Chapter 3: Scientists
Face-to-Face with Climate Scientists
I can think of three separate occasions over the years where meeting top climate scientists had a profound impact on my life. Let me tell you about the first, in 2006.
One day, Steve McIntyre, a famous climate skeptic, wrote in his Climate Audit blog that he had been invited to Washington, DC to speak about the paleoclimate issue at a symposium sponsored by the National Academy of Sciences.
Paleoclimatology is the study of the climate history of the Earth.
The symposium centered around the contemporary research that described temperature trends over the last one thousand years. The symposium asked: was it good research?
Steve McIntyre’s Climate Audit blog had suggested that there were problems in the statistical methodology used to create a graph of temperature trends over this thousand year period.
The graph, which was popularly known as “The Hockey Stick,” was first created in 1998, then revised in 1999, by a team of climatologists that included Dr. Michael Mann, a leader in the field. Dr. Mann was also spoking at the symposium.
Both Dr. Mann and Mr. McIntyre had each separately co-published papers about the Hockey Stick in the peer-reviewed scientific literature. The resulting scientific debate generated by these papers had sparked a lot of controversy.
And now, even Congress had gotten interested in the scientific validity of the Hockey Stick graph.
The question was interesting and I thought, gee, I wonder if the symposium is open to the public. So I nervously picked up the phone, called the National Academy of Sciences, and asked if I could come.
They said, we’d love to have you come. Not only that, but we’ll give you a free parking spot in downtown DC!
Something that I didn’t realize at the time was that there have been very few occasions where you get scientists from both sides of the climate-related fence in the same place. This 2006 symposium was one of those extremely rare occasions.
The symposium was held in a small room. There were all these big name climate scientists giving presentations, while another bunch of big name climate scientists were on the panel that was going to write a post-symposium report. Beyond some policy analysts who worked on Capitol Hill, there weren’t a lot of other people attending.
I think I was the only amateur there.
I had a great time! I met all of these very interesting people, including Steve McIntyre of Climate Audit himself.
I also met Dr. Ross McKittrick, one of the Canadian co-authors of the 2002 book Taken By Storm: The Troubled Science, Policy and Politics of Global Warming. It was the first time I had found a book that I felt really explained the controversy. (Incidentally, McKittrick had co-authored the two papers that McIntyre had published in 2003 and 2005 about the Hockey Stick.)
But I digress. Let’s get back to the symposium.
Periodically, there would be breaks between presentations. And one of the things I found interesting was that the scientists would hang around and schmooze with each other, whether they agreed with each other or not.
It was all quite cordial. I met a whole bunch of other climate scientists, and found them a lot of fun.
I didn’t really have any problem fitting in; they were very receptive to me, even though I was an amateur.
I returned to New York and posted a comment in Climate Audit about my experiences.
I wrote what the symposium was like and about some of the things that I thought were a little controversial. I submitted the comment, and didn’t think much more about it.
But someone from Climate Audit responded by saying he liked my comment so much that he decided to promote it by making it an actual standalone article in the blog.
My article generated a number of comments, some of which were very supportive, some of which were very critical.
It was my next step in getting actively involved in this gigantic worldwide debate about the climate. But there would be others.
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