### Close Encounters of the Absurd Kind

Filed under: Climate Science IPCC skeptics — group @ 24 February 2010
Guest commentary from Ben Santer
Part 2 of a series discussing the recent Guardian articles A recent story by Fred Pearce in the February 9th online edition of the Guardian ( “ Victory for openness as IPCC climate scientist opens up lab doors ”) covers some of the more publicized aspects of the last 14 years of my scientific career. I am glad that Mr. Pearce’s account illuminates some of the non-scientific difficulties I have faced. However, his account also repeats unfounded allegations that I engaged in dubious professional conduct. In a number of instances, Mr Pearce provides links to these allegations, but does not provide a balanced account of the rebuttals to them. Nor does he give links to loca tions where these rebuttals can be found. I am taking this opportunity to correct Mr. Pear ce’s omissions, to reply to the key allegations, and to supply links to more detailed responses.
Another concern relates to Mr. Pearce ’ s discussion of the “ openness ” issue mentioned in the title and sub-title of his story. A naïve reader of Mr. Pearce’ s article might infer from the subtitle (“Ben Santer had a change of heart about data transparency...”) that my scientific research was not conducted in an open and transparent manner until I expe rienced “a change of heart ”

. This inference would be completely incorrect. As I discuss below, my research into the nature and causes of climate change has always been performed in an ope n, transparent, and collegial manner. Virtually all of the scientific papers I have published over the course of my career involve multi-institutional teams of scientists with exper tise in climate modeling, the development of observational datasets, and climate model evaluation. The model and observational data used in my research is not proprietary – it is freely available to researchers anywhere in the world. The 1995 IPCC Report: The “ scientific cleansing ” allegation Mr. Pearce begins by repeating some of the allegations of misconduct that arose after publication (in 1996) of the Second Assessment Report (SAR) of the Inter governmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). These allegations targeted Chapte r 8 of the SAR, which dealt with the “ Detection of Climate Change, and Attribution of Causes ”

. The IPCC SAR Page 1 of 10 RealClimate: Close Encounters of the Absurd Kind

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...reached the historic finding that “The balance of evidence suggests a di scernible human

influence on global climate”. Information presented in Chapter 8 provided s ubstantial support for this finding. I served as the Convening Lead Author (CLA) of Chapter 8. There were three principal criticisms of my conduct as CLA. All three allegations are bas eless. They have been refuted on many occasions, and in many different fora. All three allegations m ake an appearance in Mr. Pearce’s story, but there are no links to the detailed response s to these claims. The first allegation was that I had engaged in “scientific cleans ing”. This allegation originated with the Global Climate Coalition (GCC) – a group of businesses “opposing immediate action to reduce greenhouse gas emissions ”. In May 1996, a document entitled “The IPCC: Institutionalized ‘Scienti fic Cleansing’?” was widely circulated to the press and politicians. In this document, the Global Climate Coalition claimed that after a key Plenary Meeting of the IPCC in Madrid i n November 1995, all scientific uncertainties had been purged from Chapter 8. The GCC’s “ scientific cleansing” allegation was soon repeated in an article in Energy Daily (May 22, 1996) and in an editorial in the Washington Times (May 24, 1996). It was also prominently featured in the World Climate Report , a publication edited by Professor Patrick J. Michaels (June 10, 1996). This “scientific cleansing” claim is categorically untrue. Ther e was no “scientific cleansing”. Roughly 20% of the published version of Chapter 8 specifically addressed uncert ainties in scientific studies of the causes of climate change. In discussing the “scientific cleansing” issue, Mr. Pearce claims that many of the caveats in Chapter 8 “did not make it to the summary for policy-makers”. This is incorrect. The Summary for Policymakers (SPM) of the IPCC SAR is four-and-a -half pages long. Roughly one page of the SPM discusses results from Chapter 8. The final paragraph of that page deals specifically with uncertainties, and notes that: “Our ability to quantify the human influence on global climate is current ly limited because the expected signal is still emerging from the noise of natural vari ability, and because there are uncertainties in key factors. These include the magnitude and pat terns of long term natural variability and the time-evolving pattern of forcing by, and response to, changes in concentrations of greenhouse gases and aerosols, and land surface changes”. Contrary to Mr. Pearce’s assertion, important caveats did “make it to the summary for policymakers”. And the “discernible human influence” conclusion of both Chapter 8 and the Summary for Policymakers has been substantiated by many subsequentnational and international assessments of climate science. There were several reasons why Chapter 8 was a target for unfounded “ scientific cleansing” allegations. First, the Global Climate Coalitions’s “scientif ic cleansing” charges were released to the media in May 1996. At that time, Cambridge Universi ty Press had not yet published the IPCC Second Assessment Report in the United States. B ecause of this delay in the Report’s U.S. publication, many U.S. commentators on the “scient ific cleansing” claims had not even read Chapter 8 – they only had access to the GCC’s skewed ac count of the changes made to Chapter 8. Had the Second Assessment Report been rea dily available in the U.S. in May 1996, it would have been easy for interested parties to verify that Chapter 8 incorporated a fair and balanced discussion of scientific uncertaintie s. Page 2 of 10 RealClimate: Close Encounters of the Absurd Kind

