A response to Jerry Cohen's reasonable request

["Dukelow, James S Jr" <jim.dukelow@PNL.GOV>]

Sometime a while back, Jerry Cohen wrote:

=========================================



Jim, 



As I suggested in a previous message, scientists are capable of judging 

the soundness of a scientific analysis itself, while the technologically 

illiterate must base their judgements on their trust of the scientists 

making the argument. 



There may be good & bad scientists, but one thing they have in common in 

that they have completed some education in one or more of the sciences. 

MDs and DDSs (as opposed,for example, to lawyers & journalists) have all 

been exposed to a lot of science in their education. Science is 

basically a way of thinking based on data, logic and reason. 



With that background, and without discussion on the ancestry, pedigree, 

or social proclivities of the opponents of the global warming 

hypothesis, could you let us know what problems you have with Singer's 

analysis, or with the technical arguments of the OISM ( <www.oism.org>). 



================

Jim Dukelow responds:



That's a fair request.



I wasn't the one who raised the issue of 17,000+ scientists subscribing 

to the dissident position on global warming.  I merely pointed out that 

there is no way of telling which or how many of the non-fraudulent 

signatories of the petition are actually scientists. 



Singer has an impressive C.V.



One of my problems with Singer is that he has been writing lawyer's 

briefs rather than objective reviews of the science.  Some of his 

positions seem to be ideologically rather than scientifically 

determined.  In the late 80s, Singer was one of the few scientists 

taking the position that CFCs were not causing depletion of 

stratospheric ozone.  He went so far as to complain that the Swedish 

Academy had political motives for awarding the Nobel Prize for Chemistry 

to Rowland, Molina, and Crutzen for their work on ozone depletion.  He 

has apparently since been persuaded to abandon the more extreme aspects 

of that position, but still argues that non-ozone-hole ozone depletion 

has turned around at 4% depletion.  He does not credit the Montreal 

agreement for that turn around. 



Somewhat more seriously, he misrepresents climate science, even some 

parts that are ridiculously easy to check.  Long after it ceased to be 

true, Singer has been writing that the satellite temperature record 

shows the atmosphere to be cooling.  He did that a few months ago in a 

letter to the editor of the WSJ (which is currently lost among my rather 

disorganized climate literature), but also in an interview appearing in 

the 31 January 2000 issue of the New American, available online at 

<www.thenewamerican.com/tna/01-31-2000/vol16no03_environment.htm>.  

Singer writes "Data from earth satellites in use since 1979 do not show 

any warming.  But eventually, they probably will because carbon dioxide 

and other greenhouse gases are increasing in the atmosphere."



The first sentence is both flat wrong and disingenuous on several 

levels.  First off, the statement was true until the end of 1997, but 

false since the end of 1998.  Second, there are four major temperature 

datasets.  Two of them, the Global Historical Climate Network (U.S.) and 

the Jones et al. (UK) datasets provide surface temperatures -- both land 

and marine.  The Angell radiosonde dataset provides results of 

radiosonde measures at five or six altitudes in the troposphere and 

stratosphere for 63 stations with measurements dating back to 1958 

(actually, I have had the Parker et al. radiosonde dataset recommended 

to me, but have not yet tried to chase it down).  The fourth dataset is 

comprised of MSU satellite measurements from all over the world for the 

period of 1979 to the present.  [MSU stands for microwave sounding units]  

The instruments on the MSU satellites basically listen to the 

temperature-dependent screams of oxygen atoms on several different 

radio band frequencies.  The two major datastreams that have be coming from the

scientists analysing these data (John Christy of U of Alabama - 

Huntsville and Roy Spencer of the NASA Marshall Space Flight Center) are 

a weighted average (weighted over a range of altitudes) temperature for 

the lower stratosphere and a weighted average temperature for the lower 

troposphere.  These data are measuring something quite different from 

the other datasets, something to keep in mind when you see them compared 

with analyses of the other datasets.



Third, although the world-wide coverage of the MSU data is an 

improvement over the sparser coverage of the other datasets (which not 

too surprisingly is concentrated where people live and where ships 

travel), it is not clear -- too me at least -- how useful these weighted 

averages are.  The LT2 data (lower troposphere) has contributions from 

the lowest 8 km of the atmosphere, including a variable contribution 

from the surface.  Unlike the radiosonde data, it is of no use for 

weather prediction and tells us very little about the temperature 

structure of the atmosphere.



Fourth, the Spencer/Christy data has been subject to very little 

independent replication by other scientists, although it is available for 

downloading from the MSFC web site. 



