognized for its leadership in conducting, analyzing and reporting the latest research around the world.  Many of our scientists are internationally recognized leaders in their fields of expertise.

WWF has scores of scientists working around the world, publishing their research in international peer-reviewed journals, advising governments and other partners, and putting science to work for conservation.  Just within our central Conservation Science Program, based in the U.S., there are 20 practicing scientists, 10 with PhDs, who produce an average of 20 peer-reviewed papers each year in journals such as Science, Nature, PNAS, Bioscience, PLoS Biology, Ecology Letters, Conservation Biology.  On average, our research is cited by other scientists more than 600 times per year.  WWF scientists also sit on editorial boards of several top journals and are trusted as reviewers of papers for Science, Nature and PNAS.

In the broader context:

Both the Himalayan and Amazon references illustrate lapses in the writing and review process and are more a reflection of improper citation of sources than an indication of any fundamental issues with the accuracy of the science.  In the case of the Himalayan glaciers, the essential point is that their mass is decreasing as are most other glaciers around the world. In regards to the Amazon case, the fact is that a very large portion of the Amazonian forest is at risk from the drier conditions that are likely to be more common as climate rapidly changes – and if deforestation continues. 

It is important to keep in mind that our current understanding of climate science is based on decades of research by thousands of scientists and volumes of peer-reviewed studies. These errors, while regrettable, are relatively minor in scope in comparison to the strong scientific basis for our understanding of climate change, which is recognized by virtually every country on the planet.

Earlier CSW posts:
February 5: Questions to an IPCC co-chair on ensuring the credibility of IPCC leadership and communications

January 21: Worldwide glacier melt a real concern; Himalaya controversy leaves questions about IPCC leadership

January 19: IPCC slips on the ice with statement about Himalayan glaciers.

See also the excellent analysis in Yale Forum on Climate Change and the Media: Anatomy of IPCC’s Mistake on Himalayan Glaciers and the year 2035

 

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Why snowstorms freak out Washington, D.C.: How snow-plowing policy is made in the nation’s capital

Posted on Wednesday, February 10, 2010

“Obama announces that he wants to get the snow plowed, but that he wants bipartisan consensus and compromise instead of unilateral action, and that instead of him pushing a particular snow-plowing policy, he wants Congress to work out the details. The Republicans, seeing that Obama is for cleaning up the snow, decide that they must be against it. They negotiate the plan down to clearing half the snow and doing it very slowly. Then they still refuse to support it. Joe Lieberman expresses his intention to join Republicans in filibustering the plan if it comes to that. Eventually, the Republicans and Senate Democrats have whittled it down to a non-binding resolution expressing support for the idea of ‘somebody’ plowing the snow at some point in the future, and the Democrats have thrown in some tax cuts to get 60 votes. It finally passes, still getting zero Republican votes (other than Olympia Snowe, since it reminds her of her name). Republicans attribute this to Democrats’ hyper-partisanship and unwillingness to negotiate. At this point, it is July.”  (h/t to Layne Longfellow and a poster on a social networking site)

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Commerce Department proposes NOAA Climate Service

Posted on Tuesday, February 09, 2010

On February 8, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) unveiled a major new proposal for the establishment of a NOAA Climate Service, a new office tasked with serving the nation’s increasing climate information needs. We support this initiative as a significant step in the right direction, while noting that it appears to leave aside, for now, the question of how the Climate Service office will ultimately coordinate with the full suite of federal activities relevant to climate change adaptation and preparedness planning.

Post by Alexa Jay, Climate Science Watch

According to NOAA’s website, the Climate Service will “provide a single, reliable and authoritative source for climate data, information and decision-support services to help individuals, businesses, communities and governments make smart choices in anticipation of a climate changed future.”

Under the current proposal, the new Climate Service office will reorganize NOAA’s existing climate assets to create a single, visible and accessible point of entry for users, bringing together “research labs, climate observing systems, modeling facilities, integrated monitoring systems and extensive on the ground service delivery infrastructure.”

More information about the proposed program organization can be found here, and more general questions are addressed here.

Tom Karl, director of NOAA’s National Climatic Data Center and NOAA’s lead on climate services for more than a year, will serve as Acting Director of the NOAA Climate Service. New positions for six NOAA Regional Climate Services Directors will also be announced, providing “regional leadership for integrating user engagement and on-the-ground service delivery within the Climate Service.”