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...Second, the “pre-Madrid” version of Chapter 8 was the only chapter in the IPCC Working

Group I Second Assessment Report to have both an “Executive Summary” and a “Concluding Summary”. As discussed in the next section, this anomaly was partly due to the fact that the Lead Author team for Chapter 8 was not finalized unti l April 1994 – months after all other chapters had started work. Because of this delay in getting out of the starting blocks, the Chapter 8 Lead Author team was more concerned with complet ing the initial drafts of our chapter than with the question of whether all chapters i n the Working Group I Report had exactly the same structure.
The reply of the Chapter 8 Lead Authors to the Energy Daily story of May 22, 1996 pointed out this ‘two summary’ redundancy, and noted that: “After receiving much criticism of this redundancy in October and November 1995, the Convening Lead Author of Chapter 8 decided to remove the concluding summary. About half of the information in the concluding summary was integrated with ma terial in Section 8.6. It did not disappear completely, as the Global Climate Coalit ion has implied. The lengthy Executive Summary of Chapter 8 addresses the issue of uncertaint ies in great detail – as does the underlying Chapter itself.” The removal of the concluding summary made it simple for the Global C limate Coalition to advance their unjustified “scientific cleansing” allegations. They c ould claim ‘This statement has been deleted’, without mentioning that the scientific issue addres sed in the deleted statement was covered elsewhere in the chapter. This was my first close encounter of the absurd kind. The 1995 IPCC Report: The “political tampering/corruption of pee r-review” allegation The second allegation is that I was responsible for “political tampering”. I like to call this “the tail wags the dog” allegation. The “tail” here is the summary of the Chapter 8 results in the IPCC Summary for Policymakers, and the “dog” is the detailed under lying text of Chapter 8. In November 1995, 177 government delegates from 96 countries spent three days i n Madrid. Their job was to “approve” each word of the four-and-a-half page Summary for Policymakers of the IPCC’s Working Group I Report. This was the repor t that dealt with the physical science of climate change. The delegates also had the tas k of “accepting” the 11 underlying science chapters on which the Summary for Policymakers was ba sed. “Acceptance” of the 11 chapters did not require government approval of each word in each chapter. This was not a meeting of politicians only. A number of the government del egates were climate scientists. Twenty-eight of the Lead Authors of the IPCC Working Group I Report – myself included – were also prominent participants in Madrid. We were there to ensure that the politics did not get ahead of the science, and that the tail did notwag the dog. Non-governmental organizations – such as the Global Climate Coalition – w ere also active participants in the Madrid meeting. NGOs had no say in the formal proc ess of approving the Summary for Policymakers. They were, however, allowed to make comm ents on the SPM and the underlying 11 science chapters during the first day of the Plenary M eeting (November 27, 1996). The Global Climate Coalition dominated the initial plenary discussions. Page 3 of 10 RealClimate: Close Encounters of the Absurd Kind

