The Soon and Baliunas controversy involved the publication of a paper written by Willie Soon and Sallie Baliunas in the journal Climate Research [1], which prompted concerns about the peer review process of the paper and resulted in the resignation of several other editors and the eventual repudiation of the paper by the publisher.
By the late 1980s scientific findings indicated that greenhouse gases including CO2 emissions were leading to global warming. There was increasing public and political interest, and in 1987 the World Meteorological Organization pressed for an international scientific panel to assess the topic. The United States Reagan administration, concerned about political influence of scientists, successfully lobbied for the 1988 formation of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change to provide reports subject to detailed approval by government delegates.[2] The IPCC First Assessment Report included a "schematic diagram" of global temperature variations over the last thousand years[3] which has been traced to a graph based loosely on Hubert Lamb's 1965 paper.[4] The IPCC Second Assessment Report (SAR) of 1996 featured a graph of an early northern hemisphere reconstruction by Raymond S. Bradley and Phil Jones,[4][5] and noted the 1994 reconstruction by Hughes and Diaz questioning how widespread the Medieval Warm Period been at any one time.[6] Efforts to reduce CO2 emissions were resisted by industrial interests, and political pressures increased as the international Kyoto Protocol was opposed by lobbyists such as the American Petroleum Institute who sought climatologists to dissent and undermine its scientific credibility.[7]
In 1998, Mann, Bradley and Hughes published a multiproxy study (MBH98) which used a new statistical approach to find patterns of climate change in both time and global distribution.[8] In 1999 they extended their approach to 1,000 years in a study (MBH99) summarised in a graph which showed relatively little change until a sharp rise in the 20th century, earning it the nickname of the hockey stick graph. In 2001 the IPCC Third Assessment Report (TAR) included a version of this graph which was frequently featured in literature publicising the findings of the IPCC report that the 1990s were likely to have been the warmest decade, and 1998 the warmest year, of the past millennium in the Northern Hemisphere.[9]
After the publicity it had been given by the IPCC Third Assessment Report (TAR), the hockey stick graph was targeted by those opposing ratification of the Kyoto Protocol on global warming. Among them, Willie Soon argued that climate change was primarily due to solar variation, and Sallie Baliunas of the Harvard–Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics had contested whether ozone depletion was due to man-made chemicals.[10][11] They prepared a literature review which used data from previous papers to argue that the Medieval Warm Period had been warmer than the 20th century, and that recent warming was not unusual. They sent their paper to the editor Chris de Freitas, an opponent of action to curb carbon dioxide emissions who has been characterized by Fred Pearce as a "climate contrarian".[12][13]
Chris de Freitas as an editor at the journal Climate Research accepted the paper written by Willie Soon and Sallie Baliunas, and it was published in the journal on 31 January 2003 under the title Proxy climatic and environmental changes of the past 1000 years.[14][12] The article reviewed 240 previously published papers and tried to find evidence for temperature anomalies in the last thousand years such as the Medieval warm period and the Little Ice Age. The authors pointed out their disagreement with the Mann, Bradley and Hughes hockey stick studies; "Our results suggest a different interpretation of the multiproxy climates compared to recent conclusions of Mann et al. (1998, 1999, 2000)." Their abstract concluded that "Across the world, many records reveal that the 20th century is probably not the warmest or a uniquely extreme climatic period of the last millennium". The paper acknowledged funding support from the American Petroleum Institute, the Air Force Office of Scientific Research and NASA, while stating that the views were those of the authors and were independent of the sponsoring agencies.[15]
On March 31, 2003, Soon and Baliunas, with three additional co-authors, published a longer version of the paper in Energy and Environment.[12] The three additional co-authors were Craig Idso, Sherwood Idso, and David Legates. A press release headed "20th Century Climate Not So Hot" announced the paper with a statement lacking the caveats of the original paper; "Soon and his colleagues concluded that the 20th century is neither the warmest century over the last 1000 years, nor is it the most extreme."[15][16][17]
In the paper, Soon, Baliunas, and their co-authors investigated the correlation between solar variation and temperatures of the Earth's atmosphere. When there are more sunspots, the total solar output increases, and when there are fewer sunspots, it decreases. Soon and Baliunas attribute the Medieval warm period to such an increase in solar output, and believe that decreases in solar output led to the Little Ice Age, a period of cooling lasting until the mid-19th Century.[18] In a statement to The Chronicle of Higher Education, Soon said that, "When you compare the 20th century to the previous nine centuries, you do not see the change in the 20th century as anything unusual or unprecedented."[12]
