Consequences Of The Conflict Of Interest In the 2007 CCSP Report – “Temperature Trends in the Lower Atmosphere: Steps for Understanding and Reconciling Differences”

As reported on Climate Science (e.g. see) and documented in depth in a public comment; see

Pielke Sr., Roger A., 2005: Public Comment on CCSP Report “Temperature Trends in the Lower Atmosphere: Steps for Understanding and Reconciling Differences”. 88 pp including appendices.

the CCSP Report – Temperature Trends in the Lower Atmosphere: Steps for Understanding and Reconciling Differences

“……excluded valid scientific perspectives under the charge of the Committee. The Editor of the Report systematically excluded a range of views on the issue of understanding and reconciling lower atmospheric temperature trends. The Executive Summary of the CCSP Report ignores critical scientific issues and makes unbalanced conclusions concerning our current understanding of temperature trends.”

The Editor of this Committee was Thomas Karl, who is also Director of the National Climate Data Center (NCDC). Karl also directs the completion of multi-decadal global surface air temperature trends which were used in the 2007 IPCC report.

When I resigned from the CCSP Committee, I wrote in my Public Comment,

“The process that produced the report was highly political, with the Editor taking the lead in suppressing my perspectives, most egregiously demonstrated by the last-minute substitution of a new Chapter 6 for the one I had carefully led preparation of and on which I was close to reaching a final consensus. Anyone interested in the production of comprehensive assessments of climate science should be troubled by the process which I document below in great detail that led to the replacement of the Chapter that I was serving as Convening Lead Author.”

Since the CCSP Committee prevented a balanced assessment of the quality of the near surface temperature trends, I invited scientific colleagues to work with me on several peer reviewed papers to evaluate this trend record. Now after two years, we have published several papers that clearly document the poor quality of the trends.

These papers include

Pielke Sr., R.A. J. Nielsen-Gammon, C. Davey, J. Angel, O. Bliss, N. Doesken, M. Cai., S. Fall, D. Niyogi, K. Gallo, R. Hale, K.G. Hubbard, X. Lin, H. Li, and S. Raman, 2007: Documentation of uncertainties and biases associated with surface temperature measurement sites for climate change assessment. Bull. Amer. Meteor. Soc., 88:6, 913-928;

Lin, X., R.A. Pielke Sr., K.G. Hubbard, K.C. Crawford, M. A. Shafer, and T. Matsui, 2007: An examination of 1997-2007 surface layer temperature trends at two heights in Oklahoma. Geophys. Res. Letts., 34, L24705, doi:10.1029/2007GL031652;

and

Pielke, R. A., Sr., et al. (2007), Unresolved issues with the assessment of multidecadal global land surface temperature trends, J. Geophys. Res.,112, D24S08, doi:10.1029/2006JD008229

with several more submitted and in preparation.

We should not have had to complete these studies ourselves. They should have been funded and completed as specific recommendations of the CCSP Report. Unfortunately, the suppresion of these scientific questions occurred with the CCSP Report, which was directly used in the completion of the 2007 IPCC report. The result of the failure of the CCSP assessment process is the communication of incomplete and erroneous climate change information to policymakers

In upcoming weblogs, the individual issues raised in our peer reviewed papers that are listed above will be discussed one at a time in order to emphasize why they are so important with respect to the quantitative assessment of global warming and cooling.