CLIMATE DEBATE TURNS FOUL

Abstract

THREATS AND harassment, including a dead rat delivered to his front door, have been part of Benjamin D. Santer’s life for the past 14 years. Santer, a climate scientist at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, was the convening lead author of the chapter of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s 1996 assessment that made the historic conclusion that “the balance of evidence suggests that there is a discernible human influence on global climate.” “This sentence changed my life,” Santer said at a hearing on climate science in the political arena held by the House Select Committee on Energy Independence & Global Warming on May 20. Santer testified before the committee as a private citizen and not in his professional capacity. Shortly after the IPCC report was published, several global warming skeptics publicly accused Santer of political tampering, abuses of the peer review system, and irregularities in his scientific work. Despite detailed responses from Santer and IPCC ...