Some things I've been reading in the last 24 hours:

• Economist Greg Mankiw summarizes (via Brookings' Ted Gayer) the case for a carbon tax.
• The Climate Prediction Center says El Nino is cranking up.
• The LANL blog has the latest on the decline in morale at Los Alamos.

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Jeff Sterba, PNM's CEO, will step down next March, the company announced today.

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I've been asking New Mexico scientists and others involved with climate change to weigh in with their thoughts on the emails among a group of climate scientists recently made public. Today, we hear from Chick Keller, the retired head of Los Alamos National Laboratory's Institute of Geophysics and Planetary Physics:

The recent spate of reaction to the "hacked" emails of some top climate scientists has caused critics to charge that this is proof there is nothing to the human-caused global warming idea. Nothing could be farther from the truth. Regardless of the actions of some of the people involved, the science has spoken and excepting for details the argument is really over. That many remain either confused or adamant to the contrary remains a bit of a mystery given the enormous effort for the last 25 years or so which has very adequately answered all the major questions. Given the recent agreement between surface and satellite measures of global temperatures, most everyone now agrees that the warming is real and of sufficient magnitude to warrant concern.

The work of seven or so teams of scientists to determine northern hemisphere temperatures for the past 1,000 to 2,000 years is finished and is in agreement on the magnitude of climate swings--warming in medieval times, cooling in the Little Ice Age and subsequent warming in the last century. All these studies also agree that warming in medieval times was less than what is being observed now (rapidly melting mountain glaciers support this conclusion). Finally, computer models which simulate climate from first principles, not having to rely on data excepting to start the simulations, all agree that recent warming cannot be natural (yes climate varies, but all major climate warmings and coolings over the past 500,000 years are well enough understood to rule out natural causes).

Further, when known greenhouse gas concentrations are added to natural forcings of warming or cooling, they not only match the observations but predict the past 20 years or so back when the models weren't nearly as good as today's. Even the lack of warming in the past 8 years or so was predicted beforehand by some of these models. Other dramatic predictions by the models has lent additional credence to their ability to work hand in hand with multiple observations to understand where we are and where the climate is going. The answers are unsettling. If the models have any major problem it's that they consistently under-predict the observed warming.

Countering this immense body of evidence are critics who often simply misunderstand what's been done and what's known. Sometimes this lack of understanding seems willful and appears to be driven by philosophical or economical bias. Given such unwarranted criticism it's not surprising that some of those tasked by their countries to give society the best information about this potentially drastic warming, vent frustration to each other and try to make clear that certain publications are simply wrong?

So, is this group think? It's really hard to imagine so many scientists all falling for that.

Every day new evidence adds to our understanding of the warming--recent satellite data shows the rate of sea level rise to have nearly doubled recently, and glacier melt is observed to be rapidly increasing. Animals that can migrate are now moving to cooler regions, and changes in moisture high in the atmosphere predicted by computer models are being observed. Everywhere one looks there are the finger prints of human-caused warming. So, the next time you read some facile statements by nay sayers, take them with a grain of salt until you can check them out.

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Add I25 between Santa Fe and Las Vegas to your list of roads worth avoiding if you can. The state DOT said at 5:15 p.m. that the freeway is snowpacked and icy. In Albuqerque, if you're getting ready to head home, know that the New Mexico Department of Transportation reported Albuquerque-area roads getting slick at 4:30 p.m. with rain falling and temperatures dropping.

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I've been asking New Mexicans prominent in climate science, politics and policy to share their views on the implications of the release over the Internet of a thousand emails documenting discussions among a group of leading climate scientists.

Petr Chylek, a researcher at Los Alamos National Laboratory who has been for many years a skeptical voice on the question of human influence on Earth's climate (see here for a story I wrote several years ago about a conference organized by Chylek in Santa Fe to explore these issue), share this over the weekend:

Open Letter to the Climate Research Community

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I am sure that most of you are aware of the incident that took place recently at the University of East Anglia's Climatic Research Unit (CRU). The identity of the whistle-blower or hacker is still not known.

The selected release of emails contains correspondence between CRU scientists and scientists at other climate research institutions. My own purely technical exchange of emails with CRU director Professor Phil Jones is, as far as I know, not included.

I published my first climate-related paper in 1974 (Chylek and Coakley, Aerosol and Climate, Science 183, 75-77). I was privileged to supervise Ph. D. theses of some exceptional scientists - people like J. Kiehl, V. Ramaswamy and J. Li among others. I have published well over 100 peer-reviewed papers, and I am a Fellow of the American Geophysical Union, the Optical Society of America, and Los Alamos National Laboratory. Within the last few years I was also honored to be included in Wikipedia's blacklist of "climate skeptics".

For me, science is the search for truth, the never-ending path towards finding out how things are arranged in this world so that they can work as they do. That search is never finished.

It seems that the climate research community has betrayed that mighty goal in science. They have substituted the search for truth with an attempt at proving one point of view. It seems that some of the most prominent leaders of the climate research community, like prophets of Old Israel, believed that they could see the future of humankind and that the only remaining task was to convince or force all others to accept and follow. They have almost succeeded in that effort.

Yes, there have been cases of misbehavior and direct fraud committed by scientists in other fields: physics, medicine, and biology to name a few. However, it was misbehavior of individuals, not of a considerable part of the scientific community.

Climate research made significant advancements during the last few decades, thanks to your diligent work. This includes the construction of the HadCRUT and NASA GISS datasets documenting the rise of globally averaged temperature during the last century. I do not believe that this work can be affected in any way by the recent email revelations. Thus, the first of the three pillars supporting the hypothesis of manmade global warming seems to be solid.

However, the two other pillars are much more controversial. To blame the current warming on humans, there was a perceived need to "prove" that the current global average temperature is higher than it was at any other time in recent history (the last few thousand years). This task is one of the main topics of the released CRU emails. Some people were so eager to prove this point that it became more important than scientific integrity.

The next step was to show that this "unprecedented high current temperature" has to be a result of the increasing atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide from the burning of fossil fuels. The fact that the Atmosphere Ocean General Circulation Models are not able to explain the post-1970 temperature increase by natural forcing was interpreted as proof that it was caused by humans. It is more logical to admit that the models are not yet good enough to capture natural climate variability (how much or how little do we understand aerosol and clouds, and ocean circulation?), even though we can all agree that part of the observed post-1970 warming is due to the increase of atmospheric CO2 concentration. Thus, two of the three pillars of the global warming and carbon dioxide paradigm are open to reinvestigation.

The damage has been done. The public trust in climate science has been eroded. At least a part of the IPCC 2007 report has been put in question. We cannot blame it on a few irresponsible individuals. The entire esteemed climate research community has to take responsibility. Yes, there always will be a few deniers and obstructionists.

So what comes next? Let us stop making unjustified claims and exaggerated projections about the future even if the editors of some eminent journals are just waiting to publish them. Let us admit that our understanding of the climate is less perfect than we have tried to make the public believe. Let us drastically modify or temporarily discontinue the IPCC. Let us get back to work.

Let us encourage students to think their own thoughts instead of forcing them to parrot the IPCC conclusions. Let us open the doors of universities, of NCAR, NASA and other research institutions (and funding agencies) to faculty members and researchers who might disagree with the current paradigm of carbon dioxide. Only open discussion and intense searching of all possibilities will let us regain the public's trust and move forward.

Regards,

Petr Chylek

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