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...Most of the plenary discussions at Madrid focused on the portrayal of Chapt er 8’s findings in

the Summary for Policymakers. Discussions were often difficult a nd contentious. We wrestled with the exact wording of the “balance of evidence” statem ent mentioned above. The delegations from Saudi Arabia and Kuwait argued for a very weak st atement, or for no statement at all. Delegates from many other countries countered that there was strong scientific evidence of pronounced a human effect on climate, and that the bottom-line statement from Chapter 8 should reflect this. Given the intense interest in Chapter 8, Sir John Houghton (one of the two Co-Chairs of IPCC Working Group I) established an ad hoc group on November 27, 1996. I was a member of this group. Our charge was to review those parts of the draft Summ ary for Policymakers that dealt with climate change detection and attribution issues. The group was placed under the Chairmanship of Dr. Martin Manning of New Zealand, and included del egates from the U.S., the U.K., Canada, Kenya, the Netherlands, and New Zealand. Sir John Houghton also invited delegates from Saudi Arabia and Kuwait to participate in thi s ad hoc group. Unfortunately, they did not accept this invitation. The ad hoc group considered more than just the portions of the Summary for Pol icymakers that were relevant to Chapter 8. The Dutch delegation asked for a det ailed discussion of Chapter 8 itself, and of the full scientific evidence contained in i t. This discussion took place on November 28, 1996. On November 29, 1996, I reported back to the Plenary on the deliberations of the ad hoc group. The Saudi Arabian and Kuwaiti delegations – who had not attended any of the discussions of the ad hoc group, and had no first-hand knowledge of what had been dis cussed by the group – continued to express serious reservations about the scientific basis for the detection and attribution statements in the Summary for Policymakers. On the final evening of the Madrid Plenary Meeting, debate focused on findi ng the right word to describe the human effect on global climate. There was broad agreement among the government delegates that – based on the scientific evidence presented in Chapter 8 – some form of qualifying word was necessary. Was the human influence “meas urable”? Could it be best described as “appreciable”, “detectable”, or “substantial”? Each of these suggested words had proponents and opponents. How would each word translate into different languages? Would the meaning be the same as in English? After hours of often rancorous debate, Bert Bolin (who was then the C hairman of the IPCC) finally found the elusive solution. Professor Bolin suggested that the human effect on climate should be described as “discernible”. Mr. Pearce – who was not present at the Madrid Plenary Meeting – argues that the discussion of human effects on climate in the IPCC Summary for Policymakers “went beyond what was said in the chapter from which the summary was supposedly drawn”. In othe r words, he suggests that the tail wagged the dog. This is not true. The “pre-Madrid” bottom-line statement from Chapter 8 was “Taken together, these results point towards a human influence on climate”. As I’ve noted above, the final statement agreed upon in M adrid was “The balance of evidence suggests a discernible human influence on global climate”. Is “suggests” stronger than “points towards”? I doubt it. Is “The bal ance of evidence” a more confident phrase than “Taken together”? I don’t think so. Page 4 of 10 RealClimate: Close Encounters of the Absurd Kind

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...The primary difference between the pre- and post-Madrid statements is that the latter

includes the word “discernible”. In my American Heritage College D ictionary, “discernible” is defined as “perceptible, as by vision or the intellect”. In Mer riam-Webster’s Online Dictionary, one of the three meanings of the verb “discern” is “to re cognize or identify as separate and distinct”. Was the use of “discernible” justified? The answer is clearly “yes”. Chapter 8 of the IPCC’s Second As sessment Report relied heavily on the evidence from a number of different “fingerprint” studies. This type of research uses rigorous statistical methods to compare observed patt erns of climate change with results from climate model simulations. The basic concept of fingerprinting is that each different influence on climate – such as purely natural changes in the Sun’s energy output, or human-caused changes in atmospheric levels of greenhouse gases – has a unique signature in climate records. This uniqueness becomes more apparent if one looks be yond changes averaged over the entire globe, and instead exploits the much greater inf ormation content available in complex, time-varying patterns of climate change. Fingerprinting has proved to be an invaluable tool for untangling the complex cause -andeffect relationships in the climate system. The IPCC’s Second Assessment Report in 1995 was able to draw on fingerprint studies from a half-dozen different research groups. Each of these groups had independently shown that they could indeed perceive a fingerprint of human influence in observed temperature records. The signal was beginning t o rise out of the noise, and was (using Merriam-Webster’s definition of “discern”) “ separate and distinct” from purely natural variations in climate. Based on these fingerprint results, and based on the other scientific evidence available to us in November 1995 , use of the word “discernible” was entirely justified. Its use is certainly justified based on the scientific information available to us in 2010. T he “discernible human influence” phrase was approved by all of the 177 delegates from 96 countries present at the Plenary Meeting – even by the Saudi and Kuwaiti delegations. None of the 28 IPCC Lead Authors in attendance at Madrid balked at this phrase, or questioned our f inding that “the balance of evidence suggests a discernible human influence on global climate”. The latter statement was cautious and responsible, and entirely consistent with the state of the science. The much more difficult job of trying to quantify the size of human influenc es on climate would be left to subsequent IPCC assessments