Initially, the scientists whose work was being disputed by Soon and Baliunas felt it was one of a series of sceptical papers that, in Mann's words, "couldn't get published in a reputable journal". In March he wrote to Phil Jones that "I believed our only choice was to ignore this paper. They've already achieved what they wanted, the claim of a peer-reviewed paper. There is nothing we can do about that now, but the last thing we want is to bring attention to the paper." Jones replied "I think the sceptics will use this paper to their own ends and it will set [ Paleoclimatology ] back a number of years if it goes unchallenged. I will be emailing the journal to tell them I'm having nothing more to do with it until they rid themselves of this troublesome editor", referring to de Freitas. At the time the second Soon et al. paper was publicised, Mann emailed Fred Pearce to say that it "was absurd, almost laughable (if it wasn't, as is transparently evident, being used as a policy–and politics–driven publicity stunt to support the dubious positions on climate change of some prominent American politicians)", and added that the paper made no attempt to find if the past warm temperatures it reported were contemporaneous or merely one-off scattered events.[19]
The Bush administration was involved in editing the first Environmental Protection Agency Report on the Environment prior to the draft being made public. The administrations Council on Environmental Quality chief of staff Philip Cooney deleted all references to surface temperature reconstructions showing world temperatures rising over the last 1,000 years, and on 21 April 2003 sent a memo to Kevin O’Donovan in the Office of the Vice President stating "The recent paper of Soon-Baliunas contradicts a dogmatic view held by many in the climate science community that the past century was the warmest in the past millennium and signals human induced “global warming.” ... We plan to begin to refer to this study in Administration communications on the science of global climate change; in fact, CEQ just inserted a reference to it in the final draft chapter on global climate change contained in EPA’s first “State of the Environment” report. ... With both the National Academy and IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) holding that the 20th Century is the warmest of the past thousand years (see below), this recent study begins to provide a counterbalance on the point to those two authorities. It represents an opening to potentially invigorate debate on the actual climate history of the past 1000 years and whether that history reinforces or detracts from our level of confidence regarding the potential human influence on global climate change."[20][21]
By May the journal's editors Hans von Storch and Clare Goodess were receiving numerous complaints and critiques of the paper from other scientists, to such an extent that they raised the issues with de Freitas and the journal's publisher Otto Kinne. In reply, de Freitas said they were "a mix of a witch-hunt and the Spanish Inquisition".[22] Other scientists also criticized the study's methods and argued that the authors had misrepresented or misinterpreted their data.[23] Some of those whose work was referenced by Soon and Baliunas were particularly critical. Tim Barnett of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography commented that "the fact that [the paper] has received any attention at all is a result, again in my view, of its utility to those groups who want the global warming issue to just go away". Malcolm K. Hughes of the University of Arizona, whose work on dendrochronology was discussed in the paper, called it "so fundamentally misconceived and contain[ing] so many egregious errors that it would take weeks to list and explain them all."[24]
On 8 June 2003 The New York Times ran a news item about the Bush administration Council on Environmental Quality chief of staff Philip Cooney having edited Environmental Protection Agency reports to remove previously agreed statements,[21] and on 19 June said that the Bush administration had removed references to Mann Bradley and Hughes 1999 and inserted a reference to Soon and Baliunas. Agency officials objected, but following discussions with officials of the administration, staff of the Agency decided to remove the whole section on climate change rather than "selectively filtering science to suit policy".[25]
Over this period the media requested opinions from climate scientists and paleoclimatologists familiar with the issues underlying the Soon and Baliunas papers, and to help with information Mann and Michael Oppenheimer drafted and circulated privately a memorandum providing detailed guidance on the topic. They stated "Nothing in the paper undermines in any way the conclusion of earlier studies that the average temperature of the late twentieth century in the Northern Hemisphere was anomalous against the background of the past millennium". Colleagues receiving these requests from the media included Tom Wigley, Philip Jones and Raymond S. Bradley.[26][27]
