Science supports climate change claims - a letter from Michael Mann
by Michael Mann
Climate change is real. Those who assert otherwise do not have the science on their side.
This nation’s highest scientific body, the National Academy of Sciences, is firmly on record in concluding that the scientific case for human-caused climate change is clear. The evidence includes independent assessments of thermometer records documenting the degree and extent of modern warming. It includes the unprecedented melting of glaciers and, as documented in more recent years, the diminution of the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheet. As a consequence of melting ice and warming oceans, the global sea level is rising and at an accelerating rate. Continental drought is becoming more pronounced in many extratropical regions, such as the deserts of the U.S. Southwest, and there is an increase in the destructive potential of Atlantic hurricanes that influence the east and Gulf coasts. Theoretical climate models predict these things to happen, but only when human influences—
in particular, increasing greenhouse gas concentrations due to fossil fuel burning—are included.
Those same models project far more profound and potentially damaging impacts of climate change if action is not taken to stabilize greenhouse gas levels this next decade. The Union of Concerned Scientists with scientific input from a large number of Penn State researchers, recently published an extensive report documenting the threat that future climate change could pose specifically to Pennsylvania, where both my parents grew up and where I am raising my daughter.
And what of the so-called "climate change deniers?". Sadly, some who are opposed to taking
action to combat the potential threat have engaged in a smear campaign that appears intended to distract the public and policymakers from the reality of the threat as policymakers begin to consider taking more serious action to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
As documented in numerous news reports over the past two months, climate change deniers have xploited and misrepresented thousands of personal emails between scientists stolen from a university computer server in the UK. It is true that there are some things that were said or requested in e-mails I received from colleagues that I cannot condone. And there are some things that I myself said in these private correspondence that I would have stated differently—in clearer and more formal language—had I known that e-mails of my own would be released, through a criminal act of theft, to the world.
But the bottom line is this: What is evident in these emails is healthy discourse and debate, Scientists arguing what the data and models show, challenging each other on their findings and interpretations. What is clearly not in evidence is the sort of collusion or overstating of the science among scientists that those leading the attacks would like you to believe exists.
There have been suggestions made that the e-mails reveal an effort to “suppress dissent,” blocking contrarian views from being expressed in the “peer reviewed” scientific literature, and that the peer review process is supposedly biased against climate change deniers. The only bias that exists, however, is for backing up claims with hard evidence and valid reasoning. That is why some climate “skeptics” such as Richard Lindzen of MIT or John Christy of the University of Alabama—who are widely regarded as credible and whose work contributes meaningfully to the scientific discourse—have no problem publishing their work in mainstream scientific journals.
I myself have published scientific work that has been considered by some as representing a skeptical point of view on matters relating to climate change (for example, my work demonstrating the importance of natural oscillations of the climate on multidecadal timescales). Skepticism in the truest scientific sense of the word is good and is indeed essential to science. Informed skepticism should not be confused, however, with mere contrarianism that fails to meet even the most basic standards of scientific inquiry.
Since my work on the "Hockey Stick", indicating that recent warming is unusual in the context of at least the past millennium— was featured in the 2001 summary report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), it has been a favorite object of attack by climate change deniers. The National Academy of Sciences reviewed that work in 2006. Their findings were summarized by the Washington Post as “Study Confirms Past Few Decades Warmest on Record,” by the New York Times as “Science Panel Backs Study on Warming Climate” and by the BBC as “Backing for Hockey Stick Graph.”
As for claims that there was any impropriety in our work, members of the NAS panel dismissed such accusations out of hand, stating that they “saw nothing that spoke...of any manipulation” and that the study was “an honest attempt to construct a data analysis procedure.”
But the evidence for human-caused climate change hardly is based just on my work or the work of any small subset of scientists. Instead, support for the existence of climate change comes from thousands of scientists and diverse lines of evidence as noted above. It rests on basic principles of physics and chemistry governing the behavior of so-called “greenhouse gases” and the favorable comparisons of thus far observed changes with what theoretical climate models predict in response to increasing greenhouse gas concentrations.
In this situation, the record truly does speak for itself.
Michael Mann is a professor in the
Departments of Meteorology and
Geosciences and the Earth &
Environmental Sciences Institute at Penn
State. He also directs the Penn State Earth
System Science Center
Michael Mann
I would like to thank Professor Mann for responding to the current imbroglio concerning the emails. After reading his article, I am more skeptical. To rid me of my skepticism, Professor Mann, would you list your academic funding and private investments for the last fifteen years. CUI BONO?
And I'm sure it's just a coincidence...
... that you parrot canned "denial" rhetoric.
Cmon, you can do better than that. Lets hear something substantive. Swing for the fences. Go for something you cook yourself, not this goop right out of rupert murdochs can.