. Mr. Pearce’s remarks suggest that there is some substance to the “political tampering” allegation – that I was somehow coerced to change Chapter 8 in order to “reflect the wording of the political summary”. This is untrue . There was no political distortion of the science

. If Mr. Pearce had been present at the Madrid Plenary Meeting, he would have seen how vigorously (and successfully) scientists resisted efforts on the par t of a small number of delegates to skew and spin some of the information in the Summary for P olicymakers. The key point here is that the SPM was not a “political summary” – it was an accurate reflection of the science. Had it been otherwise, I would not have agreed to put my name on the Report. A reader of Mr. Pearce’s article might also gain the mistake n impression that the changes to Chapter 8 were only made in response to comments made by government delegat es during the Madrid Plenary Meeting. That is not true. As I’ve mentioned above, changes were also made to address government comments made during the meeting of the ad hoc gr oup formed to discuss Chapter 8. Page 5 of 10 RealClimate: Close Encounters of the Absurd Kind

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...Furthermore, when I first arrived in Madrid on November 26, 1995, I was handed a stack of

government and NGO comments on Chapter 8 that I had not seen previously. I ha d the responsibility of responding to these comments. One reason for the delay in receiving comments was that the IPCC ha d encountered difficulties in finding a Convening Lead Author (CLA) for Chapter 8. To m y knowledge, the CLA job had been turned down by at least two other scientists before I received the job offer. The unfortunate consequence of this delay was that, at the time of the Madrid Plenary Meeting, Chapter 8 was less mature and polished than other chapters of the IPCC Working Group I Report. Hence the belated review comments. The bottom line in this story is that the post-Madrid revisions to Chapt er 8 were made for scientific, not political reasons. They were made by me, not by IPC C officials. The changes were in full accord with IPCC rules and procedures ( pdf ). Mr. Pearce repeats accusations by Fred Seitz that the changes to Chapter 8 were illegal and unauthoriz ed, and that I was guilty of “corruption of the peer-review process”. These allegations are false, as the IPCC has clearly pointed out. The 1995 IPCC Report: The “research irregularities” allegation The third major front in the attack on Chapter 8 focused on my personal r esearch. It was a two-pronged attack. First, Professor S. Fred Singer claimed that the IPCC’s “discernible human influence” conclusion was entirely based on two of my own (multi-author ed) research papers. Next, Professor Patrick Michaels argued that one of these two papers was seriously flawed, and that irregularities had occurred in the paper’s publicati on process. Both charges were untrue. On July 25, 1996, I addressed the first of these allegations in an email to the Lead Authors of the 1995 IPCC Report: “Chapter 8 references more than 130 scientific papers – not just two. Its bottom-line conclusion that “the balance of evidence suggests a discernible human infl uence on global climate” is not solely based on the two Santer et al. papers thatSinger alludes to. This conclusion derives from many other published studies on the comparison of modell ed and observed patterns of temperature change – for example, papers by Karoly e t al. (1994), Mitchell et al. (1995), Hegerl et al. (1995), Karl et al. (1995), Hasselmann et al. (1995), Hansen et al. (1995) and Ramaswamy et al. (1996). It is supported by m any studies of globalmean temperature changes, by our physical understanding of the climate sys tem, by our knowledge of human-induced changes in the chemical composition of the atmosphere , by information from paleoclimatic studies, and by a wide range of supporting information (sealevel rise, retreat of glaciers, etc.). To allege, as Si nger does, that “Chapter 8 is mainly based on two research papers” is just plain wrong”. In the second prong of the attack, Professor Michaels claimed that a paper my colleagues and I had published in Nature in 1996 had been selective in its use of observational data, and that our finding of a human fingerprint in atmospheric temperature data was notvalid if a longer observational record was used. Further, he argued that Nature had been “ toyed with ” (presumably by me), and coerced into publishing the 1996 Santer et al. Nature paper one week prior to a key United Nations meeting in Geneva. My colleagues and I immediately addressed the scientific critici sm of our Nature paper by Michaels and his colleague Chip Knappenberger. We demonstrated that this criticism was Page 6 of 10 RealClimate: Close Encounters of the Absurd Kind