The memorandum developed into a more general position paper jointly authored by 13 climate scientists, which was published on 8 July 2003 in the journal Eos as an article "On Past Temperatures and Anomalous Late-20th Century Warmth".[26] Most of the paper's authors had been cited in the Soon and Baliunas 2003 paper (SB03).[28] The Eos paper made three key points: the SB03 and Soon et al. papers had misused precipitation and drought proxies without assessing their sensitivity to temperature, they had taken regional temperature changes as global changes without any attempt to show that they had occurred at the same time across the world, and they had taken as their base period for comparison mean temperatures over the whole of the 20th century, reconstructing past temperatures from proxy evidence not capable of resolving decadal trends, thus failing to show whether or not late 20th century warming was anomalous. The IPCC TAR had concluded that late 20th century northern hemisphere warmth was likely to have exceeded warmth of any time in the past 1,000 years on the basis of studies that compared temperatures for recent decades with reconstuctions of earlier periods while allowing for uncertainties in the reconstructions.[26]
Mann and other scientists considered that de Freitas had improperly published a defective paper, and sought a retraction but the journal refused. The publisher of Climate Research. Otto Kinne, wrote that "Chris de Freitas has done a good and correct job as editor". When Mann presented a preprint of the Eos rebuttal of the Soon and Baliunas papers to the members of the Climate Research editorial board several allegedly took his side against de Freitas, partly because they found out that the four reviewers of the paper had recommended rejecting it,[29] although this view is disputed by an editor of the journal who states that the paper had "apparently gone to four reviewers none of whom had recommended rejection" [22]. The publisher of 'Climate Research' attempted editorial restructuring to address certain concerns over the paper's review process[30] [31][32]
In response, Kinne upgraded Hans von Storch from editor to editor in chief as of 1 August 2003. After examining the details, von Storch decided that the Soon and Baliunas paper was seriously flawed and should not have been published as it was. He proposed a new editorial system, and an editorial saying that the review process had failed. Kinne agreed that the flawed Soon and Baliunas paper should not have been published uncorrected, but wanted agreement from all other editors to von Storch's proposals to improve the editorial process. When some of the other editors at the journal refused, von Storch decided to resign on 28 July 2003.[12][14] He condemned the journal's review process in his resignation letter: "The review process had utterly failed; important questions have not been asked ... the methodological basis for such a conclusion (that the 20th century is probably not the warmest nor a uniquely extreme climate period of the last millennium) was simply not given."[33]
When the McCain-Lieberman bill proposing restrictions on greenhouse gases was being debated in the Senate on 28 July 2003, Senator James M. Inhofe made a two-hour speech in opposition. He cited a study by the Center for Energy and Economic Development and the Soon and Baliunas paper in supporting his conclusion: "With all of the hysteria, all of the fear, all of the phony science, could it be that man-made global warming is the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people? It sure sounds like it."[34][35]
Inhofe convened a hearing of the United States Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works held on 29 July 2003, examining work by the small group of researchers saying there was no evidence of significant human-caused global warming. Three scientists were invited, Mann giving testimony supporting the consensus position, opposed by long term skeptics Willie Soon and David Legates.[34][36] The Soon and Baliunas paper was discussed. Senator Jeffords read out an email dated 28 July. In it, von Storch announced his resignation, and stated "that the review of the Soon et al. paper failed to detect significant methodological flaws in the paper. The critique published in the Eos journal by Mann et al. is valid." In reply, Mann testified about the Soon et al. paper, "I believe it is the mainstream view of just about every scientist in my field that I have talked to that there is little that is valid in that paper. They got just about everything wrong."[12][36] He later recalled that he "left that meeting having demonstrated what the mainstream views on climate science are."[37]
Eventually half of the journal's editorial board resigned along with von Storch.[38] Von Storch later stated that climate change sceptics "had identified Climate Research as a journal where some editors were not as rigorous in the review process as is otherwise common"[39] and complained that he had been pressured to publish the paper and had not been allowed to publish a rebuttal contesting the authors' conclusions.[17]
In an editorial published on 5 August 2003, Otto Kinne as president of the organization that publishes Climate Research stated that "While these statements [the conclusion of the paper] may be true, the critics point out that they cannot be concluded convincingly from the evidence provided in the paper. CR should have requested appropriate revisions of the manuscript prior to publication."[40] Kinne told the New York Times that "I have not stood behind the paper by Soon and Baliunas. Indeed: the reviewers failed to detect methodological flaws."[41]
