Climate Change Squabbles

Climate change squabbles

For those who cannot get enough of climate change debates, here are a couple of skirmishes. An editorial in the July 14 Wall St. Journal cites a report soon to be released by the House Energy and Commerce Committee in which three statisticians critique the work of Michael Mann regarding the climate record of the past 2,000 years. Mann is famous for the “hockey stick” graph that indicates that after a long period of relative stability the climate has been warming rapidly in recent years. This report finds statistical errors in Mann’s work and further concludes that climate researchers are a close-knit social network who are not sufficiently rigorous in criticizing one another’s work. The report could be accurate in its specific observations, but the Journal is wrong in concluding that this has any meaning for the larger debate about climate science.

A more thorough discussion of Mann’s work can be found in a new National Research Council report: Surface Temperature Reconstructions for the Last 2,000 Years (http://www.nap.edu/catalog/11676.html).

For more climate change feuding, check out Roger Pielke’s blog about an upcoming Discovery Channel program about global warming:
http://climatesci.atmos.colostate.edu/2006/07/07/nbcdiscovery-channel-show/
He makes a good case for including a little more rigor and range of scientific opinion in the show.

Pielke is an atmospheric scientist at Colorado State University who maintains a lively science policy blog at http://sciencepolicy.colorado.edu/prometheus/