Michael E. Mann: In denial of warming, lies were repeated

Here's the context surrounding a flawed 2003 research paper

By MICHAEL E. MANN
StarTribune
July 30

The author is a professor of meteorology at Penn State University and is director of the Penn State Earth System Science Center.

In "Warming alarmists can't stand the heat" (July 26), the Star Tribune allowed Peter J. Havanac to do a grave disservice to its readers by making false statements about me and other climate scientists. 

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."

Original here. Interestingly enough, the overwhelming number of climate scientists are of one mind: They know that human-caused greenhouse gasses are warming the earth's atmosphere. Meteorologists, on the other hand, are not quite sure, with many, like Peter Havanac, allying themselves with the so-called climate change denier group, and others, like Mann, siding with the climate scientists.

Those climate scientists and meteorologists who understand the science of the greenhouse gas effect vary in their opinion of how serious that effect is. Some, like Richard Lindzen of MIT, a well-known so-called "denier", argues that the atmosphere is self-adjusting, and that all the efforts to limit greenhouse gas emissions will have little or no effect at a great cost to the world economy.

Others, like James Hansen of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, says that even a small increase in greenhouse gasses could tip the delicate weather balance through a falling domino effect that will result in disastrous worldwide climate changes unless humankind takes immediate steps to limit the release of those gasses.

For the record, we at Vox Verax, having studied the science as well as both sides of the issue, are more in the Hansen camp and feel that we need to act as if Hansen could be entirely correct. If we don't and Hansen is correct, the planet will look a lot different in the future than it does today ... and not for the better.