As if.
Sadly, I very much doubt Mann even knows this is published here. Somebody should tell him.
I wonder if this is why them scientists wanted to avoid the FOI
One of the questions I had when first going thru the stolen emails and following some of the conversations, was this.
Why did those climate scientists want to resist the UK version of freedom of information act requests to hand over their data?
Now, living in a college town, I happen to have seen first hand the bitter rivalries and intense academic politics that are part and parcel of the researchers life. If you think federal or local politics can be nasty, they are tame compared to the stuff one hears about among profs and scientists. It's like science money gang cage match out there, multiple reasearchers enter, only a few survive. And it's publish or perish, publish or perish.
Today I was reading something, actually a url in a tweet over at onward state, that struck me as being relevant to this question of why someone like Mike Mann would be involved in a conversation about resisting a FOI request and deleting emails.
(Note - so far there has been NO SIGN WHATSOEVER that Mann was involved in the deletion of data or emails - it was another Scottish scientist who was suggesting it, and every investigation so far both internal and external has said repeatedly (as far as I can determine, if you know f examples to the contrary please post them), "There was no indication that Professor Mann has done anything, other then being involved in email exchanges in which FOI requests for data were being discussed.".)
This is the link from the tweet, for an NYU media workshop called Beyond Journals, about scientific journals specifically.
Many pages down there is a section that struck me as very relevant:
I say yes to most media requests because I think it’s part of my social responsibility as a scientist to communicate my science to the public. My research is paid for by tax dollars.
So, here's the gist. The big name journals, the career makers and breakers, DON'T WANT OLD SCIENCE, and they DONT WANT SCIENCE THAT HAS ALREADY BEEN IN THE MEDIA.
So, heres a model to consider when it comes to answering the question of resisiting FOI acts and deleting data and emaisl before some blogger can take it from them.
It would ruin the publication value of the data.
"The Nature Trick to hide the decline" and the GOP claims
While reading Newsweeks review of "The Lomberg Deception", a new book that purports to find a pervasive pattern of "errors" and intentional misquoting of sources in a popular book among opponents of the climate-change model, I came across an analysis of the East Anglia emails that I thought was worth reposting.
But first a snippet from the review I linked above:
Friel's previous books (The Record of the Paper: How The New York Times Misreports U.S. Foreign Policy and Israel-Palestine on Record) were works of media criticism, and that's what he thought this one would be. He had planned to examine coverage of global warming in the Times and The Wall Street Journal, he told me, when he came upon Cool It. In this and his other writing, Lomborg accepts that greenhouse gases from the burning of coal, oil, or natural gas trap heat in the atmosphere and thus alter climate. But he doesn't think it will be a disaster, which means we shouldn't do anything too difficult or expensive to avert it. That has made him hugely influential in providing cover to politicians, climate-change deniers, and corporations that don't want any part of controls on greenhouse emissions. Lomborg made that stance intellectually respectable in many circles, in no small part because his books seem so well sourced, something a number of glowing reviews noted. The Guardian named him "one of the 50 people who could save the planet" and Foreign Policy listed him as 14th on its list of "the top 100 public intellectuals."
But when Friel began checking Lomborg's sources, "I found problems," he says. "As an experiment, I looked up one of his footnotes, found that it didn't support what he said, and then did another, and kept going, finding the same pattern." He therefore took on the Augean stables undertaking of checking every one of the hundreds of citations in Cool It. Friel's conclusion, as per his book's title, is that Lomborg is "a performance artist disguised as an academic."
Now, to get to the material that is relevant to Mike Mann's "Nature Trick to hide the decline".
Here is the source, from a UK newspaper, which is appropriate because the emails were hacked from a UK server:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2010/feb/09/climategate-bogus-sceptics-lies
If those journalists had read even a few words beyond the soundbites, they would have realised that they were often being fed lies. Here are a few examples.
The most quoted soundbite in the affair comes from an email from Prof Phil Jones, director of the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia, to Prof Mike Mann of the University of Virginia in 1999, in which he discussed using "Mike's Nature trick" to "hide the decline". The phrase has been widely spun as an effort to prevent the truth getting out that global temperatures had stopped rising.
The Alaska governor Sarah Palin, in the Washington Post on 9 December, attacked the emailers as a "highly politicised scientific circle" who "manipulated data to 'hide the decline' in global temperatures". She was joined by the Republican senator James Inhofe of Oklahoma – who has for years used his chairmanship of the Environment and Public Works Committee to campaign against climate scientists and to dismiss anthropogenic global warming as "the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people". During the Copenhagen climate conference, which he attended on a Senate delegation, he referred to Jones's "hide the decline" quote and said: "Of course, he means hide the decline in temperatures."
