Wednesday, February 01, 2012

Email 2349, Nov 2003, Energy and Environment editor Sonja Boehmer-Christiansen writes a great letter to Mann, Briffa, Pachauri, etc

Email 2349

I simply believe that research controversies related to global warming (science, social science, and technology) should be heard by policy-makers and NGOs in a world were vast amounts of limited finance are about to be spend on 'decarbonisation' on the assumption made by most social scientists and many policy people that IPCC summary pronouncements are undisputed and hence are acceptable as uncontroversial baseline for their work on decarbonisation economics, 'clean' technologoly, carbon finance, Kyoto mechanisms etc). I am encouraging research controversy in the public arena rather than editorial boardrooms. For example and to my considerable regret, even the UK Foreign Office and many of my colleaugues in the energy policy research (not in the earth sciences by the way) now believe that they need not pay any attention to scientific issues because all climate skeptics are funded by the oil industry. If this slur is permitted to stand, as it seems to be, then journals like mine are surely permitted to ask and who is funding the 'global warming' modelling community if not governments committed to the UNFCCC, and to explore what agendas have attached themselves to the warming threat.

2 comments:

Brian French said...

These people should go to jail...


from: Tom Wigley
subject: Re: Fwd: McIntyre and McKintrick paper
to: "Michael E. Mann"

Mike,
Yes -- ignore Sonja. Poor woman, she can't even write or spell properly.
Mrs Malaprop would be proud of her.
Another sad aspect is the strong hint of paranoia in her letter to you. It
is laced with implications that scientists are distorting their science, that we
are subservient to political agendas, and so on. Nothing new, of course,
but she really seems to believe it. I suspect there is a psychology PhD here.
I must commend you on the detective work you did to figure out what
M&M did wrong. Perhaps the focus of any 'response' could be on
elucidating the details of and justifications for your methods, using M&M
as an example of how not to do it? In this way the paper would be a
direct contribution to the science, with the rebuttal of M&M coming as
a byproduct. I have said this before, but this is how Ben Santer, Karl
Taylor and I responded to some junk criticism of our detection work by
Legates (in GRL). This puts the science first and relegates the criticism
to its proper place as not worth making a direct response to. (Hmmm, is
that good grammar?)
Tom.
++++++++++++++++++++++
Michael E. Mann wrote:

Dear all,
Thought you'd all be interested in this email.
Of course, we have no intention to respond to this, or other further emails from the
contrarians.
We're working on a full response that will be formally published. We'll let you know the
venue when its confirmed,
mike m

Anonymous said...

Maybe because you have no "scientific" response? Ignore something and it will go away, then formally publish an non debatable response. Brilliant! Mann, are you ever a coward!