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May 02, 2006
| Key Climate Skeptic Paper Proved Wrong | Environment |
In October 2004, Science published a paper that was seized on by global warming skeptics, including members of Congress who based hearings on it. The indispensable Real Climate, a global warming site run by working climate scientists, tells us that a correction published last week in Science shows that the original paper was just flat wrong. Excerpt:
Today, Science published an important comment pointing out that there were serious errors in a climate research article that it published in October 2004. The article concerned (Von Storch et al. 2004) was no ordinary paper: it has gone through a most unusual career. Not only did it make many newspaper headlines...when it first appeared, it also was raised in the US Senate as a reason for the US not to join the global climate protection efforts. It furthermore formed a part of the basis for the highly controversial enquiry by a Congressional committee into the work of scientists, which elicited sharp protests last year by the AAAS, the National Academy, the EGU and other organisations. It now turns out that the main results of the paper were simply wrong. [...]Error made, error corrected, and all is well? Unfortunately not. A number of questions remain, which need to be resolved before the climate science community can put this affair to rest.
The first is: why did it take so long to correct this error, and why did the authors of the original paper not correct it themselves? The error is reasonably easy to spot, even for non-specialists. And it was in fact spotted very soon after publication. In January 2005, a comment was submitted to Science which correctly pointed out that Von Storch et al. had calibrated with detrended data and had therefore not tested the Mann et al. method. As such comments are routinely passed to the original authors for a response, Von Storch et al. must have become aware of their mistake at this point at the latest. However, the comment was rejected by Science in May 2005.
In a paper dated July 2005, Zorita and Von Storch admit their error in passing. [...] It is thus clear that they knew that their central claim of the Science paper, namely that they had tested the Mann et al. method, was false. But rather than publishing a correction in Science, they wrote the above in a non-ISI journal called "Memorie della Societa Astronomica Italiana" that not many climatologists would read.
An unambiguous correction in Science, where the original paper appeared, would not only have been good scientific practice. It would have been particularly important given the large public and political impact of their paper. It would have been a matter of courtesy towards their colleagues Mike Mann, Raymond Bradley and Malcolm Hughes, who had suffered a major challenge to their scientific reputations as well as having to invest a large amount of time to deal with the Congressional enquiry mentioned above. And it would have been especially pertinent given the unusually vitriolic media statements made previously: in an interview with a leading German news magazine, Von Storch had denounced the work of Mann, Bradley and Hughes as "nonsense" ("Quatsch"). And in a commentary written for the March 2005 German edition of "Technology Review", Von Storch accused the journal Nature for putting their sales interests above peer review when publishing the Mann et al. 1998 paper. He also called the IPCC "stupid" and "irresponsible" for highlighting the results of Mann et al. in their 2001 report. [...]
Unfortunately, while the dispute has been used in the public arena to score political points, e.g. to discredit the IPCC process and to question all of the relevant climate science, the significance of this dispute for the bigger picture has been wildly blown out of proportion...We should not lose sight of the fact that the debate here is about a few tenths of a degree — a much smaller change than is projected for the next century. It is also important to remember one principal point: Conclusions on whether recent warmth is likely to have been unprecedented in the past millennium, or the recent extent of human-caused warming, are based on the accumulation of evidence from many different analyses and are rarely impacted by a technical dispute about any one paper such as this. [Emphasis added]
Among the many sins of the current administration is its deliberate campaign to politicize science. I have no idea if that politicization had any bearing on this case, but there is no question that it has muddied the waters on a number of scientific questions, global warming most prominently.
With so much riding on the outcome in this critical time, scientific enquiry needs to remain true to the scientific method and the scientific culture of free and open debate. There is just too much at stake. If humanity fails to act, there will be a special circle of Hell reserved for those who treated science as an exercise in propaganda.
Posted by Jonathan at May 2, 2006 09:06 PM