This is nonsense. Given the year the email was written, 1999, it cannot be anything of the sort. At that time there was no suggestion of a decline in temperatures. The previous year was the warmest on record. The full email from Jones says: "I've just completed Mike's Nature trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years (ie from 1981 onwards) and from 1961 for Keith [Briffa]'s, to hide the decline."The decline being referred to was an apparent decline in temperatures shown in analysis of tree rings, which have historically correlated well with changes in temperature. That relationship has broken down in the past half century. The reasons are still debated.
The "trick" was a graphic device used by Mann in a 1998 paper in Nature to merge tree ring data from earlier times with thermometer data for recent decades. He explained it in the paper. Jones was repeating it in another paper. "This is a trick only in the sense of being a good way to deal with a vexing problem," Mann told the Guardian. Clearly, this problem with modern tree data raises questions about older data – at least until the reason for the divergence is nailed down. But it is not clandestine data manipulation, or, as claimed by Palin and Inhofe, a trick to hide global cooling. That charge is a lie.
While he was in Copenhagen, Inhofe made a link between the "trick" to "hide the decline" and the second most popular soundbite. He said that "of course [Jones] meant hide the decline in temperatures, which caused another scientist, Kevin Trenberth of the National Centre for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado, to write: 'The fact is we can't account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can't.'"
The link is bogus. The two emails were 10 years apart. Unlike Jones, Trenberth's remark from October 2009 was indeed about the slackening of the warming trend that some like to interpret as cooling. That much is agreed. But Inhofe and other sceptics latched on to Trenberth's "travesty" phrase as a revelation that scientists were trying to keep cooling secret because it undermined their arguments about global warming.
Again this is demonstrably false. Nothing was hidden. For months, Trenberth had been discussing publicly his concerns about the inability of scientists to pin down the precise reason for the "absence of warming" since 1998. He had argued in the journal Current Opinion in Environmental Stability in early 2009 that "it is not a sufficient explanation to say that a cool year [he had 2008 in mind] is due to natural variability (pdf)". Such explanations "do not provide the physical mechanisms involved". This was the "travesty" he was referring to in his email. He wanted scientists to do better.He said the best way to improve the explanation and make it more specific was to make better measurements of the planet's energy budget. This would allow scientists to distinguish between any changes in the greenhouse effect, which would result in more or less heat overall in the atmosphere and oceans, and short-term natural cycles of variability, which merely redistribute heat. He was debating this with the former head of the Climatic Research Unit Tom Wigley, who took a different view. But their genuine scientific discussion has, since the publication of the emails online, been hijacked by ignorant or malicious invective.
Several other soundbites were subject to perverse or dishonest interpretations by commentators. Patrick Michaels, the climatologist and polemicist for the rightwing Cato Institute, published a long op-ed piece in the DC Examiner, slamming Mann for an email quote about keeping sceptics' papers out of the IPCC report "even if we have to redefine what the peer-reviewed literature is".
Michaels is an old foe of Mann's, but this genuinely damaging statement was actually made by Jones.
"Michael E. Mann: In denial of warming, lies were repeated"
Click to the link and read the whole letter. Much of it is focused on the legitimacy of a specific paper which Mike Mann says is a bad (or phony?) paper funded by oil companies, so bad that half the editorial board of the journal publishing it resigned rather than have their names associated with it.
Here's a snippet from the letter:
Havanac repeated false allegations (based on illegally hacked e-mails) of supposed scientific misconduct by scientists at the Climatic Research Unit of the University of East Anglia (for example, the supposed destruction of e-mails) that have now been rejected as false by three separate investigations in the U.K. A similar investigation by my university has exonerated me of any of the wrongdoing alleged by climate-change deniers like Havanac. Unfortunately, these exonerations cannot stop individuals like Havanac from repeating the false allegations. Only the possession of decency can do that.
Havanac parroted the false claim that I sought to "undermine" a journal that "contradicted views held by ... global-warming alarmists." His claim was based on a thorough misrepresentation of a single example: a deeply flawed paper published in 2003 by the journal Climate Research. That paper, by Willie Soon and Sallie Baliunas, claimed that recent warming is not unusual.
I did in fact have concerns about the paper and the process that led to its publication. As the Wall Street Journal reported ("Global warming skeptics are facing storm clouds," July 31, 2003), this fossil-fuel-industry-funded study was heavily criticized by a large number of other scientists. The editor-in-chief of Climate Research, Hans Von Storch, found that the paper "was flawed" and "shouldn't have been published."
http://www.startribune.com/opinion/commentary/99588169.html?elr=KArksc8P...