Professor Benjamin Santer, honorary professor at the University of East Anglia (UEA), and one of the first scientists to identify the human impact on Earth’s climate back in the 1990s, has criticised a major US government report that makes ‘demonstrably incorrect’ claims about the role of human activity in global warming.
Last July, the US Department of Energy (DoE) issued a report that misconstrued Professor Santer’s research, on the same day that the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) released a proposal to reverse the so-called ‘endangerment finding’.
This 2009 ruling, which gave the EPA the authority to regulate greenhouse gas emissions from vehicles, power plants and other industrial sources, was revoked by the Trump administration in February.
Scientific response
In response, in the journal AGU Advances, Professor Santer, along with Professor Susan Solomon from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Professor David Thompson from UEA and Colorado State University, and Professor Qiang Fu of the University of Washington, has reiterated the role of humans in climate impact, and criticised the DoE’s report.
“We view it both important and with precedent to rebut an incorrect scientific claim made in the DoE report,” Prof Santer commented. “Setting the record straight in the peer-reviewed literature is particularly important when demonstrably incorrect scientific claims are made in official government reports.
“Changes in the vertical structure of atmospheric temperature are an important ‘fingerprint’ of human effects on global climate. These changes are mainly driven by human caused increases in atmospheric levels of CO2 and other greenhouse gases.”
Pointing to the warming of the troposphere, the lowest layer of the atmosphere, and the cooling of the stratosphere, Prof Santer added that an “indisputable fingerprint of human effects on climate” has been tracked for more than 50 years by both simple and more sophisticated climate models, and is borne out by satellite temperature data.
“The claim to the contrary made in the US DoE review of climate science is factually incorrect,” he added. “As our analysis clearly illustrates, the DoE report is not a reliable source of information on the vertical structure of changes in atmospheric temperature, which is a key piece of evidence for human effects on global climate.”
Still referenced
While the author team of the DoE report was dissolved last September, following a lawsuit that alleged the Department’s failure to adhere to proper Federal Advisory Committee procedures, the report itself has not been retracted or corrected, he noted.
“The report is still available on the DoE website and is still being publicly referenced by DoE Secretary Wright as a credible source of information on climate science,” said Prof Santer. “It is not.”
Prof Santer and his colleagues’ report, Modeled and observed stratospheric temperature changes: implications for fingerprint studies, can be viewed here. Read more here.