In September 2003 Soon told The Chronicle of Higher Education that the critics had mischaracterized the research in the paper. He said that he had used precipitation data because too many scientists had concentrated on temperature records which, in Soon's opinion, are not the only measures of climate. He added that "Some of the proxy information doesn't contain directly the temperature information, but it fits the general description of the medieval warm climatic anomaly. This is a first-order study to try to collect as much data as possible and try not to make the pretension that we know how to separate the information in the proxy."[12]
In 2006, Osborn and Briffa published a paper on "The Spatial Extent of 20th-Century Warmth in the Context of the Past 1200 Years", and concluded that "comparison with instrumental temperatures shows the spatial extent of recent warmth to be of greater significance than that during the medieval period."[42] They reexamined the questions raised in the Baliunas and Soon study, but used different statistical methodology, restricted themselves to records that were validated as temperature proxies, and considered the timing of temperature anomalies in different regions to examine whether they had happened at the same time, or were from different periods reflecting local rather than global changes. They found that by far the most widespread warming had occurred after the mid 20th century.[43]
Questions have also been raised about funding for the paper. Soon and Baliunas was funding directly by the American Petroleum Institute in the amount of $53,000. [44]
Also, the additional sources of funding mentioned in the papers were apparently unrelated to the research presented in Soon and Baliunas 2003 and in Soon et al. 2003: both the Air Force Office of Scientific Research and NASA stated that they had provided funds for work on solar variability, not for work related to proxy climate records as discussed in the papers, while the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration said it had not provided funds for the research.[22] Air Force Office of Scientific Research, Grant AF49620-02-1-0194, deals with Theory and Observation of Stellar Magnetic Activity,[45] and NASA grant NAG5-7635 studies variability of stars.[46] When questioned during the 29 July 2003 Senate hearing, Soon said that the NOAA grant for Soon et al. was awarded to David Legates, and the papers, showing research into detailed patterns of local and regional climate variability, were directly relevant to his main goal of research on physical mechanisms of the sun-climate relationship. When asked if he had been "hired by or employed by or received grants from organizations that have taken advocacy positions with respect to the Kyoto Protocol, the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change, or legislation before the U.S. Congress that would affect greenhouse gas emissions", he responded "I have not knowingly been hired by, nor employed by, nor received grants from any such organizations described in this question."[47][36]
Connections between the paper's authors and oil industry groups have been well documented. Soon and Baliunas were at the time paid consultants of the George C. Marshall Institute.[48]. Soon has also received multiple grants from the American Petroleum Institute between 2001 and 2007 totalled $274,000, and grants from Exxon Mobil totalled $335,000 between 2005 and 2010.[49] Other contributers to Soon's research career include the Charles G. Koch Foundation, which gave Soon two grants totaling $175,000 in 2005/6 and again in 2010, and coal and oil industry sources such as Mobil Foundation, the Texaco Foundation and the Electric Power Research Institute.[50] Soon has stated that he has "never been motivated by financial reward in any of my scientific research."[47]
In November 2009, a database of emails and documents were hacked from a server belonging to East Anglia University. Many of the emails included communication between the climatologists in East Anglia's Climatic Research Unit (CRU) and other scientists, including Michael E. Mann. Several of the emails revealed conversations about Soon and Baliunas' paper as the controversy was ongoing in 2003 and 2004.[51]
In one of the emails in early March 2003, Mann proposes to other scientists that they publicly ignore Soon and Baliunas' paper. Phil Jones, a CRU scientist, however, responds on 11 March that he thought the paper would be used by sceptics to further their agenda and therefore the paper's conclusions should be challenged. Mann's email responses to Jones the same day criticized de Freitas and von Storch and stated that, "I think we have to stop considering Climate Research as a legitimate peer-reviewed journal. Perhaps we should encourage our colleagues... to no longer submit to, or cite papers in, this journal. We would also need to consider what we tell or request of our more reasonable colleagues who currently sit on the editorial board."[52] In a 24 April 2003 email, Tom Wigley suggests that pressure be put on Climate Research's board members to remove von Storch.[53][54][55][56]
In a 18 December 2009 column in the Wall Street Journal, Pat Michaels alleged that pressure from Jones and Mann was responsible for the resignations at Climate Research.[57] Mann, Jones, and Trenberth, however, have stated that they did not carry out the threat against the journal or keep the papers out of the IPCC report. Von Storch has stated that his resignation as editor of Climate Research had nothing to do with any pressure from Jones, Mann, or anyone else, but was instead "because of insufficient quality control on a bad paper"[51][58]