Benjamin Santer, a long-time climate scientist who has worked at the Department of Energy’s (DOE) Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory for nearly 30 years, has begun briefing federal judges on climate attribution science to help them understand how experts can trace greenhouse gases from their source and determine how they exacerbate adverse events.
Such identification of potential liability is crucial as state and local governments and other parties pursue various nuisance cases against large oil companies over their contributions to climate change.
Santer participated in a National Academy of Sciences (NAS) workshop in February that involved a handful of scientists and federal judges, “and the purpose was to address how attribution science would be best used in a court of law.
See ‘A history of Dr. Ben Santer and his IPCC “trick” by Dr, Timothy Ball here.
Santer was appointed the convening Lead-author of Chapter 8 of the 1995 IPCC Report titled “Detection of Climate Change and Attribution of Causes.” In that position, Santer created the first clear example of the IPCC manipulation of science for a political agenda. He used his position to establish the headline that humans were a factor in global warming by altering the meaning of what was agreed by the committee as a whole at the draft meeting in Madrid.
Agreed comments
1. “None of the studies cited above has shown clear evidence that we can attribute the observed [climate] changes to the specific cause of increases in Greenhouse gases.”
2. “While some of the pattern-base discussed here have claimed detection of a significant climate change, no study to date has positively attributed all or part of climate change observed to man-made causes.”
3. “Any claims of positive detection and attribution of significant climate change are likely to remain controversial until uncertainties in the total natural variability of the climate system are reduced.”
4. “While none of these studies has specifically considered the attribution issue, they often draw some attribution conclusions, for which there is little justification.”
Santer’s replacements
1. “There is evidence of an emerging pattern of climate response to forcing by greenhouse gases and sulfate aerosol… from the geographical, seasonal and vertical patterns of temperature change… These results point toward a human influence on global climate.”
2. “The body of statistical evidence in chapter 8, when examined in the context of our physical understanding of the climate system, now points to a discernible human influence on the global climate.”
As Avery and Singer noted in 2006,
“Santer single-handedly reversed the ‘climate science’ of the whole IPCC report and with it the global warming political process! The ‘discernible human influence’ supposedly revealed by the IPCC has been cited thousands of times since in media around the world and has been the ‘stopper’ in millions of debates among nonscientists.”
See how the report cherry picked the period that temperatures were displayed to provide an illusion of warming when the data really showed cooling.
See also ‘Prejudiced Authors, Prejudiced Findings’ by John McLean here
See the UK experience that Santer and his partners in crime in the media and universities and IPCC won’t tell you about Wind Power Economics - Rhetoric and Reality by Gordon Hughes, Professor of Economics with the School of Economics, University of Edinburgh at the Renewable Energy Foundation in a webinar.
See how data shows the GHS models are failing with most of the warming natural and any human influence UHI related.
Comparisons with ocean observed temperatures show the model bias is significant.
