In his darkest hour, Ben Santer considered walking away from his life's work. A physicist and atmospheric scientist at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, Santer has spent his career detailing the modeled and observed effects of human-induced climate change. His research led to his appointment as the lead author of a key section of the 1995 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change assessment report, which concluded, "The balance of evidence suggests a discernible human influence on global climate." The statement was one of the first, definitively worded assertions ... Read More
A Discernible Human Influence: Schneider and Climate Change
September 16, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment
Criminalizing the Science You Don’t Cotton To
May 27, 2010 • By • 9 Comments
Virginia's recently elected attorney general, Ken Cuccinelli, has his hand in just about every divisive issue of the day. He is leading his own charge against the constitutionality of the health care bill, he is suing the Environmental Protection Agency to block it from regulating greenhouse gas emissions, and he is tussling with state universities over whether they can bar discrimination based on sexual orientation. But the local fight with potentially the broadest reach is the one Cuccinelli has picked against a single scholar — Penn State climatologist Michael Mann. Mann is the ... Read More
Maximum Disclosure, Minimum Delay
February 24, 2010 • By • Leave a Comment
When hacked e-mails between climate change researchers surfaced late last year, they created a furor. The messages, swiped from a server at a British university, included a reference to a statistical trick and slights against critics. To climate change skeptics, this was proof of what they'd been saying all along: The idea of a warming Earth is a boondoggle, bought into by greenie extremists looking to blame SUVs, air-conditioning and factory-farmed sirloin. Critics gave climate researchers a good telling off, but the scientists stuck to their guns — er, graphs — citing a ... Read More