Fifth, although Spencer and Christy, Singer, and many other global warming 

dissidents have made fairly extravagent claims in the past for the 

precision and accuracy of the MSU measurements, Spencer and Christy have had to

make a number of corrections to their data processing algorithms, several of the

problems being identified by other scientists.  The current version of the

algorithms is version D.  Corrections of these systematic errors resulted in

some upward adjustments of the measured weighted average 

temperatures, although the version D corrections included some problems 

found by Spencer and Christy themselves that cancelled much of the 

correction required for orbital decay of the satellites. 



The OISM white paper (which can be found at 

<www.oism.org/pproject/s33p36.htm>) by Robinson, Baliunas, Soon, and 

Robinson (RBSR) has an interesting history.  An early draft was sent 

out with a cover letter by Dr. Frederick Seitz, a former president of 

the National Academy of Sciences.  The paper was formatted to look 

exactly like a paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of 

Sciences.  Seitz's cover letter and a later letter to the editor of the 

WSJ contained a vicious ad hominem attack on a prominent climate 

scientist, Dr. Benjamin Santer.  An echo of that attack survives at 

Fig. 14 and surrounding text in the current, revised version of the 

paper.  The caption of Figure 14 mis-characterizes the purpose of the 

Santer et al. paper (RBSR's reference 41) and states that "Later in 

1996, the study was refuted by a longer set of data" (RBSR's reference 

42).  If you read all three pieces of RBSR reference 42, you will 

discover that the original Santer et al. paper was not refuted.  I have 

a message I sent to RISKANAL two or three years ago that analyses the 

whole thing in gruesome detail that I would be happy to provide to 

anyone interested.  We also received a message from Benjamin Santer 

that deals with the issues in even more gruesome detail.  The Board of 

the NAS was so disturbed by the Seitz/RBSR letter and paper that they 

issued an official statement to the effect that the paper had no 

connection to the NAS whatsoever and deploring Seitz's ad hominem attack 

on Santer. 



A full critique of the current version of RBSR would take more time 

than I have available right now, so I'll hit a few high points.



One problem is not with the paper, per se, which was written in January 

1998, but with credulous readers who suppose that time dependent 

assertions are still true.  It was true in January 1998 that the 1979-

1997 MSU temperature record and radiosonde temperatures over the same 

time period showed the lower troposphere to be cooling slightly.  That 

quit being true sometime in the middle of 1998 and remains false to 

this day.  OISM doesn't appear to give any warning to the reader that 

some of the assertions in the paper are no longer true.



RBSR makes quite a point of the "validation" of the MSU temperatures by 

the radiosonde temperatures (Figs. 5-7).  It also makes quite a point 

of urban heat island "problems" with the two major surface temperature 

datasets (Fig. 13 and accompanying text).  This is part of a general 

attack by the dissidents on the surface temperature records, which show 

statistically significant strong warming trends, particularly in the 

last 30 years.  What they don't point out is that the radiosondes start 

measuring temperatures very near the surface and the radiosonde surface 

temperatures ALSO validate the Jones et al. surface dataset.



The paper (p. 2) states: "During the Medieval Climate Optimum, 

temperatures were warm enough to allow the colonization of Greenland.  

These colonies were abandoned after the onset of colder temperatures. 

... The human historical record does not report 'global warming' 

catastrophes, even though temperatures have been far higher during much 

of the last three millennia."  H.H. Lamb's book, Climate, History, and 

the Modern World, 2nd ed., Routledge, 1995, tells a very different 

story.  Similarly, a recent paper in Science (Science, V.292, pp.667-

673, 27 Apr 2001, Cultural Response to Climate Change During the Late 

Holocene, Peter B. deMenocal) identifies the collapse of a number of urban 

civilisations coincident with extended droughts during warm periods.  

These include the Anasazi in New Mexico and the Maya in southern Mexico 

and Guatemala, during the Medieval Climate "Optimum". 



Like some Safety Analysis Reports I have reviewed, the number of things 

I found wrong with RBSR was essentially a linear function of the time I 

spent on it.  I do essentially agree with the section on Sea Level and 

Storms and didn't spend much time looking at the section on 

Fertilization of Plants.  I would note, however that CO2 is only one of 

the nutrients plants require and simply increasing CO2 will not 

necessarily increase the growth rate of the plants indefinitely.  A 

couple of papers in Nature (Nature, V.411, pp.466-469, 24 May 2001, 

Limited carbon storage in soil and litter of experimental forest plots 

under increased atmospheric CO2, Schlesinger and Lichter; and Nature, 

V.411, pp.469-472, Soil fertility limits carbon sequestration by forest 

ecosystems in a CO2-enriched atmosphere, Oren et al.), reporting on 

research at the Duke University Research Forest, found a growth spurt 

(under conditions of doubled CO2) that leveled off after three or four 

years. 



Best regards.



Jim Dukelow

Pacific Northwest National Laboratory

Richland, WA

jim.dukelow@pnl.gov



These comments are mine and have not been reviewed and/or approved by 

my management or by the U.S. Department of Energy.



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