August 20, 1996
Dear Tom,
I always enjoy receiving mail from you. It's so much fun to watch you wiggle out of the facts (no pun intended).
1) Just one example out of the 30 (capitalized) items in your August 14 e-mail: You claim that I am "absolutely wrong!" when I state (correctly) that the Summary for Policymakers (SPM) makes absolutely no mention of the existence of weather satellite data. Please note that the SPM covers pages 3 to 7; your reference to pp. 27-28 and Chapter 3 is not relevant. Please, please, do learn to read. I don't want to quibble but you do this all the time.
2) Turning to your first item, you state that it was not "Sir John personally" who prevailed upon Santer (and, I assume, your good self--since you told us in your last e-mail that you were also involved) to make the text changes in Madrid. But I have it on good authority that Santer was following Sir John's urging; unfortunately, my information is second-hand, since Santer has not been "forthcoming" with me. Your advice is that I go to the U.S. Government for this factual information. Fortunately, we don't need to do this; we now have the November 15 letter from the State Department (which you conveniently ignore), instructing Houghton to "prevail upon" chapter authors to make changes after Madrid. This instruction occurs in the paragraph which complains about inconsistencies between the draft SPM and the chapters. I note that the letter does not suggest that the SPM be conformed to the chapters.
You can try to explain this away if you like. You might argue that the letter doesn't exist. Or that Houghton never received it. Or that Houghton refused to heed such instructions and angrily told the State Department not to interfere with the IPCC scientific report. These excuses won't work. We have the report in Nature that identifies the letter by date, presumably based on an interview with Houghton or his staff.
Nature also reports that "there is some evidence that the revision process did result in a subtle shift... that... tended to favour arguments that aligned with the report's broad conclusions." The same Nature article also confirms claims by IPCC officials that the revisions to the chapter were made "to ensure that it conformed to a 'policymakers' summary' of the full report..."
I conclude, therefore, that when you disingenuously state that Santer was not instructed by "Sir John *personally*," it was done through an intermediary. You can tell us who he was, or you can let us guess his identity. By the way, were other lead authors prevailed upon to make changes in their respective chapters?
3) Let's turn to something more substantive--the artful IPCC phrase about a "discernible human influence," which, as you state correctly, should not be used to deduce anything at all about climate sensitivity. In fact, your e-mail expresses great shock and disbelief that policymakers and their advisors would be so naive as to misunderstand or to link the two concepts. You explicitly state that "pattern studies can't pin down the climate sensitivity, we never said it did--neither in the original papers, nor in Ch. 8." Fine.
I now draw your attention to para 2 of the Ministerial Declaration of 18 July, 1996 (in Geneva), which specifically--and improperly-- links the IPCC phrase about human influence to a temperature increase of 2 C by 2100.
My question is: Is the IPCC going to do something about this "misunderstanding?" Does not scientific integrity demand that Bert Bolin or John Houghton complain about the misuse of the IPCC report for political purposes and draw attention to your statements and to the explicit sentence in the SAR (section 8.4.2.3, p. 434): "To date, pattern-based studies have not been able to quantify the magnitude of a greenhouse gas or aerosol effect on climate."
I've had responses to my email of 9 August; one of our colleagues says: "I thought the IPCC headline [conclusion] was nicely crafted to reduce the chances that it would be misused... How would YOU re- write the IPCC headline...?" My answer is:
I would be glad to continue on with your remaining 20 odd items, but would prefer to wait until I have your reaction to the issues just raised.
Best wishes,
Fred