Early priorities for the new office are as follows:

•  The NOAA Climate Service will work to develop a sustained capacity to provide regional and sectoral climate vulnerability and risk assessments to more effectively meet the requirements of the US Global Change Research Act (national assessment required every 4 years).
•  The NOAA Climate Service will have a more clearly established regional footprint to coordinate and provide improved regional climate services.
•  The NOAA Climate Service will be able to better align climate observing and modeling assets with strategic needs.

According to ClimateWire (by subscription only), Administration officials said they intend to have the Climate Service up and running by October 1. Its establishment does not require formal legislation or an increase in funding, but will involve negotiations with Congress, employee groups, and the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), in order to reallocate funds within NOAA to the new climate service office.

NOAA notes that it has worked closely with its Federal partners and the Administration in developing the Climate Service proposal, including the Office of Science and Technology Policy, OMB, and the Council on Environmental Quality, and it is in keeping with the intent of the climate services section in the Waxman-Markey bill and the NOAA climate services authorization language in the Kerry-Boxer bill.

The NOAA website states: “NOAA will continue to work with OSTP who is leading an inter-agency effort to establish an integrated climate service enterprise that is inclusive of all relevant Federal climate capabilities.” NOAA currently participates in a number of inter-agency efforts including co-chairing with CEQ and OSTP the interagency Adaptation Task Force, and leading several assessment reports as part of the US Global Change Research Program. 

However, the current proposal appears to leave aside the question of how the Climate Service office will ultimately coordinate with the full suite of federal activities relevant to climate change adaptation and preparedness planning. Climate Science Watch has consistently advocated for the creation of a federal capacity to provide operational support for state and local adaptation, supported by a comprehensive, proactive national planning and preparedness strategy for attempting to limit the socioeconomic and environmental impacts of climate change. A Climate Service office should play a key role in this support capacity, which will be a vehicle for applying USGCRP and Climate Service information in operational contexts, and as such must articulate with a national adaptation strategy and related federal programs. Climate Science Watch will continue to monitor and comment on the evolution of this framework as the inter-agency planning process progresses.

See previous post:
Climate Science Watch recommendations for the Senate bill on preparedness, research, climate services

Climate Services Portal

NOAA also unveiled the Climate Services Portal, intended to become the “‘go-to’ website for NOAA’s climate data, products, and services for all users.” The Portal will be a “central component of NOAA’s commitment to enhancing the access to and extensibility of climate data and services, timely articles and information, education resources, and tools for engagement and decision-making.”

According to the site, the Portal was created in response to “emerging needs for improved decision-making capabilities across all sectors of society facing impacts from climate variability and change, and the importance of leveraging climate data and services to support research and public education.”

The site is currently in a prototype phase and will gradually transition to full operational capacity over the next year. NOAA will “actively gather user feedback through focus groups, usability studies, and informal communications,” and over the next several years, will “expand the NCS Portal’s scope and functionality in a user-driven manner to greatly enhance the accessibility and usefulness of NOAA’s climate resources.”

The Portal currently includes ClimateWatch magazine, with a series of online science articles examining different aspects of climate change. (What can we say? ‘Climate Science Watch’ can only approve of ‘ClimateWatch’ as the title NOAA has chosen for a science magazine.)

Short-Term Cooling on a Warming Planet

One article, “Short-Term Cooling on a Warming Planet” by Michon Scott, is notable in that it specifically addresses the deliberate use of a cherry-picked temperature data trend from 1998 to 2008 by climate change “skeptics” to conclude that global warming has stopped. 

David Easterling of NOAA is quoted in the article explaining that, because 1998 was a very strong El Niño year and arguably the warmest year on record (or very close to 2005), a straight line from 1998 to 2008 does indicate that 2008 was cooler. However, temperature data must be examined on a longer timescale to draw meaningful conclusions about climatic trends. As Easterling says, “the bottom line is that current temperatures are way above the long-term average.” Making statements about global warming based on a ten-year interval is inaccurate at best, and deliberately misleading at worst. 

This type of straightforward explanation from a highly credible source is crucial in an atmosphere where scientific data can be plausibly misrepresented in a sound bite. NOAA has a wealth of resources to offer to the public, and the creation of the Climate Services Portal is an important step.

The Portal also features an Education section with teaching resources, professional development, and multimedia tools. A Data and Services section focuses on both larger climatic trends and the information needs of specific sectors of society, and an Understanding Climate section provides climate assessment reports and information about NOAA public engagement activities.

Previous post:
New Hansen analysis and global temperature data counter disinformers who say the planet is cooling

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