Soon and Baliunas controversy

The United States Reagan administration, worried about political influence of scientists, successfully lobbied for the 1988 formation of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change to provide reports subject to detailed approval by government delegates.

[2][3] The IPCC First Assessment Report included a "schematic diagram" of global temperature variations over the last thousand years[4] which has been traced to a graph based loosely on Hubert Lamb's 1965 paper.

[7] Efforts to reduce CO2 emissions were resisted by industrial interests, and political pressures increased as the international Kyoto Protocol was opposed by lobbyists such as the American Petroleum Institute who sought climatologists to dissent and undermine its scientific credibility.

[8] In 1998, Mann, Bradley and Hughes published a multiproxy study (MBH98) which used a new statistical approach to find patterns of climate change in both time and global distribution, over the past six centuries[9] In 1999 they extended their approach to 1,000 years in a study (MBH99) summarised in a graph which showed relatively little change until a sharp rise in the 20th century, earning it the nickname of the hockey stick graph.

[10] After the publicity the MBH99 study had been given by the IPCC Third Assessment Report (TAR), the "hockey stick controversy" developed in which the graph was targeted by those opposing ratification of the Kyoto Protocol on global warming,[11] including Willie Soon and Sallie Baliunas.

[12] Both were astrophysicists at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics: Soon had for a long time said that climate change was primarily due to solar variation, while Baliunas had previously been noted for disputing that man-made chemicals (halocarbon refrigerants such as CFCs) were causing ozone depletion.

[14][16] The article reviewed 240 previously published papers and tried to find evidence for temperature anomalies in the last thousand years such as the Medieval warm period (MWP) and the Little Ice Age (LIA).

Their abstract concluded that "Across the world, many records reveal that the 20th century is probably not the warmest or a uniquely extreme climatic period of the last millennium".

The paper acknowledged funding support from the American Petroleum Institute, the Air Force Office of Scientific Research and NASA, while stating that the views were those of the authors and were independent of the sponsoring agencies.

[21] Initially, the scientists whose work was being disputed by Soon and Baliunas felt it was one of a series of sceptical papers that, in Mann's words, "couldn't get published in a reputable journal".

At the time the second Soon et al. paper was publicised, Mann emailed Fred Pearce to say that it "was absurd, almost laughable (if it wasn't, as is transparently evident, being used as a policy–and politics–driven publicity stunt to support the dubious positions on climate change of some prominent American politicians)", and added that the paper made no attempt to find if the past warm temperatures it reported were contemporaneous or merely one-off scattered events.

The administration's Council on Environmental Quality chief of staff Philip Cooney deleted all references to surface temperature reconstructions showing world temperatures rising over the last 1,000 years, and on 21 April 2003 sent a memo to Kevin O'Donovan in the Office of the Vice President stating "The recent paper of Soon-Baliunas contradicts a dogmatic view held by many in the climate science community that the past century was the warmest in the past millennium and signals human induced "global warming".

... With both the National Academy and IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) holding that the 20th Century is the warmest of the past thousand years (see below), this recent study begins to provide a counterbalance on the point to those two authorities.

Tim Barnett of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography commented that "the fact that [the paper] has received any attention at all is a result, again in my view, of its utility to those groups who want the global warming issue to just go away".

Peter Stott, a climatologist at the Hadley Centre for Climate Prediction and Research, said "Their analysis doesn't consider whether the warm/cold periods occurred at the same time".

[21][27] The media requested opinions from climate scientists and paleoclimatologists familiar with the issues underlying the Soon and Baliunas papers, and to help with information Mann and Michael Oppenheimer drafted and circulated privately a memorandum providing detailed guidance on the topic.

They stated "Nothing in the paper undermines in any way the conclusion of earlier studies that the average temperature of the late twentieth century in the Northern Hemisphere was anomalous against the background of the past millennium".

[21][28] The memorandum developed into a more general position paper jointly authored by 13 climate scientists, which was published on 8 July 2003 in the journal Eos as an article "On Past Temperatures and Anomalous Late-20th Century Warmth".

She and fellow editor Hans von Storch knew of three earlier papers edited by de Freitas where concerns had been raised about the review process.

He cited a study by the Center for Energy and Economic Development and the Soon and Baliunas paper in supporting his conclusion: "With all of the hysteria, all of the fear, all of the phony science, could it be that man-made global warming is the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people?

Three scientists were invited, Mann giving testimony supporting the consensus position, opposed by long term global warming deniers Willie Soon and David Legates.

"[38] In a Climate Research editorial pre-published on 5 August 2003, its publisher Otto Kinne expressed regrets about the resignations of von Storch, Goodess, and a third editor, Mitsuru Ando.

Kinne described the main conclusions of the Soon and Baliunas paper; that the late 20th century was probably not the warmest period nor uniquely extreme in the last 2,000 years, and most of the proxy records had warmer anomalies at earlier times.

"[40] On 19 August 2003, Tom Wigley wrote to a colleague that "I have had papers that I refereed (and soundly rejected), under De Freitas’s editorship, appear later in the journal — without me seeing any response from the authors.

Framework Convention on Climate Change, or legislation before the U.S. Congress that would affect greenhouse gas emissions", he responded "I have not knowingly been hired by, nor employed by, nor received grants from any such organizations described in this question.

They have been linked to Western coal interests, and the ExxonMobil Foundation provided a grant of $15,000 to their Center for the Study of Carbon Dioxide and Global Change in 2000.

[51] In an 18 December 2009 column in The Wall Street Journal, Pat Michaels alleged that pressure from Jones and Mann was responsible for the resignations at Climate Research.

[54] In petitions to the United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), the Coalition for Responsible Regulation, the Ohio Coal Association, Peabody Energy, the Southeastern Legal Foundation, and the State of Texas argued that emails from March and April 2003 showed scientists discussing a boycott of the journal Climate Research and trying to get de Freitas removed, leading to the resignations of editors.

Tom Wigley wrote that von Storch "is partly to blame — he encourages the publication of crap science ‘in order to stimulate debate’.

One approach is to go direct to the publishers and point out the fact that their journal is perceived as being a medium for disseminating misinformation under the guise of refereed work."