Reply #10: No the kicker is... [View All]

[Viking12]

Willie Soon, Sallie Baliunas (2003, January). Proxy climatic and environmental changes of the past 1000 years. Climate Research. 23:89-110, has been the darling of the right-wing think tanks. The study however doesn't hold up under scrutiny.

As two of the scientists explain in Scientific America: "The fact that it 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," comments Tim Barnett, a marine physicist at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography. Similar sentiments came from Malcolm Hughes of the Laboratory of Tree-Ring Research at the University of Arizona, "The Soon et al. paper is so fundamentally misconceived and contains so many egregious errors that it would take weeks to list and explain them all."

Given the high-level attention that the paper was drawing from the flat-earth crowd, 13 scientists took the unusual step of publishing in July an extended rebuttal in the American Geophysical Union's journal, Eos. As the Eos rebuttal states " claims are inconsistent with the preponderance of scientific evidence."
As summarized by AGU's press release on the Eos article, the problems with the Soon and Baliunas article are:

"First, in using proxy records to draw inferences about past climate, it is essential to assess their actual sensitivity to temperature variability. In particular, the authors say, Soon and Baliunas misuse proxy data reflective of changes in moisture or drought, rather than temperature, in their analysis.

Second, it is essential to distinguish between regional temperature anomalies and hemispheric mean temperature, which must represent an average of estimates over a sufficiently large number of distinct regions. For example, the concepts of a "Little Ice Age" and "Medieval Warm Period" arose from the Eurocentric origins of historic climatology. The specific periods of coldness and warmth differed from region to region and as compared with data for the northern hemisphere as a whole.

Third, it is essential to define carefully the modern base period with which past climate is to be compared and to identify and quantify uncertainties. For example, they say, the most recent report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) carefully compares data for recent decades with reconstructions of past temperatures, taking into account the uncertainties in those reconstructions. IPCC concluded that late 20th century warmth in the northern hemisphere likely exceeded that of any time in the past millennium. The method used by Soon and Baliunas, they say, considers mean conditions for the entire 20th century as the base period and determines past temperatures from proxy evidence not capable of resolving trends on a decadal basis. It is therefore, they say, of limited value in determining whether recent warming in anomalous in a long term and large scale context."

The press release also adds:

"A group of leading climate scientists has reaffirmed the "robust consensus view" emerging from the peer reviewed literature that the warmth experienced on at least a hemispheric scale in the late 20th century was an anomaly in the previous millennium and that human activity likely played an important role in causing it. In so doing, they refuted recent claims that the warmth of recent decades was not unprecedented in the context of the past thousand years."

Many scientists feel betrayed by Soon and Baliunas' misrepresentation of their data. Peter deMenocal, an associate professor at Columbia University's Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, used sediment records off the coast of Africa as a proxy for ocean-surface temperatures. He says Soon Baliunas could not justify their conclusions that the African record showed the 20th century as being unexceptional. "My record has no business being used to address that question," the Columbia scientist says. "It displays some ignorance putting it in there to address that question."

David E. Black, an assistant professor of geology at the University of Akron, says Soon and Baliunas did not use his data properly in concluding that the Middle Ages were warm and the 20th century ordinary. Black's record of plankton in ocean sediment collected off Venezuela provides a proxy record of the strength of trade winds from 1150 to 1989. But "winds don't meet their definition of warm, wet, or dry," he points out. Contrary to what Soon and Baliunas claim about the Venezuelan data, Black says he found no 50-year period of medieval extremes in his record. "I think they stretched the data to fit what they wanted to see," he says.

So how did such bad science get published in a peer-reviewed journal? It appears that the process was taken advantage of for purely political reasons.

Dr. Hans von Storch, who was slated to become the journal's new Editor-in-Chief in the summer of 2003 says, "The review process had utterly failed; important questions have not been asked, as was documented by a comment in EOS" He says he suspects that "some of the skeptics had identified Climate Research as a journal where some editors were not as rigorous in the review process as is otherwise common." So he resigned from the position before he even started. Five other members of the editorial board followed suit. von Storch explains the reason for his resignation by saying, "I withdrew also as editor because I learned during the conflict that CR editors used different scales for judging the validity of an article. Some editors considered the problem of the Soon & Baliunas paper as merely a problem of "opinion", while it was really a problem of severe methodological flaws."

As a matter of fact the journal itself has openly disavowed the article in question. Otto Kinne, Climate Research's publisher, wrote that "...there was insufficient attention to the methodological basis of statements that touch on hotly debated controversies and involve pronounced political and economic interests. CR should have been more careful and insisted on solid evidence and cautious formulations before publication." Elsewhere Kinne is quoted, "I have not stood behind the paper by Soon and Baliunas, indeed: the reviewers failed to detect methodological flaws."

Even Baliunas appears to be distancing herself from the article. In the Tacoma News Tribune editorial, she writes about the "Harvard study" without even mentioning that she's one of its co-authors.