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...simply wrong. Use of a longer record of atmospheric temperature change strengthened

rather than weakened the evidence for a human fingerprint . We published this work in Nature in December 1996. Unfortunately, Mr. Pearce does not provide a l ink to this publication. Since 1996, studies by a number of scientists around the world have substanti ated the findings of our 1996 Nature paper. Such work has consistently shown clear evidence of a human fingerprint in atmospheric temperature records. Disappointingly, Professor Michaels persists in repeating his criti cism of our paper, without mentioning our published rebuttal or the large body of subsequently published evidence refuting his claims. Michaels’ charge that Nature had been “toyed w ith” was complete nonsense. As described below, however, this was not the last time Iwould be falsely accused of having the extraordinary power to force scientific journals to do my biddi ng. A Climatology Conspiracy? More “peer-review abuse” accusations Mr. Pearce also investigates a more recent issue. He implie s that I abused the normal peerreview system, and exerted pressure on the editor of the International Journal of Climatology to delay publication of the print version of a paper by Professor David Douglass and colleagues

. This is not true

. The Douglass et al. paper was published in December 2007 in the online edi tion of the International Journal of Climatology. The “et al.” included the same Professor S. Fred Singer who had previously accused me of “scientific cleansing”. It also incl uded Professor John Christy, the primary developer of a satellite-based temperature r ecord which suggests that there has been minimal warming of Earth’s lower atmosphere since 1979. Three alternate versions of the satellite temperature record, produced by different t eams of researchers using the same raw satellite measurements, all indicate substanti ally more warming of the Earth’s atmosphere

. The focus of the Douglass et al. paper was on post-1979 temperature cha nges in the tropics. The authors devised what they called a “robust statistical test” to compare computer model results with observations. The test was seriously flawed (see Appendix A in Open Letter to the Climate Science Community: Response to A “Climatology Conspiracy? ”). When it was applied to the model and observational temperature datasets, the testshowed (quite incorrectly) that the model results were significantly different from observations.
As I have noted elsewhere , the Douglass et al. paper immediately attracted considerable media and political attention. One of the paper’s authors claimed that it represented an “inconvenient truth”, and proved that “Nature, not humans, rules the climate”. These statements were absurd. No single study can overturn the very large body of scientific evidence supporting “discernible human influence” findings. Nor does any individual study provide the sole underpinning for the conclusion that human activities are i nfluencing global climate. Given the extraordinary claims that were being made on the basis of this incorrect paper, my colleagues and I decided that a response was necessary. Although the errors in Douglass et al. were easy to identify, it required a substantial amount of new and original work to repeat the statistical analysis properly. Page 7 of 10 RealClimate: Close Encounters of the Absurd Kind

