The letter from Ben VanHees (April 21: Climate scientists have done nothing to earn respect) contains a number of misleading statements which need to be corrected.
To start, the IPCC scientists did not and do not work for pay from the UN. The IPCC website clearly states, “Experts contributing to the review will do so without any remuneration.” And they didn’t work for a solid year: a glance at the call for applications at the IPCC website mentions frequent week-end gatherings and rely on email the rest of the time.
Secondly, the hockey stick graph, based on an analysis of tree rings (used as temperature estimations) showed clearly how temperatures were fairly steady for hundreds of years and then spiked in the last part of the 20th Century.
The hockey stick graph has been the focus of attacks by certain right wing national newspapers, perhaps because it was prominent in the Third IPCC Report (we’ve received the Fourth and IPCC is working on the Fifth) and in Al Gore’s film. Yes, two Canadians found errors in the Mann “hockey stick” paper, not by visiting trees, but by obtaining the original data and re-analyzing it. However, independent assessments agree that, although there was one small error in the paper, the overall conclusions were reasonable. This website http://www.logicalscience.com/skeptic_arguments/fakeddata.html has a nice summary of the controversy.
VanHees says that replication is the basis of the “scientific method” and charges that Michael Mann, one of the authors of the hockey stick graph, refuses to release all of his data. How then did the two Canadians re-analyze it? In fact, Mann’s data are available (see the website above for links). More importantly, the research findings shown in the hockey stick graph have been replicated again and again, using different temperature proxies and different methodologies. The findings have been published in peer-reviewed journals, such as SCIENCE (arguably one of the top science journals in the world) unlike attempts to discredit the research.
That the earth is warming is accepted by the national academies of the G8 countries (http://www.nationalacademies.org/includes/G8+5energy-climate09.pdf) and even by most skeptics who now focus on the cause. There are local temperature changes such as receding glaciers and earlier spring break-ups. More importantly, global temperature averages show the warming (http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/graphs/). Quick action is imperative.
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Mark Sandilands
Published in the Lethbridge Herald 2010-4-29, page A8
Funny when conversing with me you indicate that one should not put too much faith in local weather, i.e. Antarctica, but use it yourself to "justify" your position. The hockey stick has long been debunked.
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