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...Our work went far beyond what Douglass et al. had done. We looked at the sensitivity of

model-versus-data comparisons to the choice of statistical test, to the test assumptions, to the number of years of record used in the tests, and to errors in the comput er model estimates of year-to-year temperature variability. We also examined how the statistical test devised by Douglass et al. performed under controlled conditions, using random data with known statistical properties. From their paper, there is no evidence that Douglass et al. considered any of these important issues before making their highly-publicized claim s. Our analysis clearly showed that tropical temperature changes in obse rvations and climate model simulations were not fundamentally inconsistent – contrary to the c laim of Douglass and colleagues. Our research was published on October 10, 2008, in the online edition of the International Journal of Climatology. On November 15, 2008, the Douglass e t al. and Santer et al. papers appeared in the same print version of the International Journal of Climatology. In December 2009, shortly after the public release of the stolen ema ils from the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit, Professors David Douglas s and John Christy accused me of leading a conspiracy to delay publication of the print version of the Dougl ass et al. paper. This accusation was based on a selective analysis of the st olen emails. It is false

. In Mr. Pearce’s account of this issue, he states that “There is no doubt the (sic) Santer and his colleagues sought to use the power they held to the utmost...” So what are the facts of this matter? What is the “power” Fred Pearce is referring to? Fact 1: The only “power” that I had was the power to choose which scientific journal to submit our paper to. I chose the International Journal of Climatology. I did this because the International Journal of Climatology had published (in their online edition) the seriously flawed Douglass et al. paper. I wanted to give the journal the opportunit y to set the scientific record straight. •

Fact 2: I had never previously submitted a paper to the International Journal of C limatology. I had never met the editor of the journal (Professor Glenn McGregor). I did not have any correspondence or professional interaction with the editor prior to 2008. •

Fact 3: Prior to submitting our paper, I wrote an email to Dr. Tim Osborn on January 10, 2008. Tim Osborn was on the editorial board of the International Journal of Climatology. I told Dr. Osborn that, before deciding whether we would submit our paper to the International Journal of Climatology, I wanted to have some assurance that our paper w ould “be regarded as an independent contribution, not as a comment on Douglass et al.” This request was entirely reasonable in view of the substantial amount of new work thatwe had done. I have described this new work above. •

Fact 4: I did not want to submit our paper to the International Journal of Clima tology if there was a possibility that our submission would be regarded as a mere “com ment” on Douglass et al. Under this scenario, Douglass et al. would have received the last word. Given the extraordinary claims they had made, I thought it unlikely that their “la st word” would have acknowledged the serious statistical error in their original paper. As subsequent events showed, I was right to be concerned – they have not admitted any error in their work. •

Fact 5: As I clearly stated in my email of January 10 to Dr. Tim Osborn, if the International Journal of Climatology agreed to classify our paper as an independent contri bution, “Douglass et al. should have the opportunity to respond to our contribution, and we should be given the chance to reply. Any response and reply should be published side-by-side...” • Page 8 of 10 RealClimate: Close Encounters of the Absurd Kind

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...Fact 6: The decision to hold back the print version of the Douglass et al. paper was not mine.

It was the editor’s decision. I had no “power” over the publishing decisi ons of the International Journal of Climatology. •

This whole episode should be filed under the category “No good deed goes unpunished”. My colleagues and I were simply trying to set the scientific record s traight. There was no conspiracy to subvert the peer-review process. Unfortunately, conspiracy theories are easy to disseminate. Many are willing to accept these theories at face value. The distribution of facts on complex scientific issues is a slower, more difficult process

. Climate Auditing – Close Encounters with Mr. Steven McIn tyre Ten days after the online publication of our International Journal of Clim atology paper , Mr. Steven McIntyre, who runs the “ClimateAudit” blog, requested all of the climate model data we had used in our research. I replied that Mr. McIntyre was we lcome to “audit” our calculations, and that all of the primary model data we had employed w ere archived at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and freely available to any r esearcher. Over 3,400 scientists around the world currently analyze climate model output fromthis open database. My response was insufficient for Mr. McIntyre. He submitted two F reedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests for climate model data – not for the freel y available raw data, but for the results from intermediate calculations I had performed with the raw data. One FOIA request also asked for two years of my email correspondence related to these climate model data sets. I had performed these intermediate calculations in order derive wei ghted-average temperature changes for different layers of the atmosphere. This i s standard practice. It is necessary since model temperature data are available at specif ic heights in the atmosphere, whereas satellite temperature measurements represent an aver age over a deep layer of the atmosphere. The weighted averages calculated from the climate mode l data can be directly compared with actual satellite data. The method used for making suc h intermediate calculations is not a secret. It is published in several differe nt scientific journals. Unlike Mr. McIntyre, David Douglass and his colleagues (in their Inte rnational Journal of Climatology paper) had used the freely available raw model data. With these raw datasets, Douglass et al. made intermediate calculations similar to the calculations we had performed. The results of their intermediate calculations were similar to our own intermediate results. The differences between what Douglass and colleagues had done and what my colleagues and I had done was not in the intermediate calculations – it was in the statistical tests each group had used to compare climate models with observations. The punch-line of this story is that Mr. McIntyre’s Freedom of Inform ation Act requests were completely unnecessary. In my opinion, they were frivolous. Mr. Mc Intyre already had access to all of the information necessary to check our calculations and our findings. When I invited Mr. McIntyre to “audit” our entire study, including the int ermediate calculations, and told him that all the data necessary to perform s uch an “audit” were freely available, he expressed moral outrage on his blog. I began to receive t hreatening emails. Complaints about my “stonewalling” behavior were sent to my superiors at Lawrenc e Livermore National Laboratory and at the U.S. Department of Energy. A little over a month after receiving Mr. McIntyre’s Freedom of Information Act requests, I decided to release all of the intermediate calculations I had per formed for our International Page 9 of 10 RealClimate: Close Encounters of the Absurd Kind

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...Journal of Climatology paper. I made these datasets available to the entire scientific

community. I did this because I wanted to continue with my scientific research. I did not want to spend all of my available time and energy responding to harassme nt incited by Mr. McIntyre’s blog. Mr. Pearce does not mention that Mr. McIntyre had no need to file Fr eedom of Information Act requests, since Mr. McIntyre already had access to all of the raw climate model data we had used in our study (and to the methods we had used for performing intermediate calculations). Nor does Mr. Pearce mention the curious asymmetry i n Mr. McIntyre’s “auditing”. To my knowledge, Mr. McIntyre – who purports to have considerable statistical expertise – has failed to “audit” the Douglass et al. paper, which contained serious statistical errors. As the “Climategate” emails clearly show, there is a patte rn of behavior here. My encounter with Mr. McIntyre’s use of FOIA requests for “audit” purposes is not an isolated event. In my opinion, Mr. McIntyre’s FOIA requests serve the purpose of initiat ing fishing expeditions, and are not being used for true scientific discovery. Mr. McIntyre’s own words do not present a picture of a man engaged in pur ely dispassionate and objective scientific inquiry: “But if Santer wants to try this kind of stunt, as I’ve said above, I’ve submitted FOI requests and we’ll see what they turn up. We’ll see what the journal policie s require. I’ll also see what DOE and PCDMI administrators have to say. We’ll see if any of S anter’s buddies are obligated to produce the data. We’ll see if Santer ever sent any of the data to his buddies” (Steven McIntyre; posting on his ClimateAudit blog; Nov. 21, 2008). My research is subject to rigorous scrutiny. Mr. McIntyre’s blogging is not. He can issue FOIA requests at will. He is the master of his domain – the s upreme, unchallenged ruler of the “ClimateAudit” universe. He is not a climate scientist, but he has the power to singlehandedly destroy the reputations of exceptional men and women who have devoted thei r entire careers to the pursuit of climate science. Mr. McIntyre’s unchecked, extraordinary power is the real story of “Climategate”. I hope that someone has the courage to tell this story. Benjamin D. Santer
John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Fellow San Ramon, California February 22, 2010* *These remarks reflect the personal opinions of Ben jamin D. Santer. They do not reflect the official v iews of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory or the U.S. Department of Energy. In preparing this document, I would like to acknowledge the assistance of Tom Wig ley, Myles Allen, Kristin Aydt, Graham Cogley, Pete r Gleckler, Leo Haimberger, Gabi Hegerl, John Lanzant e, Mike MacCracken, Gavin Schmidt, Steve Sherwood, Susan Solomon, Karl Taylor, Simon Tett, and Peter T horne.
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